The Flavor of Memory

I cooked wild rice today, poured the bark brown grains into the rice cooker, hoping that by dinner, the grains would swell and fill us with comfort. The fragrance of lake and earth filled the house and spilled out into the backyard, where I was busy tasting the finest mud pies a toddler ever baked. Just the scent of wild rice cooking makes me feel warm and safe and happy. It is a memory that contains the best stuff of childhood, my mother's simple cooking, the red wine vinegar from her purple cabbage salad soaking into the rice on my plate. We spent some time in a Minnesota house, right on the sandy shore of the Boundary Waters. The skies went violet with an electrical storm and a tornado formed on the great grey expanse of water that nearly lapped our front steps. We cooked wild rice on the wood burning stove, and waited for the twister to pass us by. I remember my mom's long tapered fingers grasping the handle of a cast iron pot.

She had surgery this week, my mother. Crashed in the recovery room, but they brought her around, and she's home now, bed ridden for the next six weeks. This is a woman who has suffered from nearly constant pain, heart attacks, strokes, multiple surgeries, congestive heart failure, lung collapse....beginning in her thirties. But she simply refuses to slow down, won't allow her self to be beaten. She works sixty-odd hours a week, and is preparing to defend her doctoral thesis. 90 percent of the time, we are at fierce odds with each other, but I have immense respect for her, for what she is able to accomplish, for the sheer boldness of her spirit.

Like any good Italian-Irish-Cherokee-Jew, I've been kamikaze cooking, lately. Feeding my fears, alleviating my anxiety with smoked eggplant, phyllo dough, soups from scratch, apple-glazed sausages (of the veggie variety), wild rice. I think I'm afraid for her. And I think, I'm afraid for me. Afraid that, one of these days, she won't have a miraculously recovery...afriad that she'll go before we've been able to resolve our difference, before we've really gotten to know one another, afraid that I've inherited her bum ticker, her faulty neoruological wiring, her emotional and physical pain.

I'm processing slowly, just sort of limping along. But I keep finding myself in the kitchen, trying to preserve us, trying to fortify our life and our love through the flavors of my memories, both future and past.

Comments

[Cheryl]

I hope your mom's recovery goes well. My mom also has a lot of health problems and it terrifies me.
I didn't know you were also Cherokee and Irish. I'm an Irish-Cherokee-Germanic-Jew. Us mutts are pretty amazing all around, but definitely good cooks ;-)