Stray

I caught a glimpse of her through her kitchen window,

As I walked by with my dog on a leash.

I saw her, staring off,

Chewing her peanut butter toast,

Sipping yesterday’s coffee.

She looked like she wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there,

But had resigned herself to staying.

Maybe I should have just let her be.

Here she was in a place I’d probably overstated,

Trying her best to tether herself,
With her dishes and pictures from before,

Finding comfort in keepsakes,

Waiting for small birds to visit the feeder I’d attached to the glass.

Each day I hope

Small new and colorful additions

Will make this be home.

But each box opened from her past evokes a sigh.

Where will these things possibly fit?

Was I wrong to imagine this place would be right?

Did I need to be right?

I am sorry for my selfishness,

For bringing her like a small creature I’d found

And kept in my closet,

Hoping I could keep her.

I will make a bed of moss and leaves,

And I’ll poke holes through the lid

With a nail.

Cook Til Done: Travels Through My Grandmother's Recipe Box

In the same way that I’d like to read every book before I die, I’d like to cook every recipe. Almost. Just as I’d like to read every book that’s not science fiction, computer how-to or automotive technique, I’d like to cook every recipe that isn’t too difficult or time-consuming or doesn’t have entrails in it.

I’m compulsive. I can’t skip one. So there with my grandmother’s recipes, I plod through 55 years of clipped, scantily jotted notes, and my family serves as the wary clientele. 

When my grandmother died in 1982, she left behind two small file boxes filled with recipes. Some recipes we copied for everyone, as they were favorites. The stuffed cabbage. The noodle kugel. The hot water gingerbread. But most often she didn’t write those down as she made them often enough to know how to cook them without reading a recipe. So I have Rose’s blintz soufflé, Doris’ babke, and salmon quiche from some event or other, written on the back of a place card.

Then there are the ones cut from the paper. Parade magazine. Or from the woman who wrote weekly recipes in our local paper with, inevitably, 2 days later, an apology in the paper for the ingredient surreptitiously omitted. “We regret to inform you that the recipe for cranberry mold in Saturday’s paper forgot to mention two packets of gelatin.” I never have found the regrets section of my grandmother’s file boxes. 

I’ve been cooking my way through these for years. I try not to skip, but stuffed derma is not compelling, nor is the avocado gelatin ring. Still, taking the time to cook what my grandmother either did cook or intended to cook brings me into her kitchen with her smallness, her quick curse when something slipped from her fingers, her kitchen at the lake where chicken was served every baked way but the way I’d eat it. 

I tell my mother when I’ve made a recipe of my grandmother’s. “She never made that,” is most often the reply. But she intended to! So I must cook it.

On “From The Desk Of Isaac Shapiro, M.D. F.A.C.P” is Calamondin Nut Bread. The calamondin is a small, bitter orange. (I don’t know who Isaac Shapiro M.D. was.) My mother took on this challenge, made from calamondins stolen from the Florida neighbor’s tree late at night. It calls for 3/4 cup of pureed fruit.  That’s about 75 calamondins, and I think you have to peel them, a task not unlike trying to peel cherry tomatoes with your fingernails.  And calamondin marmalade calls for 4 cups of the fruit -– the neighbor’s yearly harvest.

There are 7 tuna casserole recipes, none of which have potato chips on the top, which is the only way I’d get one of my two children to eat it. My favorite one is “Hot Teen Tuna Buns” which has entirely different connotations today than when printed in a magazine in 1957. "1/4 lb. cubed process (sic) American cheese, 3 chopped, hard-cooked eggs, 2 tablesp. pickle relish, one 6 ½ or 7 oz can chunk tuna, one tablesp. minced green pepper, 2 tablesp. minced onion, ½ cup mayonnaise, 3 tablesp. chopped stuffed olives. Use to fill 6 hamburger buns, split, then buttered. Wrap each in foil; refrigerate. At serving time, bake wrapped, at 400 degrees, 15 min; unwrap to serve. Makes 6. Double recipe for 12." Directions I guess I’d appreciate if I’d never seen a kitchen or been to first grade.

Then the final comment, “Warm welcome for teen-agers, served with sparkling grape juice and nut brownies.” Although I have had teenagers for 5 years now, I have yet to welcome them in this manner.

Some I have no idea what to do with. Beet mold, for instance, written in my grandmother’s loopy cursive:

Beets 1 ½ c. 
Water 2c.
Horserad. 2T
Vinegar 5T. 
juice 1 ½
salt ½ tsp
2pkg jello
1 c celery 

That’s it.  No other clues.  But I hold onto it because it’s in my grandmother’s loopy cursive.

That’s why I keep Mock Gefilte fish. And lemon mold. And Mary Hugo’s fresh tongue. Well, her recipe for fresh tongue.

I’ve found some favorites. Sweet and sour meatballs. Pear nut torte. Bananas Foster, which was really fun to burn intentionally.

I’ve found ways to cook food for Passover that I’d never serve to guests. Chremsel. Passover fruit puffs. Farfel Charlotte. Frances Kredenser’s Passover Sponge Cake.

But most of all, I’ve found a way to keep my grandmother around my own kitchen table so that my own family can spend a little time with the small, swearing-when-she-dropped-something, crying-when-laughing woman I grew up with, with whom I never cooked, whose food I hardly ever ate. 

- this piece first appeared in 2008 on Rokovoko, an online blog.

Springtime Gratefuls

Every morning I drive over the ocean. The ferries and barges glide over the sparkling water. Birds drop clam shells onto the rocks, forcing them to open for their meals.  Cormorants stand on ancient pilings, their wings held out to the wind to dry. Small black and white ducks bob on the ripples. Clouds decide daily which magnificent scene they will paint across the sky, and I drive under them, over the ocean, every day.

