{"id":779,"date":"2010-10-06T10:01:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T10:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2010\/10\/the-old-broken-fork.html"},"modified":"2014-08-22T16:02:59","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T21:02:59","slug":"the-old-broken-fork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2010\/10\/the-old-broken-fork.html","title":{"rendered":"The Old Broken Fork"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Once upon a time, my husband\u2019s grandmother was engaged to be married.\u00a0 (It\u2019s hard to think of her as that young woman in her early twenties.\u00a0 She\u2019s been old as long as I\u2019ve known her.) Her fiance\u2019s aunt and uncle took her shopping for a wedding present and were determined to buy flatware for the young couple.\u00a0 Grandma had a definite picture in her mind of what she wanted on her table.\u00a0 Having grown up on a farm in Oklahoma, she was used to making-do and going without, but when she dreamed of being a grown-up, she imagined shiny silver utensils gracing her dinner table.<\/div>\n
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Her fiance\u2019s aunt thought that pretty had no place on a farmer\u2019s table, that utilitarian and sturdy was the way to go.\u00a0 When grandma pointed hopefully at stainless steel with flowers on the handle, the aunt shook her head and picked out plain with wooden handles.\u00a0 His poor grandmother fought back tears and said, \u201d But I don\u2019t really care for that set.\u201d\u00a0 Nothing was purchased that day, but at the wedding a few weeks later the whole family exclaimed over the generosity of the aunt and uncle who gave an entire set of flatware and how sensible they were to get the sturdy kind with the wooden handles.<\/div>\n
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Eventually the tine broke off of one of the forks.\u00a0 Grandma smiled to herself that the \u201csturdy\u201d set had broken.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t long before she discovered that the broken part of it made it into and ideal hook for fishing things out of pots and flipping bacon.\u00a0 It became her trusty utensil and was more used than anything else in her kitchen.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

For 10 years, she lived with the set that she hated.\u00a0 She squirreled pennies away in the hope of replacing her ugly silverware. When she had enough money saved, this frugal child of the depression drove her flatware to the dump where she stood for a momentary pause before gleefully flinging it into the pit\u2026.all of it except the broken fork.<\/p>\n

When I met her, she was already slowing up with age, but still had all of the fire of her early days.\u00a0 Sunday mornings at her house were always church followed by a big breakfast which she insisted on making.\u00a0 In her hand as she regaled us with family stories was an old wooden handled fork with a broken time.<\/p>\n

His grandmother is dying now, slowly slipping away form us.\u00a0 It is hard to look at her quiet frame and see any trace of the woman she has always been.\u00a0 She looks so quiet and frail.\u00a0 But when I go home, I look on my window sill and see that old worn out fork and I remember the defiance of a woman my own age who flung the detested set into the trash heap and then laughed all the way home.\u00a0 I remember the aged and caring hands of a kind and generous woman who made breakfast for her grandson and his new bride and passed on the history of their family with pride and a bit of humor.\u00a0 I remember the first time she put that fork into my hand and asked me to finish the bacon because she had to sit down.\u00a0 It felt as if she was passing the torch from one generation to the next.<\/p>\n

I am not a sentimental person who gets attached to material things, but I\u2019m kind of in love with my old broken fork.<\/p>\n

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Once upon a time, my husband\u2019s grandmother was engaged to be married.\u00a0 (It\u2019s hard to think of her as that young woman in her early twenties.\u00a0 She\u2019s been old as long as I\u2019ve known her.) Her fiance\u2019s aunt and uncle took her shopping for a wedding present and were determined to buy flatware for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Old Broken Fork<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Once upon a time, my husband's grandmother was engaged to be married.  (It's hard to think of her as that young woman in her early twenties. \" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2010\/10\/the-old-broken-fork.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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