Got Me Some Old Teakettle Blues

Beautiful photo by Ellen Wilson of Ella's Edge, who provided Real Toads with a selection of photo prompts this weekend. If you click on the link, you will find many very entertaining and wonderful responses to the prompt.


The old teakettle sat on the stovetop
for nearly a century.
Cast iron, built to last,
it boiled the water
for many cups of tea,
during low conversations among
the fully-gowned 
and aproned women,
who were prone to commiserating,
and sudden bursts
of maniacal laughter,
especially when talk turned  to
The Menfolk.


Teapot watched the endless
kneading of the bread dough,
provided coffee and sustenance
to the crotchety old farmer 
in his long johns
at first light.



The old kettle brewed tea
for the conversation
that told Ma and Pa
that Sissy was expecting

and, later,  boiled water
for childbirth
while the last long scream
crescendoed 
then died away.


Teapot was there when
word came from the War
that the oldest son
had died.
It boiled and sang, 
boiled and sang,
all that livelong day,
while the aging parents 
sat at the table, 
heads bowed low,
hands folded, empty, 
in their laps,
wondering  what this life
was all about.


When the baby grew bigger,
a dear little girl
with golden curls,
it boiled again--
tea for the doctor.
Ivy had reached across 
the stovetop
to put the kettle on
for Ma, and 
her nightgown
caught on fire.
There was nothing
he could do.


The teapot witnessed
a century of hard living
as the aging farm folk withered.
It barely skirted the edge of
the New Millenium:
excess and waste beyond 
anything it had ever seen.
It was supplanted by 
flimsy electrical replacements
without its staying power,
with no history, 
that were
unable to provide 
the same degree
of comfort.
The new kettles
don't sing.


Teakettle's last trip was to the landfill
when the last living kin had died,
and the old farmhouse
got cleared out
and knocked down,
to make way for 
a bare treeless expanse
that would soon sprout
nothing but subdivisions
of every-one-the-same 
monster houses
with formidable monster mortgages,
everything within new and shiny,
breakable, disposable, 
forgettable and
lacking soul.


The days of old, weathered,  
battered, cast iron teapots
is now long gone.
But, when they were here,
what music they provided
as the background
of our lives.