My evocative object is a tiny teacup from a tea set my grandfather gave me when I was a child. Almost since I received it, it lived in a cardboard box that was labeled, in my grandfather’s slanted hand, “Hilarie’s Teaset.” It sat there quietly wrapped in that rice paper-like foam that cushions breakables, nestled in with its saucer and sibling cups and saucers and the small teapot (lid wrapped separately). For as long as I can remember, the box has been stored on an upper shelf: first in the closet of my childhood bedroom, then in the closet of my second bedroom in our next house, and now in my kitchen cabinet, in a place I can’t reach without a chair. I would get my mother to take it down once in a while and I would conduct a careful tea party. We would both attend, and sometimes I would also invite some friends or stuffed animals.

The teacup is white and made of china. It has small purple flowers centered on two of its panels. The numbers 9 and 85 are etched on the bottom – I assume this is the price, but I’m not sure. It fits in my palm. There’s a very thin veil of dust at the bottom that might be nearly as old as I am. I removed it from its box this summer, when I was building the altar I was assigned to build during my yoga teacher training. I wanted something small and pretty, and something that evoked my family. The teacup fit the bill. It now lives at the center of the altar on a table that once belonged to my mother and, before her, my great-grandmother. It sits in front of photos of my mother, my grandparents, and my childhood cat. It is flanked by a small lavender-scented candle about its size and a pile of colorful fake flowers, several of which I often wear in my hair.

Sherry Turkle’s subtitle for her book on evocative objects helps me dig further: she defines evocative objects as “things we think with.” I interpret this as using the characteristics or evoked feelings from an object to think differently about our own creative and intellectual processes. I start by looking and touching. The teacup is round but not perfectly – it has embossed on it interesting edges. When I think, I strive for those edges. When I write, I want the roundness – I want to be able to connect the beginning of the thought to the end, and recall how I got from one to the other. The teacup also holds things. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to put my memories of my mother into something, to hold them and keep them together, to keep a firm grasp on who she was and what it felt like to have her here (it still feels like she is just around the corner, just beyond my fingertips).

Turkle also says that “most objects exert their holding power because of the particular moment and circumstance in which they come into the author’s life” (8). I think that the teacup is actually more powerful for me because of what I’ve experienced since I got it. If my mother were alive, I’d probably care about it less. Because she is dead, and because my grandfather is dead, it is a tangible link to lost loved ones. Lost is a word I persist on using to describe them even though I hate it sometimes. I think the connotation of not being found is more appropriate to grief than the way people usually seem to use the word in a context slightly outside of grief. In terms of my evocative object, that sense of loss as an inability to find, rather than as the bereftness of grief, would be somewhat resolvable if I could actually gather my feelings and place them in a cup. There, they’d be safe. Probably connected to this, the teacup also symbolizes community for me; it represents the kinds of metaphorical and emotional connections I work every day to create and to maintain among my friends and loved ones.