There is a 500 ml container of veggie chili in my freezer. The taped label is written in perfect school teacher printing and the chili has raisins in it.
The first meal my mother cooked in my new house was steak broiled in the oven. I am a vegetarian and have been for twenty years. I don’t cook meat except for Canadian Thanksgiving turkey.
We moved into the house when Milo was three weeks old and my parents came to help.
My mother drank the coffee I made for myself and cooked meat to fill my new dwelling with an unfamiliar aroma.
Then she found out she was sick. Maybe less than a year later. They came for a visit again and she made food that I could eat and bought spices and a new spoon and told stories of her youth.
I’ll never eat that chili. I’ll just move it around the shelves of the freezer that gets my attention when everything else feels chaotic.
I only want to remember making my mother rhubarb and watching her share it with Milo. I want to remember the raisin muffins and the strawberry jam. The afternoon we drove together to the market; and bought sweet potato chips and ate them all in the car.
When the marijuana medicine gave her the munchies and I was horrified she was just eating salt & vinegar chips and not something even remotely healthy, we laughed about what was killing her. "It’s not the chips" she’d smirk and grab another.
Food and mothers and death.
The first story I wrote two years ago was about cleaning out her fridge while she was still alive so I wouldn’t keep everything as an archive of her life. Her mustard collection, the honeys, the special something from Italy, never opened.
When I want to taste the sweetness of my mother I make a tomato sandwich, with mayonnaise, and a side of pickles. I can taste every phase of my life with her through that combination. Her sweetness stays with me, it says I love you with every bite and then the sandwich is gone. I wash away the crumbs, I put the plate back on the shelf and I continue on.
I put honey in Milo’s sandwiches and imagine his smile at school when we are not together.
Inspired by "Cold Solace" by, Anna Belle Kaufman