Hunting and Gathering

Weekends are gold. 

Absolute gold.

When the drudgery and monotony and exhaustion of the week thwarts me over and over, I dream about all the things that the weekend will hold. Once upon a time, sleeping in was on this list, but, you know, there's a Murray that has changed that somewhat! It's hard to get up when my body desperately wants to sleep until 9 or 10 am, but once I get going, and my body is upright, I can begin to appreciate the day and its possibilities. (Except when it's dark out and snowing and icy and Murray gets salt in his paws and tries to eat all the dogs and babies that he sees on his walk. Then there are truly zero possibilities.)

In the summer, weekend mornings mean flip flops, watering the garden, the farmers markets, and getting out to the beach before the temperature reaches 100 degrees. In the winter, weekend mornings are all about catching up on episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from the week and staring out the window, angrily questioning the weather conditions with a cross tone of voice. But all weekend mornings, no matter what day of the year it is, are about cooking and experimenting in the kitchen. Before the actual food prep can occur, though, you will always find me hunting and gathering. 

Here's how it works. I settle myself at the kitchen table with all my assembled pieces: recipe box, recipe binder, cookbooks, notecards, sticky notes, and pens. And then I begin. Peace wooshes through me as I work, preparing all my food ideas for the week. My cooking goals and ideas go onto a notecard, which is taped to the cabinet. I sort through the ridiculous endlessness of my recipe box and recipe binder, pulling out the things that sound good, and adding ingredients to my grocery list. I pour through the cookbooks that I'm into lately, and mark the pages I need. A sticky note goes onto the cover with a list of the recipes I've marked on the inside, and I do a second ingredient sweep to make sure my grocery list is complete. I record other food notes from the week in notebooks -- what was good, what was bad, and what did and didn't work. When I'm done, I finally feel like everything okay and the week is now allowed to begin (if it insists, which it usually does). Glory.

All this hunting and gathering is something I've been doing on weekend mornings for as long as I've had my own kitchen to cook in. It's good because it helps me feel organized and prepared, but it's important for another reason altogether. There's a legacy, you see, and I've got to keep it up. 

As soon as I could read, I became fascinated with cookbooks. The cookbooks in my life were on my mother's, grandmother's, and great-grandmother's shelves, and I was intensely, passionately drawn to them. I loved the text and the pictures and the ideas, but mainly I loved the notes. My great-grandmother would write in the margins and turn down the page corners, with her loopy, antiquated cursive filling every bit of empty space. My grandmother used notecards and sticky notes, with the page numbers always meticulously added and notes about how the finished product turned out. My mother tends not to write in her cookbooks, but she is quite partial to the sticky note on covers of magazines and cookbooks, and she keeps a binder of magazine-page recipes, sticky notes stuck to the plastic pages too, and many other paper notes tucked in. The process of hunting and gathering is in my blood, you see. And I'm so proud.

I learned all of these techniques not by being instructed, but because there was, to me, no other way. With my first cookbooks, like Strawberry Shortcake's Cooking Fun, I didn't write in them, but I would make the recipes and then record my learnings and experiences in my journal, noting what worked and what didn't. I'd add notes to the covers, though, and make lists of the things I wanted to try. Once I had adult cookbooks, they became my epic tomes, crammed with notes, messages, papers, ideas, and polaroids of the cakes and breads I'd made. My memory is such that I have absolutely no recollection of anything unless I write it down, so it's important that I make obscenely detailed notes that I cram into all the empty spaces. 

When my grandmother had to move out of her apartment and join my grandfather in the nursing home where they both proceeded to live their last impossible days, my parents spent months sorting their things into donation, garbage, and storage piles. I joined them for a weekend, and my mom and I cleaned out the kitchen, which had always been my grandmother's stomping ground, her sanctuary. Although she cooked less and less as she got older, I know that food and cooking were vital and important to her until the day she left the earth. Talking about food would always make her eyes light up, and I remember her always asking me, Don't you just love food? Isn't it just the best thing in the world?

