Let's say you hooked up a capacitor like this:

In an electronic circuit, a capacitor is shown like this:

Here you have a battery, a light bulb and a capacitor. If the capacitor is pretty big, what you would notice is that, when you connected the battery, the light bulb would light up as current flows from the battery to the capacitor to charge it up. The bulb would get progressively dimmer and finally go out once the capacitor reached its capacity. Then you could remove the battery and replace it with a wire. Current would flow from one plate of the capacitor to the other. The lightbulb would light and then get dimmer and dimmer, finally going out once the capacitor had completely discharged (the same number of electrons on both plates).