WIDE MEADOWS: A CONTINUING SERIES; THE SILVER SPOON: SPECIAL MEANING IN A KITCHEN UTENSIL

Editor's note: This is a chapter in Jean Bell Mosley's book "Wide Meadows" that was first published in 1960.

Near the close of a cold November day, old Mr. Scroggins stopped in to warm himself by our kitchen fire. He had been chopping wood up in Gold Mine Hollow and was on his way home to his shack down by the river.

"Jeanie," Mama said to me, "fix Mr. Scroggins a cup of tea."

I hastened to do so, reaching for cup and spoon.

"Jeanie." This time Mama spoke severely. "Use the silver spoon."

The silver spoon for old Mr. Scroggins? Why waste it on him, I wondered. But I got it, the only silver spoon we had, and laid it carefully on the saucer. It was delicate and fragile and softly lustrous.

If the silver spoon looked alien in amongst our bone-handled knives and forks in the cabinet drawer, it looked even more so in Mr. Scroggins' calloused old hands. He stirred his tea slowly, looked at the spoon, and then, as if deciding that it was too fine a thing for him to be handling, laid it on the table where it continued to gleam in the lamplight.

Nobody seemed to know just how we acquired the silver spoon. Mama said she had always had it just as Grandma had, and even Great-grandmother. To us it was a symbol of quality and perfection. Lillian, Lou, and I learned to walk by that spoon. Daddy had held the shiny thing out in front of us and we took our first steps toward it. Later, when we were given medicine, we got to use the silver spoon.

"Things are easier done when the tools are pretty and solid and pure," Mama had told us. We thought then that she meant, literally, the silver spoon and pretty dishes and rugs and curtains. But as time went on we came to learn that she meant other things, too -- the intangible tools we used every day in living with each other.

Sometimes someone got to eat with the silver spoon. Once Lou had saved her pennies and bought red yarn for Grandma to knit her a pair of mittens, only to have one of Grandma's needles break just as she was ready to begin. Lou exchanged the red yarn for new needles and for that she got to eat with the silver spoon for a whole week!

It was nice to find it by your plate when you didn't know for sure if others had understood the sacrifice you had made, or to find it there as a token that you had been of some help to someone.

Mr. Scroggins drained his cup, mentioned that he'd found a bee tree that day, and took his leave.

After he had gone, Mama explained carefully how mixed up you can become when you try to decide who rates the silver spoon.

"Look at yourself in the spoon," she said. I held it up and looked into the bowl. Whichever way I turned it, I was upside down.

"That's the way you'll always be," Mama said. "Upside down and going around in circles when you try to judge what degree of graciousness you think others rate. When you learn to be as gracious and as kind as possible to all, showing them all the beauty you can, not only in spoons and teacups, but in your real self, you'll look like this."

She turned the spoon over. There I was, right side up.

"What makes it?" I exclaimed.

Of course Mama knew about concave and convex, but why bother with that when she could say, "Well, when you go through sterling and come out on the other side, you just naturally take on some of its qualities and you're bound to be all right."

That night as Lou and I washed the supper dishes I showed her our upside down reflections in the spoons and told her about going through sterling tests in order to come out right side up again on the back.

"Yeah," she said slowly, intrigued with the idea, and we tried to outdo each other in thinking of things that might be classified as sterling tests.

"Carrying water to Grandpa in the summertime," I suggested.

"Going to Britts' bull on our way to school," she added.

"Falling out of the loft."

"Cholera in the hogs."

"Limber-neck in the chickens."

"Selling salve."

"Owing money."

"Snake bite."

Next week: Lights for Thanksgiving.