The Farmer's Daughter

I was so excited when our mail carrier handed me a large envelope sent by my mother that I rushed into the back of our 19th Century Victorian house where God had hidden our kitchen.  The people from whom we purchased the home told us, as they handed over the keys, that we would get used to “eating over the sink” in what they called “the galley kitchen.”  As I had never spent any quality time in that kitchen, I had never really noticed that no matter where you stood, you were “over the sink.”  Just outside the kitchen was a dimly lit, perpetually cold room where we located our kitchen table.  My place at the table was clearly marked, the finish worn by my elbows over years of patiently waiting to be served my meals.  I sat at the table, elbows nestled in their familiar spots and, heart beating fast in anticipation of my return to the “big bed,” tore the envelope open like a boatload of Vikings raiding an English village. 

 Like her mother before her, my mother was an excellent cook.  Mom was a farm girl, and the apple of my Granddad’s eye.  She told me shortly before her death that she married my father on the rebound.  He was a “city slicker” who fell in love with her dimples.  My mother hoped her previous boyfriend would be so terribly jealous by the city slicker that he would beg her to return.  Instead, he became a successful ophthalmologist with a string of offices throughout the Northwest.  And the farm girl became the city slicker’s wife.

For years, I wondered whether my parents had lied to me about my birth date.  I even hired a private investigator to make sure my birth certificate was accurate.  I was certain I was the reason my parents married.  Turned out, it wasn’t me.  I happened about three years into their honeymoon.  It was her dimples, after all.  Then came World War II, and while my father ran a laundry that he built to hide his industrial-grade bootleg still on the island of Guam, my mother and I moved into her parents’ home in a small wheat-farming town settled by the Black Sea Germans. 

 My Granddad was a living legend in the small town of Odessa, Washington.  Wherever he went, I went.  His friends were my friends.  He called me “Kit.”  He was my best friend.  He was my only friend.  He made people laugh.  He knew things that nobody else in town seemed to know:  when it would rain, when and where the fish would be biting, which widow needed her house painted.  But, compared to my Grandmother, Granddad was as ordinary as dust on a dirt road.  My Grandmother made food that made farmhands cry, and my mother, the author of the recipes that were tucked safely inside the envelope on my kitchen table, had learned it all from her.  And now, it was my turn. 

 I disregarded the “$2.58 Postage Due” notice that our mail carrier had stuck on the face of the envelope, reached inside and pulled out a stack of paper---glossy and slick to the touch.  I found several articles torn from “Redbook,” “Better Housekeeping,” and “The Farm Journal.”  They all had to do with what men need to know about how women treat sex in ways that are different from how men treat sex and how to put the excitement back into the bedroom.  There was also a coupon for a dollar off on Ragu spaghetti sauce.  And a handwritten note:

Dear Gary,

 I don’t cook with recipes.  Your great aunt Maggie did, but that bastard son of hers threw them all away when she died.  Kate is a wonderful cook and her potato salad is as good as mine was on my best day.  I’m sure this is just a woman thing that she is going through right now.  Men just don’t understand. 

Love, Mom