It had been my Nana’s.

It sat there with its delicate, pale-blue floral panels, its fine sage vines, and its tiny, delicate leaves. It was so dainty and so lovely.

I looked at it, and I looked at it.

I remembered the way my nan used to drink tea with me. She made such a big deal of it. Her ancestry was British, so tea was the thing for her.

She would show me all of her beautiful teacups stored behind the special glass cupboard. Her hands would almost tremble because she loved them so much. I knew not to dare ask to ever touch even one of them.

Dare, dare, dare not ask.

My fumbling little seven-year-old fingers were definitely not something I would trust either. Way too much energy, way too much clumsiness, and not enough age to even begin to respect how very special they were to her.

But somehow, I knew.

We always had tea together, but never with the special special special cups. The special special special teacups just sat in their glass cupboard. Always beautiful, always perfect, always untouched.

I used to think to myself that it was such a shame because they were the really pretty ones, and why didn’t she ever use them if she loved them so much?

It just didn’t make sense to seven-year-old me.

One day, she left me with Grandpa while she went to get her hair done, as she did every Saturday.

Getting your hair styled once a week was a normal thing then. All of her friends did the same thing.

Quite honestly, her hair looked great-for-a-nana-kind-of-great from Saturday all the way to Tuesday.

But by the time Wednesday hit, Nana’s hair started styling itself and seemed to go in several directions at once. Sometimes it made me laugh, but I would have to hold it in and run to another room before giggling because I knew Nana would be offended.

By Friday, her hair was “such a disgrace,” she would say, and she would have a kerchief over her head the entire day, the kind of kerchief that only really old ladies wear. Of course, it was just in case anybody came to the door.

If someone showed up, she would politely answer the door, sounding flustered and confused, and say, “Oh, I am so sorry. I’m doing my cleaning right now. I don’t usually wear my hair up like this, but I don’t like to get it dirty. If you’ll excuse the way I look, you’re welcome to come in, but I am cleaning right now…”

And her voice would trail off to end the invitation that she really did not want to extend in the first place. I could not understand grown-ups and how they confused even themselves.

The funniest thing was that, in the midst of her excuses, shaky voice, and embarrassment over her dishevelled, covered hair, her face would go ten shades of red as she lied about why she was wearing the kerchief in the first place.

That day, Grandpa was downstairs watching TV in his big La-Z-Boy dark-brown cracked-leather chair. He had fallen asleep.

We had pored over the atlas together, as I excitedly looked at maps and talked about different places in the world. I loved talking to Grandpa because he just knew so, so much. He had an awesome way of explaining just about anything I could ask him. He knew so many details about so many things.

Honestly, he may have been kind of boring most other times, but when it came to learning anything, he was the guy to go to.

I wandered up the parquet stairs after a little while, as usual noticing how the thick, dark lines were kind of loud feeling compared to the rest of the honey-coloured tiles. It always left me curious as to why they were so mismatched.

I was feeling really bored and not sure what I was going to do, but I felt thirsty, so I headed to the kitchen.

Of course, Nana had plenty of apple juice there for me. She always did. I went to the cupboard to get a cup, and there it was. The big ugly orange cup. The kind of ugly cup that was only made in the ’70s. It was staring me in the face.

I hated it.

It was ugly.

Really, really ugly.

But I couldn’t tell Nana that because when I was four years old, orange had been my favourite colour. She had gotten it for me, thinking I would be so happy to have my very own special orange cup.

But even back then, that was not my orange.

It wasn’t even close to being a nice shade of orange. It was the yuckiest orange ever. The kind of yucky orange that is almost becoming light brown, that any child in their right mind would never ever ever ever ever ever want.

And I did not want it.

But I also did not want to hurt Nana’s feelings. She was so nice to me, and even then, I knew that her niceness to me meant more than how ugly the cup was.

I looked at it for a moment. I stared at it, actually. Maybe thirty seconds before I changed my mind and closed the cupboard door.

And I walked to the dining room.

Somehow, my feet were leading me to the glass cupboard. Somehow, the rest of me was following.

And somehow, even though I knew that I was doing it, I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t. I thought that somehow it was something else leading me, like maybe my feet had nothing to do with my thinking, so therefore I was not doing what my feet were doing as they decided to just start walking without me deciding to tell them to.

When I arrived at the cupboard, I stared at the beautiful cup with the lovely pale-blue flowers, the very fine vines, and the beautiful, delicate leaves set against a bone-coloured background with gold trim around the very top of it.

I took a deep breath and held it in.

The cup was just so very pretty.

So very lovely.

I couldn’t touch it, of course.

Of course, I couldn’t touch it.

Just the thought of me touching it would send poor Nana to the hospital with a ticker attack, or whatever it was she said would happen whenever she got kerfuffled.

