Flying saucers

Two weeks ago, ten saucers arrived in the post. They are Wedgwood Stonehenge Midwinter, a plain white stoneware from the 1960's that was my mother's everyday ware also. It was still in production when I set up housekeeping in the 1980's, but no longer. It came in other colors, I found out later, and I have collected a few serving pieces and party plates from the Sun pattern as well.

I ordered the saucers when I realized, with horror, that I was down to six. My mother advised me to stock twelve of everything in my everyday ware. It seemed like a lot at the time, in a house with two people, but I quickly realized she was right. We use a lot of saucers, and they get cracked and eventually break. Sometimes they get dropped. That is what happened two weeks ago, two days after the saucers arrived. I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of something breaking downstairs. I admit I didn't rush down to see what had been broken. It turned out that my husband was feeding the cats when he dropped three saucers all at once. The cats scattered and their breakfast was delayed due to the cat equivalent of post traumatic stress.

My husband dreaded that he might have broken three of the new ones, but we confirmed that the new ones were still in the dishwasher. Also, it was easy to see that the three he had broken were old, with glaze crazed from use and age, and they had a few little brown stains on the edges from a rusted dishwasher basket we replaced several years ago. I laughed because instead of buying six, to fill out my set to twelve, I had gone ahead and bought all ten that were available from the eBay seller with the best price and customer satisfaction rating. Breaking three of them brought the number of saucers in the house to thirteen-- a baker's dozen, my mother would say.