Today I wasn’t sure what to write in the blog. I’m still in the throws of clearing clutter and yesterday I picked up a couple boxes from the post office that my sister had sent. They contained a few cookbooks and other odds and ends from our mother who passed away a couple weeks before this last Christmas. I had expected to come back with the boxes, open them up and then get down to working on the novel. Well, it just didn’t happen that way. I got home around noon, but for the life of me I could not get my rear in gear. I fiddle with this, and then I fiddle with that, nothing grabbed my interest. I knew this lethergy had to do with connecting to my mother’s things, and especially her recipes.
I set the two tin boxes filled with 3×5 cards on my dining room table, along with her ledger filled with clippings and recipes that she’d written down on small scraps of paper, and the small collection of books that I’d picked out from her bookshelves when my sisters and I had packed up her apartment. From time to time during the day I walked passed the table filled with her stuff, but never had the desire to touch them. Then last night I began to look through the books, pick out one card and then another card out of the tins just to get a flavor of what she had been collecting all these years.
I gathered up the scraps of paper that she had jotted down what she thought were interesting recipes. I could tell how time had begun to damage her hands. They’d become knarled and cripled and though she kept busy for many years even though her hands hurt and ached at the end of a project, she kept at her business of writing things down. I could tell which were the last recipes that she had gathered. Her handwriting had turned nearly unreadable, with sharp jagged spots where smooth curved lines should have appeared. And she had turned to abreviate cooking methods by simply writing ‘stir’ or she leave the direction blank with only the ingredients under the title of a dish.
But what lingers most is the smell that comes from those books and pieces of paper. You might think that they smelled of puddings and cookies and roast beef, but she had been a heavy smoker all her life and everything she owned smelled of cigarette smoke. She would have quite likely been here today had she quite when our father died 25 years ago from lung cancer. Yet, she kept puffing away knowing that it would be her undoing. And that’s what I smell now. She comes to me when I least expect it, that smell of mom. I can’t tell you if I like, or not. I just know that it reminds me of when I was a little girl and how I used to love to open her pocketbook and smell what I thought made my mother special, chewing gun and the odor of tabacco. She stopped chewing gun years ago when she got faulse teeth, but those cigarettes stayed with her until the day that she died.
