Sometimes I feel like a walking treatment for the next reality series.
I am what some, often disdainfully, refer to as the family archivist--the memory keeper if you will, to both borrow and blaspheme from Kim Edwards. I come by this role honestly; I inherited it bit by bit from my father and his mother during the course of their lifetimes. But I came into my own in it early and since my father's death, I have been in a class alone.
Now, one might imagine that the tools of this trade would be found in the photo albums, the book shelves, the jewelry boxes, workshop, or even the china cabinet. And they are.
In my house, however, the mother lode is found in the kitchen.
I went in last night for recon purposes. Made my shopping list, dug out all the necessary equipment and washed it. And there it was, once again: The history of every meaningful relationship in my life, writ large in cast iron, aluminium, teflon and ceramic.
It happens every Thanksgiving. Much of my family of blood, to use a phrase from Dallasdoc, has passed. But I retain the vital pieces of their kitchens and thus my memory in that impossibly-hard-to-get-into-and-out-of-11-inch-wide-and-47-foot-deep cabinet next to the refrigerator. In an alternate universe this cabinet is an Edgar Allen Poe short story waiting to be written.
There's my grandmother's (mostly still) white ceramic colander that I'll use to rinse and cool the eggs after I boil them. I have a couple of the Paul Deen contemporary versions, in pretty post-IKEA colors for everyday use, but this one gets pulled out only for the deviled eggs on holidays. After the eggs are complete, they'll go on my great grandmother's egg platter, but that's a different cabinet, in a different room and thus, a different diary.
Then there's my Aunt Ollie's very battered double boiler, the one from the Cafe (stress on the first syllable, always) that she used to run with my Uncle Ed. That would be the cafe that closed down when I was a toddler. After Ed died, Ollie came to live with my grandparents and so during my childhood, Ollie did all the cooking. Both my grandmother and Ollie died in the late 70's, but the pot, well, its still in my kitchen in 2011, and I'll use it when I make dessert.
Lest you think I can't cook with anything manufactured post-Eisenhower Administration, however, let me introduce you to the small aluminium pot that my late mother-in-law gave the man to whom I was once married when he headed off to college, about the time my Aunt Ollie died. My mother-in-law passed away 16 years ago and he and I have been divorced for 15 years, but the pot is the perfect size for simmering the apricots in the orange liquor that both she and I were wont to put into our holiday dressing. It's a touching little piece of family history that says a great deal about the two of them and their relationship. Since the handle on this one is a little wonky, I now only use it when I make that dressing. I can't bring myself to dispose of it.
Finally there are the two cast iron skillets that my mother gave to me when I left for college. Carter era, rather than the Roosevelt vintage ones my grandmothers always used, these pans nonetheless have a central place in the food production line-up today. My mommma's gone and my sister has all her cooking equipment (and she puts it to much better use than would I), but these are the two tangible things she sent me out into the world with, these, a copy of Robert Frost's poetry and the then undeniable--but today possibly questionable--observation that as long as I could type, I would always be able to earn a living.
We laid my mother to rest with Robert Frost's words, the typing skills have held up pretty well, even if the earning skills haven't always panned out, but the skillets, while they've seen me through more than my share of culinary ahem, adventures, they've never let me down when it comes to onion tarts.
The only thing that's missing??
Well, no one seems to know what happened to the ugly configuration of wood and plastic flowers that my other grandma, my mother's mother, used to have on her Thanksgiving table as a centerpiece every year. For years we made fun of the thing all we sophisticated children and grandchildren, scoffing at the dated and localized tastes of an old mountain woman. We teased her and she let us, laughing both with us and ultimately at us, when she one day, in her early 80's, put us all in our places.
It was in the kitchen, of course, filled with all the women, as it always was. My aunt L. was teasing her about her "tacky flowers" when Mama J. looked over at all of us and said, "Don't you recognize that??" When no one had anything to say, she continued, "I suppose I should be glad that none of you children even know what that is." She walked across the kitchen and took the truly ugly thing out of my aunt's hands and turned it over, showing us the wooden piece under the truly hideous explosion of plastic gladiolas. "Its the treadle step from the loom I used to work at the mill". The son of a friend of hers had gotten a hold of an old loom and had made trinkets out of it.
"Well, I'll be damned...", I remember my mother saying, shaking her head and lifting her eyebrows at me. I knew that look, it was the one that says, and we, the young, think we're so smart. My grandmother began working in the textile mills of Rutherford County NC in 1920 at the age of 10. She worked on a loom from the time she was married at age 16 (being married made her an adult and it meant, along with turning her pay packet over to her husband instead of her father, that she could also work the loom) until she retired from the mills at age 68.
For all the magic and mystery and dust and ghosts in my kitchen archive cabinet, that ugly centerpiece isn't there. This year of all years, I'd be honored to have it amid my Thanksgiving themed array.
Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.
Happy Thanksgiving