I ordered a red gravy boat to add to my Fiesta Christmas collection this year. Everywhere they sell Fietsta was running low on them, but I ended up finding one at Kohl’s when I had a whole debacle trying to find one at Macy’s. I’ll save you that story. So when the box arrived with my new trivet and my new scarlet-colored Fiesta Sauceboat I was jacked! Until I opened the box. As soon as I touched the box I knew something was wrong. I heard pieces. Broken pieces moving around. I hoped that it was the trivet, but of course because it is 2020, it was my beloved sauceboat.

Kohl’s made it right by shipping me a new trivet, but they couldn’t ship me a new sauceboat because they are out of stock. So I sat there in madness for a second, wondering who the hell packed the box, considering it was a nightmare packing job. Then I shrugged, said hey, this is 2020 and in 2020 we have learned to accept things we can’t control and move on. So I Googled the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the mending of broken pottery by using gold. It creates a new piece that doesn’t shy away from its blemishes, but rather accepts them and makes the pottery beautiful again, just in a new way. I knew I had to do this to my 2020 gravy boat, but of course I can’t really afford to melt gold down, nor do I have access to do that or even know how. So I did the next best thing: I watched a YouTube video on how to practice “modern Kintsugi” with epoxy resin and some mica powder, ordered it from Amazon and got it done.

Listen, it was easy. But also tough. Much like this year. The epoxy resin is a mess to work with, I had gold mica powder all over my hands and table and places I was like, how did that even get there? But in the end I prevailed, in my own way of course, and now I have this broken, beautiful gravy boat. And while Jerimiah and Jackson looked at me a little crazy at first, eventually they got it.

2020, y’all. What a hot mess. But, hasn’t it shone some light on some things in our lives? I mean don’t we all have some cracks in our lives that could stand to be made beautiful? Don’t we all feel broken sometimes and wish we could be whole? Isn’t this year a shitshow, but also didn’t it sort of enlighten us to a lot of things? I think so. Which is why my family’s 2020 gravy boat* will now live eternally the way it came to us, broken but beautiful, and hopefully in years to come it will serve as reminder of how fucked up, funny, absurd, horrific, broken, and enlightening this year was. Maybe.

Enjoy some pics of the process and don’t laugh too much at my broken gravy boat.

M.

*This way of doing it, the modern, easy way, makes the gravy boat unusable as the epoxy resin is toxic, but it looks nice on the hutch.