As we analyzed piles of pots and pans and dishes and utensils, I thought of the incredibly exhausting job someone will have emptying out my kitchen one day. (I returned home and attempted to purge. I ended up getting rid of one -- yes, a mere one -- pan. I am impossible.) My mom and I saved what we needed from my grandma's kitchen and reluctantly boxed up the things that we decided we could live without. We sat on the carpeted dining room floor near the table and sifted through her cookbook collection. The book collection itself was too vast to keep, but I reserved everything with her writing on it. These were the precious things, this was the true meaning of her life.

Without notes, without writing, the cookbooks were just thrift-shop donation material, but once her pen graced the pages, the books became prized artifacts. I captured the slanting script and the pasted-in newspaper clippings like they were golden coins, and it felt like her whole life was in my hands. I don't actually remember seeing my grandma record all these notes, but I like to think that she spent weekend mornings hunting and gathering, just like I do. I know that cooking was the main thing that propelled her, the force that created her and made her feel like she was at home. She cooked lunches and dinners for my grandfather for decades, feeding him all her masterpieces and her disasters, just like my mom does for my dad, and just like I do for Andy. The food we make is the way we love and have loved, and patient, eager eating partners who join us at the table every day are the reason we get out of bed in the morning. It's everything.

Remembering my grandmother through her recipes and cookbooks was inspiring and beautiful, but the hard part came later, when it hit me -- supremely, horribly hard -- that her cooking days were over. Her transition into the nursing home was crucial, because she couldn't possibly live on her own anymore, and as we cleaned out the apartment, we felt thankful that we were doing it while she was still alive. It was like only having to eat one slice of the sadness, we opined. But as I thought about it more, it rocked my brain to think that she had become so trapped from herself. The nursing home was the right choice for both of my grandparents, but it sucked all of their independence away, all of the things and activities that they had spent their lives loving. For my grandma, her cooking wings had been clipped, and this felt, to me, like the worst kind of death sentence. 

Once she was in the nursing home, I never spoke to my grandma about cooking. It was too hard. It made me ache to think about. I thought about telling her in letters about the things I'd been cooking and the recipes I'd been collecting, but it felt like the meanest thing I could say to her. When I visited her, I wanted to talk about food and cooking, but I pictured myself in her shoes, and thought I couldn't possibly stand to hear someone talk about cooking while I was trapped in a kitchen-less hell. I wanted to save her and I couldn't. None of us could.

When I sit down to hunt and gather, I pour my coffee and I organize my pens and then I stop, always, to think about my grandma and her culinary legacy and the ways that she guided me. She was a chef of her own making, and the star of her own kitchen. This was her purpose. Her days, like mine, were propelled by menu plans. As a girl, I'd spend days at her house sometimes, and before we had finished lunch at her round kitchen table, we had started talking about what was for dinner. This, I think, is what happens when a passion guides you. It's not work, it never feels like a job, it just happens. You start planning your dinner during lunch because there's nothing that you'd rather do more. It's like breathing, but perhaps a bit more vital.

I'm not sure what we can do. I'm not sure how to make everything feel okay, or if we ever can. Losing people we love is hard and horrible no matter how sudden or slow the loss is, but when we watch them lose the ability to do the things they love, that is when the true tragedy and pain are unearthed. We've all watched someone lose the ability to do something that once came naturally to them, and I think that when we fear aging, it's perhaps primarily because we're terrified of losing the abilities that are most important to us. 

My grandmother and grandfather both spent many painful and sad months in the nursing home. My grandma survived on the hope that came when she dreamed of her kitchen and her cookbooks and the food that she loved -- I'm certain of it. And my grandfather spent his nursing home years dreaming of his workshop, his tools, mowing his lawn, and grilling burgers for the family that he loved so madly. 

When these thoughts plague my heart, I do the only thing I can do to get through it. I fire up the stove. I slice, I dice, I mix, I stir. I sit down at my red table and I pick out a pen. I turn through the pages, I write, I plan, I cook. I call my mom and talk about what's for dinner, and I record everything I cook and everything I eat. I do everything I can to keep my head remembering, my heart happy, and the hunting-and-gathering legacy alive.