I’m very sad today because my grandmother passed away. She did so peacefully and surrounded by loved ones. I think it is fair to say that she was better prepared than the rest of us. Some of my earliest memories are of my mothers (formidable) family sitting around her kitchen table for hours in the morning and in the evening, loudly sharing stories amidst an always surprising quantity and variety of food. It didn’t matter where you were in their house — upstairs, in the back porch, or out on the patio — it was clear that the center of warmth and activity in that house was her kitchen. Looking back I chuckle to think of how many of my memories of her relate to food. Eggs, bacon, potatoes, and grapefruit for breakfast; Roasts and salads for dinner (with my father and I always keeping a wary eye out for a wayward bit of unchopped ginger); candies around the holidays; Christmas morning flatbread pizza (without which it simply isn’t Christmas); jams, jellies, pies (oh the pies!); and her reliable recreations of almost every type of cuisine under the sun — she had a great appreciation for nearly every culture she came across on this earth and, in particular, their food. We had great traditions in her later years like picking out one of her hundreds of watercolor paintings to take home as a Christmas present for ourselves. Every year it became a special kind of race between cousins and siblings to be the first to get a post-it with their name on the one they wanted. In her later years, even as her eyes failed her, she didn’t stop painting. Instead, she started painting beautiful abstracts rich with color — her lifelong love of Turquoise and tie-dye spilling out onto canvas. I’m very sad today because my grandmother passed away. But I know the sadness is for me and not for her. She left us the same way she did most things, exactly as she intended.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 21:38:13 +0000
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