I honestly don’t even know what she was looking for. I walked from the living room into the kitchen, and my mom was sitting there, cook book in hand, leafing through the pages. “What are you looking for?” I asked her.
“There’s a recipe in here,” and she said the name of the salad she was looking for. I sat down next to her and really looked at the book she was going through. “Where did you get that?” I asked her with a sincere sense of curiosity. This book with the cover worn to the point that you could barely read what parish had written it originally. The edges were tattered, the pages so well loved by all of the times that she had flipped through them…
This cookbook was a gift that my paternal Grandmother had given to her, she thought, as a bridal shower gift.
My parents are in their 69th year of marriage… put that into page turns and I can not even imagine the number.
When she was finished, it was my turn. I picked it up and slowly meandered the pages of church group ladies that had gathered their favorite recipes together and created a cookbook. Mayonnaise, jello, and cream of something soups were all star ingredients, page after page.
As I continued something started to sink in, deep within me. No, not one more casserole based out of a box, it was so much more subtle than that. What drew my attention was not the recipes themselves, but the handwriting in between. The margins filled with little additions or subtractions in handwriting I knew by sight.
My mothers writing graced the pages; I could see the busy hurried times, the slow so she would remember times, the “my husband will never eat that” substitutions that had been made over the years.
It occurred to me I was looking at my Mom’s entire adult life in black and white. Holidays, family reunions, birthdays, mission group meetings, days that the neighbor ladies would come over and work on a quilt upstairs, each of these called for a visit to these hard loved pages.
I set the book down on the kitchen table, and in a few minutes my Mom went back to it.
My Mom turned 90 years old in March. You would NEVER know it by looking at her.
I watched her hands as she took each page, so much more deliberately than she needed to when she was younger. Her fingers are heavy with arthritis, the veins on top of her hands clear as roadways just like my Gramma, her Mom’s, before her. She moves more slowly now than when I was a kid, or even when my kid was a kid, but she also gets to. These days she has more time than things she needs to get done, but don’t try and tell her that as she still needs everything to have a place, and be in its place.
I watched her hands and thought of everything they have done in her 90 years: the bathing babies of 3 generations, the huge garden that fed a simple farm family, the wringing of laundry and dishcloths and carrying buckets in the barn. The millions of times she has crossed the yard from the house to the barn, or the garage, or the garden, or the shed over the 60 years she has lived with my Dad on that farm. I thought of the days she must have wanted to quit. The times she probably cried over something she never said or showed to us. Her incredible smile that still lights up a room, a giggle that still sounds like she’s a teenager, and the way she shimmies in her chair or on the kitchen floor when she tastes something she thinks is delicious. She is truly the cutest thing.
Just sitting there tracing the lines of some recipe with her index finger from left to right, figuring what she needs for her grocery list.
She got up and put the cookbook away in THE drawer… because there is ONE drawer in the kitchen for cookbooks.
Later that evening I gave my Mom the usual hug and kiss good night, we exchanged “I love you, see you in the morning” and I climbed the stairs to my room (yes, I still sleep in my same room as when I grew up). I heard their bedroom door close. The flower shaped wall light at the bottom of the stairs stays on all night and as I crawled into bed, I swear somewhere in the darkness, I heard another turn of a page.
Forever the journey, Anne