On Wooden Bowls

There is a wooden bowl in my kitchen that has been in my family since 1948. It is maple, turned, twelve and a half inches across, with a pattern of fine knife scars on one quadrant where my grandmother chopped onions on it for thirty years. The bowl has been oiled, by my count, six times in seventy-eight years. It has been washed perhaps three hundred times. It has never been put in a dishwasher because my grandmother was clear with my mother about that and my mother was clear with me.

The bowl is more useful than it has any right to be. It serves the salad. It rests bread dough. It holds apples in October, walnuts in November, clementines in December. It has held kittens, briefly, on three separate occasions. Last week, when I had the carpenter back to fix a porch step, the bowl was the surface he used to hold his nails because it was the closest thing to him and it did the job better than the cardboard cup he was about to use.

What I have come to believe about wooden bowls is that you can tell a cabin's age by them. A new cabin has a stainless-steel mixing bowl on the counter. A five-year-old cabin has a stainless-steel mixing bowl in a cabinet and a wooden bowl on the counter that was a wedding gift. A twenty-year-old cabin has the wooden bowl, plus the bowl that the children made in eighth-grade shop class, plus the bowl that the partner brought from a previous life, plus the bowl that someone left after a long weekend in 2014 and was politely never asked back for.

I am not arguing for the elimination of stainless steel. The stainless mixing bowl is excellent for whipping cream and beating eggs and for catching the oil that drips out of the duck. The wooden bowl is for the things that do not need to be beaten. The salad. The fruit. The apples that are about to become a pie. The bread dough that wants to be touched by hand.

I will pass my bowl to my niece. She is six. She is already asking about it. The bowl knows what it is doing.