Danish Fruit Plates*

The plates in my picture today are among the few possessions I inherited from my mother. They are on a very high shelf of a hutch in our kitchen pantry so I climbed up on a stool to take a picture of them.To my horror, close inspection revealed cobwebs, spiders and  a thick layer of dust. When I finished clearing that up I thought about all the other high shelves in the house, but the thermometer in the window read an even 100 degrees outside, so I headed for the thermostat and flipped the switch to 'cool'. Nothing. Not working. Not cool. The man is coming on Monday afternoon to fix it. I imagine he is very busy, since things always break at the worst possible time.

The plates  are unusual colors and I've always liked them. A couple of years ago, we bought a piece by Danish painter Gert Matthiesen from his widow, Barbara Smilow, after he died tragically of a brain aneurysm. When she delivered the painting to us, she brought along her sister-in-law, Gert's sister, here on a visit from Denmark. She  spotted the plates and said she was quite sure they had been made by her sister. The markings on the back (see extra) confirmed her belief. 

The full tale of the journey of these plates remains to be discovered. My mother would have loved the serendipity involved in the story so far…. 

*ForJolang who has shown us some of her own collection of plates from Denmark.