It was the middle of February
when she got the call.
Back home,
[she just knew]
the men would be shaking their heads
at digging into the frozen earth;
The women would move to the wardrobe,
Fetch the laid-by clothes,
The hand-tatted lace,
The age-smoothed brooch,
The coins that clinked together
in the drawstring, velvet pouch.
After she hung up the phone,
she turned off the lights
and locked her office door
and went home
to bake her mountain of grief.
On the drive,
her heart wrapped around objects
and places
and people.
– all that had gone on before –
She considered the translation from
“Once we …” to “Never more ...”
In the kitchen,
she moved aside the stainless
and the glass,
to grasp the edge of the wooden dough bowl.
She cupped it in her hands and
her heart saw the old man from Bristol
who had been so hungry that
he had forgotten how to be too proud to beg.
– who wasn’t hungry in the lean, dry days? –
The old man from Bristol who passed their way
who paid for
a corner in the loft
and three days of meals
with his hands and his tools
and a discarded piece of poplar
still green enough to carve.
that the women learned to share between them.
The bowl had been
a cause to meet and bake
and fill the fine, stitched-by-hand
muslin bread bags.
Baking in one kitchen,
then in the other.
No sense heating both houses.
Besides, the fellowship was as
much nourishment as the bread
in their early years.
Into the bowl –
She sifted her memories
with flour and salt,
then made a holler.
She poured the warm water,
the yeast, the sugar.
And waited.
After a time –
She used the long-handled wooden spoon,
dark with age,
its sides worn smooth –
more a paddle
than an object capable of scooping.
She married wet to dry.
Turned out –
on a lightly floured surface,
the dough,
and kneaded it with those memories:
– The creeks they waded:
Skirts pulled up to an acceptable “here”
when laughter was still filled with light
and the shapes in the dark
matched the shapes in the day
and they hadn’t yet learned to fear.
– The children they birthed:
Then learned not to hold too close
because the snakes
and consumptions
and the mines
would be there to hold them closer.
– The husbands they wanted to love:
But wouldn’t (not all the way)
because they would never be first
or cherished or sacred.
Too easy to replace Momma, Cook and Maid.
– The parents they buried:
Leaning together into the washing of the bodies
the fine, straight stitches in linen cloth,
the date that said “End”
in family Bibles.
Resurrection with each cobbler or
pan of sizzling Sunday chicken.
– The strength in the number of Two:
because, really, it only hurt
to count higher.
Subtraction came so fast
but they would always have the Two.
Right?Right?
Together, always together.
And then not –
On that day in February
with the dough rising
in the bowl that only she
and a memory would share.
Funeral food is comfort food,
she thought.
This, I can do.
The women who had been,
and then were not,
rested on chairs in the empty kitchen,
conjured by her hand and
the smell of food from home.
She believed they nodded with her
choices:
Bread, glazed ham, broccoli casserole.
Enough to feed the families
who would come to say goodbye.
Enough for sandwiches, later,
to attempt a filling of the
empty space
that held the loud absence
of a beating heart.
This, I can do.
And in the days and months
and years to come,
no one else would remember the food
she made that day.
No one but her.
And after the table was laid out
in the wake of death,
and the dishes draining in the board,
she folded her hands
and wept.
Baking mountains.
This, I did.