My Mom used to host Tupperware parties. She and her friends would gather on the back deck of our house, dressed in watermelon and coral and lime and ocean blue things, laughing and chattering and passing around the latest styles in plastic kitchen containers.
I can still see it like a picture in my mind, only the colors kind of smear in my memory like they were effervescent. I can still feel the pleated plastic lines on the Tupperware lids under my fingertips.
That house was my first container. The deck, when not adorned with thirty-year-old mothers in pastels, was my pageant stage. The living room was my talk show set. My bedroom a library, and my bed the cave where I stayed up late reading under the covers with a flashlight. The backyard was a kickball diamond where all the neighborhood kids gathered. The shed my kitchen. The creek my nature haven with its crayfish to dig up and its rocks to paint and its soft mud to squish my jelly shoes into. The edge of the woods the first place I camped alone, writing stories and poems in my Trapper Keeper.
A container isn’t just a yellow plastic bowl for your leftover lasagna, as it wasn’t just that yellow house and its yard.