Born in 1915, my grandmother Christine married my grandfather in her early teens. She tended the farm, two gardens, and livestock while also raising two sons and five daughters. When she wasn’t toiling her piece of land, she labored as a domestic, cooking for both her own large family and the families of her employers. She worked almost until the day she died in 1994, and I still conjure her wielding a stirring spoon and butcher knife, not just simply providing sustenance but something more. In the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen, spirits shimmered near the bucket of well water, hovered over the olive refrigerator, floated above the flour sifter, and glided around the coal-burning stove. The dead danced, both protecting and cajoling. My grandmother told me of the haints she’d seen and the ones she remembered. She told these stories at suppertime while we were cooking. She lofted her mother’s apple cakes to myth. I imagined food that tasted so good that it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. My grandmother told me that women were expected to maintain the lineage, to strive to make dishes that rivaled their mothers’. She held long-necked yellow squash as gently as babies. Her own desires to be a schoolteacher, to travel the states, were doused in favor of making her parents happy and marrying young. When she walked gingerly carrying a large pot, when she hefted a ham during hog-killing time, when she placed her hand over her mouth and laughed, she looked like a child in a grown woman’s body even when she was old. Sometimes my grandmother grew sullen and a scowl came over her face while we cooked, but when she looked into the corners of the kitchen, up toward the ceiling, her face fell into soft satisfaction before she took up the knife to scrape a corn cob clean or to grind cabbage for slaw.
These days I often wonder how many of our stories are true, how many are imagination or misplaced longing, but I refuse to believe that my grandmothers were just ordinary women who lived, then died, forever lost to me. Somehow we are all still connected through both the toil and pleasure of kitchen labor. I’m closer to them when I cook. I become them when I cook.