Yet somehow, despite all of my thinking about how I could walk to where I knew I shouldn’t go, despite a guilty feeling already creeping and spreading itself all over me, I found myself in front of it.

The Glass Cupboard.

Without a single thought or any permission at all, my hand had decided to open the sacred glass cupboard. I had not even had the chance to think to myself, open it.

I was quite surprised with myself, to be honest. How did I end up opening the cupboard door when that was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do?

Well… no use thinking about that anymore.

It was open.

But could I?

Would I… actually…

Touch it?

For real?

My fingers suddenly felt huge and clumsy. They felt fat and big like Grandpa’s fingers. But they were reaching, reaching, reaching into that cupboard.

The hand attached to the fingers was a little bit shaky. The arm attached to the hand felt very, very heavy and very, very clumsy at the same time. The body behind the arm was feeling kind of stiff and guilty and wrong.

The mind attached to the body attached to the arm attached to the hand attached to the clumsy, fat fingers was saying, What are you doing? You’re not supposed to do this!

But then there was this other voice talking to me at the same time.

Oh, it’s not going to hurt… You just want to touch it and see what it feels like… because Nana never lets you touch them… You can touch it and do no harm… What’s the big deal?

I decided it wasn’t a big deal to just touch it.

As long as I just touched it.

And so I did.

My little fat-feeling fingers felt how very, very delicate the cup with the floral pale-blue panels, its fine sage vines, and its tiny, delicate leaves was. I had never touched anything so thin and so fragile-feeling before. There was just something so grown-up feeling in how breakable it felt.

Before I knew it, my clumsy, fat-feeling fingers had lifted the treasured, lovely cup, and it was coming toward my face.

What was happening?

Surely, I did not want to disobey Nana at all.

And certainly, I did not want to disappoint Nana at all.

But here it was in front of my face, and I was staring at the inside of it. It had these tiny little ridges all along the inside, like little bones marking the place around the circular cup.

It was just so breathtaking. No wonder Nana took such special care of it.

I found myself dreaming about all the different, special places it could be used.

Maybe princesses drank with cups like this! Maybe they had breakfast with queens and drank tea together!

Or maybe special princesses in India had teacups like this!

Nana called it china. Maybe it was for Chinese princesses!

My mind played out the imagined morning teatime with princesses in exotic places, sipping delicately in their frilly princess dresses with their beautiful queen mammas nodding in approval and teaching them how to be very proper, pretty princesses.

Oh, I wanted to be a proper, pretty princess too!

I thought of all the proper, pretty princesses from every ethnicity and every country in the world who drank out of lovely teacups just like this, with its delicate, floral pale-blue panels, fine sage vines, and tiny, delicate leaves.

How lucky they were!

Even if they were seven years old like I was, I bet their grandmothers didn’t make them drink from old, orange, ugly cups instead.

I felt a little bit sad.

Because I really, really wanted to drink from it.

I thought of the apple juice.

Then… I felt a little bit angry that all the proper, pretty princesses in the world got to drink from lovely teacups while I didn’t.

But I could.

If I wanted to.

I shrugged my shoulders, then stuck my nose in the air, turning to the kitchen with the cup.

Why not?

Just a sip.

Just a little, little sip.

And there were my hands, attached to my arms, attached to my body, attached to my legs, attached to my feet, which were now walking, a little bit shaky, toward the kitchen.

Oh, Nana would be so so angry!

I am not going to think about that, I said to myself.

I’m not going to think about how angry Nana would be.

I’m not gonna think of how much I would disappoint poor Nana, who loved me so much.

I’m not gonna think of how I was disobeying her.

I’m not gonna think of just how very not nice I was being, to be quite honest.

Suddenly, the magic was gone.

I didn’t want to drink my juice anymore. Not from that cup anyhow.

I came to a full stop. I was still on the pale robin-egg-blue carpet in the dining room, and I was about two feet away from the kitchen, but my guilt was already eating me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to actually go all the way into the kitchen.

I felt so deflated.

This was not fun.

This was not what I had pictured.

I changed my mind about the entire stupid idea of drinking out of Nana’s special cup.

Just as I was about to turn around and head back, I heard Grandpa’s voice loud and suddenly right behind me, and I shuddered from startlement.

“Sweet pea! What are you doing?”

“If your grandmother knew you were touching her special teacup, she would have a conniption fit!”

And I was trembling everywhere, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, the feet that had walked me to the dining room against my will and made me guilty of something I had not wanted to do.

Tears rose in my eyes.

And I tried, but could not stop shaking.

And then it got worse.

I don’t know how, but that beautiful little cup suddenly slipped out of my trembling fingers, and the cup dropped, dropped, dropped all the way down to the plush pale robin’s-egg-blue carpet.

And my little head followed as if in slow motion as I helplessly watched it fall.