It snowed today, the third day of spring. I love the fat, graceful flakes as they drift to the ground, such mesmerizing weather, the trees soon coated like frosted mini wheats.

Two crocus bloomed in the yard, not two feet away from the snow that slowly recedes from the lawn. One purple, one white, proudly opening by the house.  I'd looked for them before today, but thought it would be impossible for them to force their way through dead leaves and hardened snow. Ta dah! They shouted.

Birds come to my feeder. Cardinals too large, him waiting for his bride to eat before he takes his turn, titmice, finches still in their dingy winter costumes, nuthatches, timid chickadees, bluejay bullies. I watch them from my living room.

While I don't really enjoy bringing the garbage and recycling to the curb during those early morning moments, I do enjoy the sounds around me in early spring, the tens of different bird songs, all those trills and tweets, while I drag the bins out to the street and the quarter moon watches before leaving the sky.

The ducks in the pond, back for spring.  I love the one who laughs at his own jokes.  That one duck guy over there tells a story that only he himself finds amusing, so he laughs wildly and his companions ignore him and roll their eyes at one another.

I drove to Clearwater Drive tonight, cracked my windows a bit, and the sound grew louder. Peepers. I shut off my car and listened with the windows rolled down all the way now, and thought about how I'd taken the girls to hear them each year. Now just me tonight, listening, surrounded by spring.

I raked today.  Under the slimy brown leaves left from last year were the chives and the daffodils, the leaves promising summer's day lilies, the lady’s mantle, and the dark fragile lacy leaves of the forget-me-nots.  

The Crayola color of the first spring buds. The trees turned that shade overnight, a page in the coloring book of spring.

Margie

It was that day she took me to a workshop on how to plant a perennial border. There was the promise of lunch and learning which plants should be planted in the company of other plants.  She wasn’t as accommodating later on, ideas rarely turned into action plans the older we got.  But for this, way back those many summers ago, she made the plan to go, just us two.  

She thought I knew so much about gardening because I remembered plant names. Because I spent time in my backyard each spring,  planting, tending. Pretending. She didn’t know these plants were yearly purchases, coming innocently to my yard from the greenhouses, spending the summer with me, but never living to see the next.

She’d heard of these people who had left their lucrative, creative, intense New York lives, for a farm in the middle of Maine where they planted gardens and harvested herbs which they’d hang in fragrant bundles upside down from the rafters of their barn and would make gorgeous wreaths to sell, and write books about their new life adventures. “You can’t imagine.” She’d always tell me I couldn’t imagine. “I can imagine,” I’d reply resentfully, hating to be told any idea was beyond my capacity to comprehend, even though it was just a phrase that had nothing to do with me really.

We drove from her house to the farm. She drove as she always did with one foot on the brake and the other on the gas, over back roads she knew as if she’d always driven there. We ended on a tree-lined road and parked in the dusty driveway alongside the farm. I remember little from that day except for the few hours we spent planting hostas in a shaded bed the new farmers were creating. We grumbled, resenting our need to help them to do this when they already knew how, and we would still have to go back home where we would continue to plant the tall things in front of the the short things, the shade things in the brilliant and devastating sunshine because we knew no better. But we dug, we moved the hostas around in groups of three.  Always plant groups of three, we were told. Always continue an idea of design along the entire border. Don’t just buy one of a plant, buy 3.  And then it was time for lunch.

She’d told me about the lunch, how the woman from New York would prepare a lunch for all the volunteers, something simple but fresh from their garden, and we’d eat all together. We’d whispered about it all morning as we dug holes for their hostas.  Then we were called to lunch alongside a sunlit field, in a small cottage they’d constructed from barn boards and sashed windows thrown open to let in the breeze. There was a simple kitchen, a long wooden countertop, glass vases and jam jars filled with coneflowers and bachelor buttons and sprigs of rosemary, and a few tables for us to gather. She had made cold chicken salad served over greens she’d gathered from the garden, drizzled with my first ever taste of raspberry vinaigrette that turned the dark fragile greens and the poached chicken a vivid red.  It was a lunch we always remembered for its delicious simplicity.

I don’t remember our drive home, I don’t remember us bringing any new skills into her garden or mine. I don’t remember ever going back to the New York people’s farm. But I remember and will always remember that day with her, that gift of a day, where she chose me, where we went together and created a new garden as friends.

I couldn’t take the doorway,

The inaccurate labels, moved

By my brother more interested

In humor than facts,

The ones that peel,

Me taller at seven than he at 14,

The ones carved into the frame,

Me at two, at five, my sister at 17,

My dad,

My dog somehow, taller at one than I was at two.

Did we hold up his willing paws?

Stand up straight.

Don’t tilt your head back.

Don’t stand on the little rise.

Cheating!

Stand flat on the floor.
No shoes.

Now step away. Look how you’ve grown.

One year I grew 4 inches.

Around the corner my children grew

and my husband started growing

when we met

and he could stand on the doorjamb

and be taller by half an inch.

Will the frame with its carpenter pencil etchings

stay?

Will they think it quaint

And heartwarming

To see the height of us all

In their new kitchen?

Veterans Day

Today I'll have pumpernickel toast

At the kitchen table

topped with cottage cheese like you.

Each morning, seated at the end of the table,

Your coffee,

Your paper,

Your English muffin topped with cottage cheese,

And the TV yelling from across the room,

You in your tie and jacket,

Quiet in your reading,

Your stirring and sipping,

Your spooning of a teetering mound of cheese

Onto the breakfast you knew each day.

We didn’t talk.

We didn’t share news.

I don’t remember you getting up from the table.

I don’t remember your sitting down at the table.

Today I think of you,

Your silent traditions,

The questions I never knew to ask,

The time you spent away from this table,

Fighting in war, married to another,

Thinking over secret memories,

Abroad.