Grandma Leona’s candy dish—rounded porcelain with a vaguely Asiatic aesthetic, covered in tiny, delicate red, yellow, and light blue stenciled bunches of flowers and geometric designs inlaid with gold. The lid had a filigree knob handle and a small, jagged chip on the edge about the size and shape of a candy corn.

The dish had been on the wooden table next to the couch at my grandmother’s house. Every time we went to visit her, my brother and I went straight for it, barely stopping to say hello before helping ourselves to a sampling of whatever was inside—Hershey’s chocolate kisses, coffee or cinnamon hard candies, M & Ms, peppermints, caramels.

Everything I love about my childhood memories—about being young— are encapsulated in the remembering of that dish, of the feeling of walking into her house, of lifting the lid to see what exciting, delightful surprises awaited us.

My object is a utensil that I always use in the kitchen. No matter if I am cooking pasta or frying eggs, or mixing batter, or even flipping things over (like pancakes or grilled cheese sandwiches) - I always use the same utensil. I use it to saute onions and garlic.  I use it to flip over asparagus when its grilling under the broiler. I use it to stir soups and sauces in the crock pot. I have maybe ten different cooking utensils that could be used - spatulas, flippers, spoons, ladles, salad tongs, grilling tongs, etc., but I always use the same one, my favorite. I wish I had a name for it, but I don't.  I should name it "Lucille" like BB King named his guitar.

My object is a piece of bent metal, a "helix-shaped toy," a spring. A slinky. When I was about 8 or 9, I asked for one for my birthday after I watched a NASA video in school about how slinkies didn't work in space. First my parents gave my a plastic one even though I specifically said metal and I was very disappointed. I asked for a metal one again the next year and got it. I'm not sure why it had to be metal, but now that I've had both, I know that metal is much better. Plastic slinkies go down stairs so slowly, and then often either stop or fall over. And if you twist them just a tad bid too much, they break. The metal ones are much hardier. But most importantly, plastic slinkies don't make a satisfying noise when you bounce them in your hands. There are few noises as satisfying as the "sllllink" "sllllink" sound of the metal slinky.

I am truly blessed to have two very different families stemming from my parents. My mother had 8 sisters and brothers growing up on a farm in rural Vermont. As such, I have plethora of cousins, aunts, great aunts, adopted aunts, etc. and our family get-togethers are loud and cramped in my grandmothers small house, always surrounded by great company and even better food. On my father's side, I'm the only granddaughter in a Sicilian family. This has afforded me a very different, and equally fantastic, experience. This story is about my father’s mother (my Grandma) and a blanket.

My object is about 2 inches long and 1.5 inches high. It is a mouse cast in concrete. Her face is molded over by concrete algae or patina or whatever grows on concrete. And her casting must have been a botched job because her features are sliding and blurry at best. She is small and cold and hunkered down. She sits, without a pun intended, near my mouse pad on the cluttered table that sits at the center of my house. In other words, I keep her near.