Her kitchen

This was her kitchen.

She was a traditional cook. She left the house around 10:00 a.m. every morning with a wicker basket to do her round. She walked a half mile to the butcher shop and backtracked home: cheese shop, bakery, vegetable stall.

She only bought enough for a day and just enough for each meal.

You couldn't drop by announced and expect her to feed you, except for eggs perhaps and potatoes. She ordered a half-ton of potatoes dumped into the cellar every winter. When I was very small, she also ordered a half-ton of coal for the stove. Later, she switched to gas.

She cooked three meals a day every day. On Sunday mornings my grandfather would come down first and make the coffee. On mother's day he'd treat her to a restaurant where she judged the food was never as good as the one she made. She cooked traditional northern French food: stews, boiled cod, sausage and peas, heart with spinach, kidneys in tomato sauce, tongue, soles with shrimp, and potatoes, always lots of potatoes, boiled, fried, sauteed, pureed but never baked (something about the Germans and the war...) She couldn't imagine life without potatoes. She didn't like rice, found pasta suspicious.

On special Sundays, she'd make puffed potatoes from balls of puree she'd fry in a large pot of grease. The puffs came out crispy and golden and burned our mouths on the first bite. She told us to slow down. We never did.

Never forever

It had never occurred to me that Margo would die. Not for real. Pretty silly thing to say for a someone in her mid-forties. Sure I knew that everyone died. Just not Margo (or me, or my children for that matter).

She'd been there since my birth. Why wouldn't she be there forever?

I last kissed her as she was lying in a coma at the Dunkirk hospital, two weeks before she died. One kiss on the forehead and a "goodbye", as if we were meant to meet again. And we did, sort of. I flew back for the funeral, saw her one last time at the viewing. She didn't quite look like herself: her fingers were strangely flat, her hair brushed the wrong way, her cheeks were cold and hard, her jewelry gone.

I couldn't eat much for weeks afterwards: oranges and soup, soup and oranges, and then more oranges. I called it "the funeral diet". It took me a whole year to cry. A year! There seemed to be no end to the pain.

But it's been almost three years since she's died and I am no longer crying. Years ago, I met a woman at work who'd lost her five-year old son to leukemia. "You cry until you get yourself sick with grief," she had said. "And then one day, someone says something funny and you start laughing. And believe me, that part is even stranger than all the crying. How can we be wired to get over the loss of the people we love? Just like that? When my son died, I thought I would cry forever. It doesn't work that way."

So Margo didn't last forever and neither did my grief for her. I wish I could say I feel her by my side at all times, but I don't. I conjure memories of her, and talk about her to whoever will listen, and I write this blog. Bust she has stopped visiting my dreams. Sometimes I'm afraid I will never cry for her again.

Would she forgive me for that?