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As a child in the 70’s and 80’s I spent a lot of time with my grandparents.

So many wonderful memories are associated with those times and often the smallest of details will bring to mind those happy feelings. A scent of freshly cleaned clothing coming from a dry cleaner/launderette, newly brewed coffee, spaghetti sauce cooking or even moth balls. The sounds of crickets, a bus going up the street or a baseball game on the radio on a summer evening all bring me back to my childhood with my grandparents.

One of the biggest visual sense memories for me, associating with my mom’s parents, has been Melmac melamine/rattan tumblers dating from sometime in the 1950’s or 1960’s.

They had this amazingly colorful set of cups that I always adored. I recall the adults drinking iced coffee in them while my cousins and I had some sort of juice or soda as we all sat on the porch during the summer. Or the time Nana taught me how to play poker when I was about 10 while we both sipped our drinks from these plastic cups. They made already happy moments so much more vibrant with their brilliant colors and odd but cool basket weave trapped between the outside clear plastic and the inside melamine.

A few years back I remember feeling so sad to know that possibly only a couple of them survived the trip from my grandparents house to the apartment they move into. I was thrilled to get one when Nana found it a couple of years later. When she passed in April and we cleaned out her apartment I got the other one that was left. Just the other day, while in my favorite vintage shop I found a set of little sundae cups of the same line and just HAD to have them. Not very expensive and as they were mass produced (and by some accounts given away for free on milk routes in some parts of the country) not worth much but honestly the joy, happiness and inspiration I get just from seeing them is invaluable and making a collector out of me.