Cooking, A Tribute

I don't quite know what to do with myself these days. I am cooking a lot.

This weekend I have already made sausage tortellini soup, waffles from scratch, taco-skillet pie, grilled chicken with baked southwestern squash, carrot-raisin salad with cumin vinaigrette; tomorrow I will bake a ham, and plan the order of things for the week: curried lentils with butternut squash, spinach risotto, tofu and green beans with peanuts, glazed salmon with avocodo-jicama salad, and countless other meals. The refrigerator is stocked to overflowing.

Dave's Mom's freezer is always filled with old yogurt cartons re-purposed for food storage, neatly labeled with the item and date: fresh blueberries, italian beef, stewed asparagus. She can scallop anything: corn, tomatoes, potatoes with ham. Whenever Dave goes home, she makes lemon sugar cookies; for younger brother Derek, they're molasses. She brings me my favorite biscotti whenever we see each other, and mails it on special occasions. Every meal ends with dessert: rum cake, homemade ice cream, cherry cobbler. (Needless to say, Barb gave Dave his metabolism; the two are built just a like.) When we returned home from Thanksgiving in Morrison, I found in the mail a set of recipe cards with a half-dozen of my favorites from her repertoire; I have adopted them whole-heartedly, with thanks.

Right now, Barb is in the hospital, recovering from major surgery to remove a malignant tumor. The tumor, discovered during a massage- a rare moment of treating herself- was the size of a grapefruit. The Doctors believe they know where the cancer came from; they believe they got it all. We believe she will be just fine. Today, Barb is moving around her hospital room in Iowa, dialing down the pain medication and, I imagine, steeling herself for recovery.

There is an overwhelming sense of impotence when your husband's mother is ill, and you are more than 2,000 miles away. I've seen Barb spend so much time planning for, preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals for her family, I wonder what it will be like while she is unable to do so; when, in fact, she will need help. This planning, preparing, serving, and cleaning up after is the familiar shape of my recent days, and I wish I could be doing it for her. Instead, I do it for my little family, feeding them to the brink of our refrigerator, right up to the edges of comfort and safety, but I think I am cooking for her.

One thing that Dave was able to do from this distance was to set up a Netflix account for her, and to make the first few selections. She has enjoyed the first seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development, as well as the movie Little Miss Sunshine. It is impossible to imagine Barb sitting still for the length of time necessary to accomplish that much watching, but I try, because I believe it's good for her. She said to David tonight that she wonders when she lost the time to watch movies- that it is something she always loved doing.

Maybe, if I find a way to satisfy whatever urge I have to help Barb, even so far away; maybe, when we know she is safe and healthy, I, too, will reevaluate. Because I confront the desire every day to do everything for the family I love; to follow, in that way, in the footsteps of my own mother and my mother-in-law, but I'd like to learn from them not to lose myself in the effort.

Someday soon, I'll order in, and go out to do something fun, just for myself. Okay, not just for myself, but also for Barb. Better yet, we'll go again to get our nails done together.

Sometimes it takes the greatest strength to put yourself first.