Today's newsletter was contributed by GFJ's own Samantha Spigos, who works behind the scenes to bring humanity to our customer service approach. Sam is also a mother, knitter, gardener, and morning person. A Midwesterner who now calls Vermont home, she is most often wearing pink.
MY GRANDMA - MY MOM'S MOM...
was the sort of home cook that could effortlessly pull together a home cooked meal for fifteen people, ages ranging from 2 years old to 80. In my adulthood I recognize that it was never effortless; rather, it was the truest expression of her love for the people who bore her, who she bore, and anyone in between who happened to stop by. Her cookbook is composed of scrap paper with conversions written in the margins to rival my high
school math notes. The conversions are but one of the myriad ways she knew how to adjust.
When she died, I inherited her cookbook and I bought her house. The thick plaster walls of her kitchen were literally imbued with the labor of her hands: I was never able to extricate the grease from the deepest wall grooves. All the better. I birthed two children in that house. I was joyful there. I was depressed there. I tipped the kettle over and into my mug thousands of times there. Did I hope the lights would flicker to let me know she was with me, the same way she felt that her brother - who tragically died within the house while resurrecting it from a condemned heap - did for her? In truth, yes. But that wasn’t her way. Instead, she says hello to me every time I bake brownies.
For the dozens of recipes and meticulous conversions laid bare in her cookbook, the food that most tethers me to her warm embrace is, perhaps comically, a store-bought box of brownies. More than the ease of baking something pre-made, and more than the scent of the brownies at minute twelve when they really start to fill the space with scent memory, it’s the action of spreading the thick, rich chocolate batter to touch each corner of a square metal tin (my Midwestern sensibility will always refer to brownie pans as “tins”) that feels most like Grandma Mariellen is with me. In spreading something simple, easy, and comforting into a brownie tin, I
experience the deep, complicated, jubilant emotions of loss and connection. Of making home a sensory experience for my own children, as matriarchs did for me.
There is joy in claiming what you grew up with, even when - as with a box of store bought brownies - it isn’t as homespun or cultured as today’s world would like us to insist upon. I claim it anyway, going so far as to deem it Very Good. I acknowledge that pre-made brownie packages do not extend further back than my grandmother. Still, the experience of conjuring her memory through baking them feels to me, viscerally, like a long lineage of ancestors saying Hello.
Whether it’s comfort and cookies that the holidays bring, or chaos and confusion, I invite all of us to cast our gaze inward (earthward, skyward, backward, forward) to examine how, and in what ways, our ancestors are still present.
In community,
Sam
photo by Samantha Spigos
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