Christina, 1976 (?)
My grandpa Jim built this kitchen for my grandma Christina. He must have given her free reign to design it, because it talks to me about her when I am cooking. Or maybe it is because I knew it so intimately while it was hers. But I do know that her mind worked a lot like mine. I remind myself of her more and more as I get older. Maybe it's our short stature, our hazel eyes- hers had more green and brown, darker than my light bluish ones, but with the same unusual dark gray circle around the outside of the iris- or our wild curls that sprout from our heads and spring out in chaos at the slightest hint of humidity. I inherited a lot from her. When I am listening intently to someone talking, I find my eyes crinkling up at the corners. It used to bug me, the way her smile didn't always reach her mouth. And the things I do, things that come from nowhere and drive my husband nuts. I remember riding in the car with her one time when the air conditioner was on the blink. She had discovered that violently slamming on the brakes made it come back on briefly. So all the way to the field, every few miles, we lurched forward in our seats as she slammed on the brakes, then our heads flew back into the headrest as she accelerated to make up for lost time, cool air coming from the vents again. Grandpa was a bit put out when she did it on the way back from the field with him in the passenger's seat. I don't recall that his gruff explanation that not only was this hard on the brakes, it could cause a loss of control gave her much pause. A woman with hot flashes needs her AC. I see that same ebullient disregard for logic in myself. The same bubble of joy bursts in my head over a particularly crafty culinary creation, an especially genius solution to a problem, or an opportunity to tell a story of random stupidity at the cost of my own dignity.
Grandma was forty when I was born. Young enough to be my mom. And she helped raise me. I think I must have spent a lot more time in her kitchen with her than I know, because of all of the memories I have of her there. Breaddy bears, bears made from the last bit of dough leftover from making pinch buns. Raisins for eyes. Bellies that puffed out in the oven and made me giggle and poke them. Cinnamon rolls in long logs, cut into slices with a length of thread.
And there were always people around. I was just the kid hanging on someone's skirt as they spun from fridge to sink to stove, stepping on my toes and apologizing when I squealed but refused to leave the kitchen. Pizza nights, jars and jars of homemade tomato sauce and piles of browned hamburger from a cow who had broken a leg in Grandpa's feedlot, twenty or more people, too many for the table, sitting in folding chairs in a circle in the living room. Running out of pizza, piles of empty pizza pans stacking up. Holiday dinners and sunday dinners and workday dinners, a house that perpetually smelled of cow poop and food.
She was broad by the time I knew her. That's really the only term for it. I never thought of her as overweight, although nowadays I might. Her shoulders were sloped but wide. Her hips were wide, and looked wider than they were because she was short. Her hands were broad, with short fingers. Her face was broad, her nose strong. She was a pillowey place for a kid to fall asleep, hearing her voice read stories with my ear resting on her chest.
In the pantry, a chilly room in the basement designated for her homemade canned goods, was a jar of pickles she made me promise never to open, and especially never to eat. She had not canned it. My great great great grandmother had.
Only the women in my family would consider five cucumbers a six-generation family heirloom. I looked at the unnaturally dark pickles floating in a murky viscuous brine, and solemnly promised as she wiped the dust from the jar and slid it far back on a shelf where it would never get broken, or worse, eaten.
Food was the theme of her life. At seventeen, she married a farmer and cattleman seven years her senior, was pregnant a few months later, and had four kids and a miscarriage in the next five years before she went on the Pill. She stayed on the Pill for eleven years, went off, and promptly found herself pregnant again. Which meant that her kitchen fed five hungry boys, most of whom measured over six feet tall at adulthood. Her only daughter married a man who equated food with love, and had me, her granddaughter, completing a trio of women with an intimate relationship with cooking.
For the women in my family, a bubbling pot provides the background music to all the big events. We grew up in kitchens, both as children and teenageers and as young brides. We remember the times our food tasted like tears and cardboard, and the times it fed our souls and the souls around our tables. We converse in pie. Bread forms itself into shapes as the essence of who we are seeps through our fingertips and into the dough. We bleed gravy. We weep sauce. Food is kind or it is malevolent, and it is naturally the mood of our food that day that determines this, not atmospheric conditions or our inattentiveness allowing a yolk to break into our egg white merengue or scalding the cream gravy. Some food is just determined to break us, and some is willing to let us win, while other food bends to our will, puffing up beautifully, turning golden brown, tasting of spices and love.
Grandma was the local authority on food. If it was a Christina Koehn creation, it was golden at bakesales and charity events and church functions and holiday dinners. Her food was rarely a strictly family affair- very few family meals eaten around her long dining room table included only biological family. Few people grow up so strongly aware of the food/community relationship as I did. She cooked at a local school, briefly, after her kids were old enough to live without her for lunch. Kids who were students then are now adults, and remember her fondly. She ran a diner in Leoti for a year before the stress of caring for her family in addition to an entire village shut it down.
I walk into a store, the bank, a restaurant, and I say I just moved back to Western Kansas. People raise their eyebrows. Who do I belong to? Do they know my parents? Kevin and Sandi. Maybe this means something to those under 65, since my mom managed the local Dairy King drive-up for several years, passing conversation, fried food and ice cream through the window where most of Leoti's comfort food comes from. Dairy King has been there, largely unchanged, as the vehicles parked under it's canopy have changed with the times from heavy, dirty farm pickups to...well, heavy, dirty farm pickups that are 30 years newer. But if I get a blank look, I say that Jim and Chris were my grandparents, and eyes light up, and I am usually regaled with a story of cooking. Or just eyes rolling back at the memory of cooking. "Oh, Chris. I remember her (pies. Cinnamon rolls. Bierocks. Gingerbread houses. Fried chicken. Peppernuts.) This one time..." and I am captive until the story ends, a story that tells me how the community saw her.
Obviously, we live in different decades. I grew up corn fed with a permanent milk mustache, freshly slaughtered beef on a daily basis, beef that had grown fat on synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and a "hot" ration of corn. Pie had fruit, therefore was wholesome. Lettuce was rabbit food, and not considered daily sustenance unless dieting. Fried chicken and ham and potatoes and roast beef and enchiladas smothered in Velveeta cheese, sweet corn drenched in melted margerine, a slice of bread as white and fluffy as snow on Christmas eve, that was the food of my childhood. My mother harbored, even back then, a slight distrust of the agencies regulating food and pronouncing it safe, so while her peer's children had bottles filled with Pepsi (not kidding!) my bottle was filled with cow's milk. When I got older and we ate out, I ordered milk with my pizza. I never learned to like soda. It's fizz made my eyes water and stung my sinuses and throat, and it left a bitter flavor in my mouth after the sugar had found it's way into my bloodstream. She did what she knew to do. There was refined carbs and low fat. The latest diet fads. Both mother and grandmother constantly tried to stay abreast of latest research. Grandma went to Weight Watcher's as the effects of five pregnancies did not melt away as babies turned to toddlers.
From Grandma's kitchen came love, joy, singing, creativity, obesity, heart disease and stomach cancer. From my mom's kitchen came love, longsuffering, gentleness, breast cancer. They knew cooking, and the things they knew, they poured their souls into. Their families ate decadently, nourished in body and spirit, and the things they couldn't know, given that the research was years in the future, they both paid for dearly.
Susan, I love that post. I mean how could I not? Its about food... But more than that, it too is food for the soul...
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