Cooking Again

19th July 2011 Tuesday

I leave my father having lunch at the long dining table downstairs with all the other residents of his home. It smells like freshly cooked fish. I drive up the hill to my mother’s grave with two bunches of artificial sweet peas. They are pale mauves and pinks and they look fragile and papery so I stick them as far down as I can in the pinhole container in front of the oak cross. I hope they don’t blow away. They are already swivelling round in the breeze. I must remember to bring some scissors next time and trim the couch grass and determined buttercups straying over the edges of the concrete plinth.

At home I make myself a plate of raw veggies from the allotment - purple veined pak choi, carrots and broad beans which are a bit hard and some bitter lettuce leaves - a little gem which has gone to seed. I douse it with lemon oil - a sister gift and one which always reminds me of my nearly Italian niece - and add flakes of smoked tuna - a recent find which I’d eat every day if it didn’t cost £2 a tin. The pussy cat has taken a liking to it too.

As my husband is out all day I put the heating on - my father’s bed sheets, and ours too, draped all over the house would never get dry otherwise on this dark-cloud-threatening- rain afternoon. I begin the sorting of 400 photo prints taken over the last six months which I ordered yesterday and find quite a few of them are blurred.

Although I’m not hungry I start making supper - chop our first green stemmed onion, flat wide spinach leaves, smooth pebble potatoes, rock hard carrots, crush garlic and slice fresh ginger - making it up as I go along - not sure what it will turn into.

I realise why I’ve been feeling disconnected and unsettled the last few days - I haven’t been cooking. Being with vegetables brings me back to myself, roots me somehow and stops me thinking about things like my husband’s brain. And how all this trying to find solutions, trying to get better, is like when we were trying to get pregnant. All those years of trying and crying and no baby in the end. We wanted to make something then - now I want to prevent something.

Maybe it's better if I just keep chopping onions and trust that supper will emerge - a delicious surprise, bursting on our tongues.