After discovering a few documents written by our ancestors, Auntie C and I came up with the idea for a new series of posts called "In Their Own Words." These posts will include letters, poems, and stories written by the dead as well as the living. Please contact either of us if you would like to contribute.
This inaugural story was written by Uncle J.
She's dead. That should be the end of the story
right there. Its a contract we all sign at birth, a duty to be fulfilled.
But no one dies until the memory slips from our collective conscience.
Bits and pieces remain. Adopted quotes, mannerisms and rituals. Genetic
tags are left showing in the smiles, hair and gait of those left to
endure. Then there are scraps of personal possessions scattered to decay
in their own sweet time.
I pick up the red covered notebook of recipes and
thumb through them. Most are written in Janet's own hand, others cut
from magazines or the backs of packages of grain and flour. For over
30 years I experienced these pages in my mouth or watched them spring
from her hands. Now I can only digest them visually or recall the running
commentary in her voice.
Recognizing a 3X5 card, with my mother's impatience
all over it, titled, Gramma Love's Walnut-Date Cake, I pause. Condensed
into 15 square inches, I find this great effort by three generations
of unrelated women to remember. They conspire to the notion that this
is the way you hook a Love.
Janet read the recipe silently, placing herself
in rural southern Missouri, during the Great Depression. "These
would have been Black Walnuts," She declares, "English Walnuts
wouldn't be affordable if they were available at all."
She reads on, "the order you mix the ingredients
isn't how they teach now. I bet your sister didn't follow the directions
this way…she said it wasn't all that great. You have to follow the
directions exactly the way it says." Then Janet looks over her
glasses, "I think the soda reacts with the dates, otherwise there's
not enough leavening here."
I can envision Gramma Love serving this cake up
on a visit back home and my father commenting on how good her cooking
was. My mother, thinking mechanically, that taste is about what you
physically put into something, asked for the recipe. Gramma dutifully
passed the recipe on but I'm sure she was wise to the art and
realities of baking. In 18 years, I never recall my mother making this
cake, Black Walnuts or no. Along enters Janet, a daughter of the south
and keeper of memories. She instinctively understood how this recipe
would make the perfect cake of necessity. Something her own ancestors
would grow up on.
My mother is losing the memory of those days, so
for her, Gramma Love has died indeed. Janet has passed too, yet lives
for both of them in the creation of this tradition. As I passed the
recipe off to my niece, April, the memory comes full circle, back to
Loves. I have been left to make it myself several times over the past
3 years. Thanksgiving was our favorite occasion for this celebration
of our ancestors. A seder of traditional foods honoring our connection
in spite of time and demise.
I am hearing it now, "follow the instructions
as they're written, don't mix it too much, pour the boiling water over
the soda and chopped dates." I proceed, "oven set at 350,
bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until a broom straw can be stuck in and
come out clean." And if it wasn't for one of the last things I
would ever hear in her voice, to "bring the black walnuts,"
I guess I could let Janet die too.
Note: bake in an 8 or 9" square pan.
