Secret gift makes its way across the country

For many years, since she was a little girl watching me fuss my way around the kitchen, my daughter has coveted my chopping bowl. It’s a beat-up old wooden bowl that once belonged to my grandmother and possibly her mother before her. This particular heirloom does not have a traceable provenance.

But my daughter wanted it. I suppose she associates it with the best parts of our family life, which has always centered on the preparation and sharing of good food. My kitchen is tiny, but that’s where everyone gathers; the air carries the scent of cookies or stewing chicken or potted fruit. Much of the delicious food my daughter ate as a kid started in the bowl.

Nearly everyone can think of some item that has taken on iconic proportions in his or her family. Grown children have come to blows over a dead father’s old flannel shirt or a mother’s broken teapot. In Tea Obreht’s novel “The Tiger’s Wife,” the centerpiece is a worn copy of Kipling’s “Jungle Book,” which was cherished and held and passed along through a family in Croatia. It was the one, single unchangeable thing in a family and a country shredded by war.

My grandmother didn’t have jewels or antique furniture to leave her children. She didn’t own books or any fine clothing. But she did have this bowl, which my mother (who’s known in the family as “Baba”) claimed and then passed on to me. For some years now, especially since she married and had children of her own, my daughter has asked about it. “How often do you really use it?” she says. I’ve always told her she could have it someday, but not yet.

There is that force between us, my daughter and me, like the charge from a small battery. I tell her about a sensational recipe I created for Asian salad with grilled chicken. She calls to say she made the recipe but added peanuts, which made all the difference.

I say, someday, but not yet.

Some weeks ago, I asked her what she would like for an upcoming birthday and she said, “You know, I’d love a wooden chopping bowl.” She didn’t ask for “the” bowl, and I could have bought her a new one, but the time felt right. So this week I packed it up in newspaper and sent it on its way to California, where she lives. In the bowl is a letter, and this is what it says:

Dear Jocelyn,

Here is Grandma Annie’s chopping bowl. I am putting it into your capable hands on the occasion of your 38th birthday.