This plate has a story to tell:

This is the final resting place of one of my plates.  Shattered and scattered for almost a whole block of South Ohio Avenue.  How did this happen?  I'll get to that, but first...

When I was 23, I bought my first house.  It was a tiny two-bedroom in the slums.  I used old mismatched dishes from garage sales, reasoning that I would put fine china on my bridal registry.  Shortly thereafter, I gave up on ever finding a man to marry me, so I bought my first set of matching dishes: a lovely set of Corelle at an outlet store.  Literally the next week, I met Mike. He must have been attracted to my dishes.  We got married without ever registering for fine china, because after all, I had my $45 set of Corelle.

I don't think we broke any of it while we lived childless in that little house in the slums.  I think some of it got broken in the move to our first house that we bought together.  Then we moved it to our first house in Morton a few years later.  The next move was just across town to our current house.  By now we had children, and they had probably broken a few dishes in the course of being children.  But by far the biggest number of casualties occurred on the tile floor in this kitchen.  I'd never had a tile floor before and hope I never do again.  It's like a dish magnet, and it has no mercy. 

So we were down to only three plates when the tragedy occurred. Yesterday Noah was outside playing basketball and eating a burrito.  He left the plate on top of the car.  Then we went to Pekin.  Noah was driving.  We made it a few houses down the street when we heard a crash and I turned around and saw shattered glass.  I asked Noah if he had hit a glass bottle or something, but I thought it was odd that I hadn't felt a bump.  That's when he remembered the plate.  He said, "I apologize to you, and to the plate, and to the people who might run over what's left of it."

This year we celebrate 22 years of marriage.  The set of dishes I bought as an old maid gift to myself has been whittled down to two plates.  It's kind of ironic.  Soon our teenagers will fly the nest, and it will be just the two of us left with one plate each.  I refuse to buy any more good dishes until we live in a house without a tile floor.