Kitchen Tears

Yes, Virginia, there actually are families like this, where everything is calm and orderly; where organization, scheduling, and structure form the basis of life.  Not in my family, of course, I hasten to add, although I used to fantasize about having a family something like this. When I was eight or nine, a friend of mine told me about her family, the Billings, several houses down, who went to church together every Sunday morning and then had pancakes for breakfast.  It sounded like heaven - both the regularity of the family ritual, and the pancakes.  I was unable to convince my mother of the desirability of either church (even a synagogue would have done . . . ) or pancakes.

Kitchen tears - the title makes me think of all the painful tears I have shed, chopping particularly virulent onions, but that isn't what prompted this post.  I just decided to tackle packing up almost all of the two dozen or less cookbooks that have remained out because of the memories, and in a few instances, recipes, they contain.  But I am putting it off an hour or so, because when I reached up to take a handful down, I was assailed by such nostalgia, and such a sense of longing for the past, that I felt on the edge of tears.
There was a strawberry-patterned binder with hand-written recipes, mine, and those of the woman who gave me this home-made cookbook for my wedding to Nosson.  There were the baking books I used to make fancy cakes, tortes, strudels, and pies for Friday night dessert, when we would have people over after the Shabbes dinner, or for Saturday night, for the party held in honor of the departing Sabbath Queen, called Melave Malka.

There, too, were sturdy books I had used again and again making ordinary dinners: mushrooms stroganoff, chicken stuffed under the skin, cornbread-topped pseudo-Mexican casserole.

If I could be magically transported back to that time, I would go enriched with the knowledge that  on one level, there are no ordinary dinners - that every moment of felicity shared with someone you love should be recognized as the temporary gift that it is.

I suppose to put these books away means putting away those dreams of the good times, and also of what might have been.  It means accepting the present and its obligations.  Acknowledging that makes it easier to pack up, because those long-ago times will always be with me, books or no books, accompanied, sadly, by regret. The books, despite my reverence for what some objects can do, are actually not magic . . .

For now, I will give myself a little time to mourn what is lost in the past, and then get back to the job of living in the present and looking to the future.