Stir

The spatula is of dark and dense wood. It's still dense, but the surface has been abraded by Dawn and Brillo until the cells have broken down, the oils all sapped away, and then fibers shorter and finer than peach fuzz give it a dusty look. The only luster is at the neck, where it is gripped, and on the convex side of the spatula's head, which spreads oil across the belly of the pan. It's scarred, too. The oblique corner of the head--this is a slightly italicized spatula--is scorched. I'd been away last winter, and when I got home I found the spatula recently cauterized in the crock. Zachary fessed up quick with a gentle apology. It's only a spatula, I assured him. Neither I nor my deceased grandmother from whom I inherited it would begrudge him jeopardizing the thing for cooking. His eyes went big. No, but really Zachary, it's alright; it still scrapes, it still scoops.

Davy uses it for cocoa. Davy uses anything for anything though, keeping a healthy distance from technique lest it get in the way. Bitterly hydrophobic cocoa powder and knife-splintered chocolate float on the surface of the oatmilk. A sedimentary layer of sugar warm to solution somewhere below. Davy paddles at the mixture, gazing, until cocoa.

Peter and I were bathed together. I don't have a first bath and I can't remember the last one we shared. At my grandparents house, we were bathed in the basement bathroom. It was always cold down there, below ground level. The walls were thick concrete painted cream. The floor the same but forest green. My grandpa had built a sturdy wooden platform, painted to the floor, and on top of it a claw-foot tub. White, cast iron, eternal. We had to climb to get in, both of us naked and squirming for it. I would still once in the hot water, once my body slipped out of sight below the membrane of bubbles. Toys would bob around us, plastic dinosaurs and a miniature diver periodically lost in the foam. Somewhere below, Peter and my toes were pressing against each other. While our mother rinsed shampoo--dunking then wringing out a washcloth over our heads--Peter and I would stir; our hands bent to paddles, I pull with my right along one wall of the tub and push with my left. The picture begins to revolve. Her voice is there, but no words.

It's an egg scrambling spatula to me whatever else it touches. Other images, Davy discovering cocoa, Zachary immolating the thing, are just crushed under that first one. I'm siting at the breakfast table watching my grandma. She is wearing a checkered apron and humming with the warbling vibrato of a lifelong church choir member. The spatula is in her hand and she sways on her hips while she tends to the vast cast iron pan. My feet can't touch the floor and my eyes aren't high enough to see over the lip--just the steam rising lazily over the stove. Finally the table is laid with scones, strawberry jam, honey, butter, marmalade, Jimmy Dean sausages nearly cremated, and the scrambled eggs. That spatula, resting elegant and proud against the rim, the head buried under a treasure of scrambled egg--that is the spatula I see.