Seeing all the tea cups lined up for Lund’s Mad Hatter Tea & Bubbly tomorrow reminds me of my own stash of cups at home given to me as a premature inheritance from my grandmother.

Nonnie is not dead but left me all of her tea cups when she moved into the assisted living. I used to stare at them in her glass cupboard after she’d picked me up from third grade and I was waiting for her to microwave the frozen hard roll or ‘had roll’ as her Mass. accent called it.  In Nonnie’s house all food was frozen and all furniture was wrapped in plastic to keep it from spoiling. The cups looked like candy sitting there mismatched and gaudy-colored like 50’s styled wallpaper–a perfect complement to her plastic-covered furniture and her aqua oriental rug with the giant pink flowers and the plastic runner that kept your footprints off of her vacuum marks. I memorized each of the cups’ designs waiting for the microwave to beep and then she’d rush me along her noisy plastic runner to her sun porch with the steaming roll wafting that warm bread smell and I would burn my fingers tearing into it and melting on the slab of butter. That momentary deliciousness of cold butter melting on a steaming roll would always make me ask her for seconds.

When she had the box of tea cups sent over it had been at least a decade since I’d seen them. Unwrapping them there was the slightest smell of damp basement but each one I found myself recalling their clashing-flowered designs thinking how they all reminded me of her name, Lola Rose, and the unspoiled furniture in her pastel life and that momentary deliciousness of how fast butter can melt on a microwaved hard roll.