My grandmother's recipes came in the mail this week.
I held those papers like pages from some kind of Bible that doesn't care if I have sex before marriage but is deeply invested in my choice of tomato paste, tears streaming down my face in the passenger seat of my Honda until I felt insane.
I have spent years aching to know this woman, who gave me my face and my love for thyme and my urge to run away when I should maybe stay in place a while, the way that granddaughters are supposed to know their grandmothers.
Her smell. The dirt on her boots. The way she sounded singing Celine Dion on her lawn mower. Her laugh when the Sicilian aunts came from New York to help and feed and scold her, and her frustration when she got tired of the judgement and made them leave.
But this feels good.
Reading her instructions for Sicilian sauce and wine-braised sausages, and how to experience the waiting as part of the consuming, feels like reading her diary. Little tricks I never knew before feel like an inheritance.
I didn't get to hold her hand before she died, but I did get to tell her I wish I'd known her better. I can't ask her if her mama used the same tomato paste she likes, but I can add hard boiled eggs to my lasagna like she told me to without knowing she had.
I am stilled and happily drowned in gratitude for the bits I get to keep, and I forgive her for the parts her pain kept from all of us.
Wherever she is, and even if that's nowhere, I love her.













