… And to My Daughter, I Bequeath My Collection of Vintage Soap Slivers; Or I Prefer the Term “Practical”

Both my mother and my grandmother loved the chicken neck.
“Ooooh,” grandma said. “You’ll see.  You’ll learn to love it.”
“It sits in the juices,” mother said.  “It really is such a flavorful part of the bird.”
I remember blinking thoughtfully into their faces, the word “interesting” floating through my head.
Chicken necks.  Why I oughta…
And so here I am, decades later, a grown woman.  I am standing in the shower, rinsing off the saltiness of a good yoga work out, wondering if I should go for a new record in the no-reason-to-shave-my-legs competition I hold against myself every autumn, when I realize that I am holding a handful of soap slivers.
I remember the Guinness Book of World Records from my childhood, reading something about the stingiest woman in the world who had died with millions in the bank and yet whose only son had lost a leg to gangrene because of her insistence that they find him free medical treatment.
She had kept a soap-sliver box.
I stare down at my handful of soap ends.
There’s a full bar down there in the soap dish, the one that Willie has been using.  Me?  For some reason, I have soap-slivers to finish.
Apparently, I feel those slivers have life in them yet. 
And I suddenly remember the supposed deliciousness of the home-cooked chicken neck.
Ahhh.  
Sometimes, it takes years before I understand the simplest things.