09/01/2025
I absolutely love this idea and needed to share it. I collect things, my friends will tell you lots of weird things, but I always have an idea for them. This one is amazing.
The estate sale lady held up Mom's broken cookie jar like it was contaminated. "Two dollars, but you'll need to find your own lid somewhere."
Two dollars for the thing that held every Christmas cookie, every after-school snack, every midnight treat when I couldn't sleep as a teenager. The red ceramic strawberry that lived on Mom's counter for thirty-seven years, now sitting next to someone else's price tags and strangers pawing through her belongings.
I grabbed it before anyone else could touch it. Didn't matter that the lid was long gone, probably thrown away when they moved Mom to the nursing home. Didn't matter that my sister rolled her eyes and muttered something about "hoarding broken junk."
For three months it sat on my kitchen counter looking sad and incomplete. My husband kept asking what I planned to do with a lidless jar. I didn't have an answer.
Then I spotted this gorgeous trailing pothos at the grocery store and something clicked. Mom always said plants made everything feel more alive. I potted it right there in her old cookie jar, and suddenly the whole kitchen felt warmer.
Now when I water it, I tell that little plant all the stories Mom used to tell me while she baked.
Sometimes the most broken things make the most beautiful new beginnings.
