We all have a cutlery drawer in the kitchen, right?
Well, mine is weird.
The forks partition has the six forks that came as the set which is in daily use, but it also has a handful of forks that don’t match that set or each other, just random ones, of unknown provenance.
But the forks partition pales in comparison with the teaspoon compartment.
The mystery of spoons lies in this: I have a whole PILE of teaspoons. I counted them, there are 21 of them, overflowing their little cubby in the cutlery tray. Of those 21, one particular kind has five spoons in that set, two have four, one has three, and the rest. Are. All. Singletons. Every one of them unique.
And I am damned if I know how I managed to accrete all these teaspons one by one and where they all came from. I know that one of them used to be “my” spoon in my mother’s kitchen (she had the same proliferating teaspoon problem… maybe it runs in the family like a rare disease…) and that one migrated to my drawer after she died. One other I recognise as having maybe originated in my mother’s collection. But the rest?
HOW does one acquire A SINGLE SPECIMEN of a particular kind of cutlery? Where did these teaspoons come from? Is there a tear in the space time continuum somewhere in my cutlery drawer and teaspoons are bleeding through it and collecting like cosmic flotsam in the teaspoon partition of my cutlery tray? Is there a Planet Teaspoon somewhere, a place where every teaspon is unique and sentient, and when they drop into my own universe they freeze into these represetative teaspon forms forever more, locked into silence and oblivion, having to andure being used to dispense cat food or stir tea or measure out baking soda into a bread recipe?
What do frozen teaspoons dream of? How many lost dreams have come home to die in my cutlery drawer…?
It’s the mystery of spoons. We may never know.