I felt my jaw drop because it…

broke.

As if by black magic, the little perfect cup had suddenly split into two halves.

The beautiful, beautiful, delicate, lovely, softly coloured blue-floral teacup with the fine sage-green vines and delicate leaves sat in two jagged, sharp, angry-looking pieces on the floor.

I sobbed immediately.

Grandpa might have known a lot of things, but he sure didn’t know what to do with a sobbing seven-year-old who had completely disobeyed her nana. Being her husband, he knew just how upset she would be, so his loyalty was torn between trying to help his little seven-year-old granddaughter and trying to think of just how to appease his wife’s anger when she got home.

Her imminent disappointment.

Her inevitable utter shock.

He knew just how much she treasured those teacups.

My body was shaking. I picked up the two little pieces of the teacup and tried to put them back together again.

There was this really weird scratchy sound I had never heard before, and I didn’t like the sound of it. I was trying to put it back together, but the scratchy sound made me even more upset, as if the scratchiness whispered to me that I was a terrible granddaughter and could never fix what I had done wrong.

I didn’t know what to do to fix what I had caused. So many things were going through my head, and they were all tangled up at once. I could only cry. Every thought made me feel worse than the one before it did.

Grandpa took the pieces from me and said, “It’s okay, sweet pea. Don’t worry. Nana might be a little bit angry and disappointed when she gets home, but she will forgive you. You’re much more special to her than a teacup.”

I went to my room, still crying.

I decided I would write a letter for Nana, but I couldn’t quite write a letter, so I wrote a story instead.

I wrote her a story about a wicked witch who kept all her special things to herself, and about a young, beautiful princess who one day sneaked into the witch’s home and touched her beautiful things.

And when the wicked witch found out, she was very, very angry, and she cursed the little beautiful princess for eternity, and the little princess was unhappy forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

The end.

When Nana got home, I handed her my little story, which I thought was very clever, and I hoped that through my gift of a story, she would see how very sorry I was for disrespecting her so badly.

At the same time, Grandpa was showing her the cup and explaining what had happened.

Her face turned bright red. Her lips and her face got tight in a really weird kind of way that made me very, very upset and very, very scared at the same time.

I ran back to my room and buried my face in the pillow.

I was so, so scared of how angry she was with me.

I was so, so scared of what consequences Nana would decide for what I did. I was really, really ashamed of myself.

I sat there in my room. After a little while, I lifted my face from my pillow, but I was too afraid to leave my room again.

Then, a few minutes later, I heard Nana.

She let out a huge, huge, huge belt of laughter that just kept going and going and going.

I could tell it was the kind where she could hardly breathe. I even pictured her eyes watering, she laughed so hard.

Well, at least something made her laugh after I had done such a bad job of making her so unhappy and angry.

Half a minute later, there she was at my doorway, and she was still laughing. I looked at her face. I could see that her eyes were all watery, as I had imagined.

Oh no.

Had I made her cry?

She said, “My darling, my darling little girl… I was so angry with you. I was so very angry with you.”

“And then I read your story about the wicked witch and the innocent, lovely little princess.”

“I didn’t know you thought of me as a wicked witch,” she said, laughing harder.

And then I felt worse.

I didn’t realize that she would think she was the wicked witch! I really did not think Nana was evil or wicked at all!

Oh no!

I had made a second huge mistake!

But then she smiled at me and said, “Honey, I didn’t know that you thought of me as selfish, and that you thought it was really mean of me to keep my things to myself.”

“Do you know what?” she asked. “You’re kind of right. I keep all my special things locked away, and I don’t let myself touch them. Never mind you.”

She leaned in toward me and kissed the top of my head.

“I have an idea, honey,” she said.

“Why don’t you come with me? Why don’t we have a lovely teatime, and we’ll use our special special cups? We will have special cookies and use special spoons and special plates, and all the things that I keep put away behind the glass cupboard forever. We will take all of our favourites out, and we will enjoy them today, and then we will enjoy them another day and another day.”

“You are a lovely princess. And because I have been acting like a wicked witch who keeps her things away from myself and from you, I am going to make this right, and we will enjoy all the beautiful things that have been hiding away as if they were too special for my own beautiful princess to enjoy with me.”

“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s teatime.”

And now, years later, I still treasure the partner of that beautiful cup, the delicate one with the pale-blue panels, fine sage vines, and tiny, delicate leaves. It is so lovely.

Like my Nana used to, I also keep all my special things in a cupboard with a glass face. But when my twin granddaughters come to visit, I take out my Nana’s special cup with all the rest of my special china, silver, and lovely things, and make our favourite teas with special-occasion cookies and delicate, proper, princessy, pretty, special things.

And always, I take one minute.

I close my eyes.

I think of Nana.

And I smile.