the cake is in the oven...

Yes, I remembered to buy cocoa on the way home from work tonight...and then I stopped to see Mom and drop off some more clothes for her. She asked if I found the dishes she told me about a few days ago. Yes, I found them, Mom. Growing up, my mom and grandma had a habit of showing me different pieces of their prized dish collection...there must have been 3 or 4 dish cabinets in the house...and they also had a habit of writing the history of each dish ("from Ella Poust, bought about 1880") on a slip of tablet paper and secreting it away inside the teapot or taping it to the bottom of a plate. The other day my mom said, "Your grandma always said she wanted you to have the tea leaf dishes." OK - where are they, I asked...I didn't remember ever seeing any dishes like that. "They're out in the dry sink in the shanty," mom says. That's Pennsylvania-eeze for "look in the cabinet in the room behind the kitchen."
OK - so I go to mom's house and literally crawl over a myriad of thrown-outs and odds & ends to the cabinet situated in the back corner of the room, pry open the doors and discover a set of dishes that I never knew existed. Here they are - minus the 8 or 10 dinner plates and a half dozen cups & saucers. They are in pretty good shape, too, considering they are about 120 years old. I am thinking I will display them in my kitchen in the space above my cabinets. They've been hidden in the dark for too long - they deserve to be seen and admired...