Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

When I was a little kid, my mother would say a little rhyme as we returned to whichever house we were renting at the time (in the Navy, most houses are rented ones, as your family will be reassigned in a year or two). As we turned into the street, she would recite, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety jig!"

We are home again, home again from a quick trip to the East coast to help clear out My Beloved's mother's attic and make the painful decisions about which sibling gets which precious item. It's an emotional process in which one tries to balance the needs of beloved others against one's own need to retain some precious objects and associated memories. Monetary values are less important at times like this, and yet in all fairness things need to be balanced that way, too. It's a delicate process.

The house looks beautiful; it has been prepared for sale and the stagers did a fine job. It looks like something right out of Architectural Digest or Coastal Living and everyone ooohs and aaahs over it. But it isn't the same house that has served as home base for the family for all those years.

Sally and her husband, Bob, bought it for a song when he retired in the early 1970s, long before their town became fashionable and the likes of Willard Scott and Jacques Pepin moved there. It was always comfortably "lived-in" and no one worried too much about spills or stacks of newspapers and sailing magazines. It was nice to be able to retrieve that article or back issue easily because it was still on the seat of the extra dining room chair. The back door was never locked and no one ever used the front door. Nothing matched, some upholstery was shabby and yet it all made a harmonious and restful whole, casual and comfortable with a view of Long Island Sound that encouraged one to simply stand and soak it in.

In some ways, it's easier to leave this beautiful designer house than it would have been to say goodbye to our home base. We won't have the house but we will retain all the memories and stories. We'll each visit each others' homes and we'll build new memories in different places, but we will all look back wistfully to the years when we all called gatherings in that address, "coming home."

My Beloved and I flew in to Oakland over the still-green hills, drove to Petaluma to retrieve Cora and came home to pizza delivered to our door. We are glad to be home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Stove Envy

Cooking for a crowd of hungry mourners is a pleasure when you have equipment like this. Not only do you get to offer a kind of solid comfort to people you love, you also get to play around on a cook's dream.

Two huge ovens, six burners, a broiler, a grill and two warming lights. Heaven! It's my Belle-Mere's gas-fired Magic Chef, a beast so large that the kitchen was actually built around it by the previous owners, Texas millionnaires who apparently employed a professional cook - it would never have fit through the door.

You use matches from a big box of wooden ones to light it, a faintly exciting event with a delicious hint of danger about it. The puff of blue flame always slightly startles.

I have always coveted it and enjoyed concocting family food on it, but it really came into its own after the memorial service for my Belle-Mere when it was heating easily in a single oven a huge pan of lasagna, an equally impressive pan of mac and cheese and a medium-sized ham. We didn't even bother lighting the second oven!

My Belle-Mere was always a casual cook who bought impressive cuts of meat as the centerpiece of any meal she made and added a couple of veggies to round it out. She moved around her kitchen with a calm, unhurried air and the food always emerged perfectly cooked and served at the same time without apparent effort, on plates warmed under one of the warming lights. I think the Magic Chef was part of her recipe for culinary success but her own natural calm was the other ingredient. I have never seen her flustered, either in the kitchen, on her boat, or anywhere else. She had a marvelous personal peacefulness that one would call dignity in a stuffier woman, but her spark of humor and self deprecation rescued her from stuffiness.

Maybe hers was just an old soul, one of those that had recycled through the ages enough times that it had smoothed off its rough edges. Whatever the reason, I admit not only to stove envy but also to calm envy.

Reminders of My Belle-Mere

My blog friend, Katie from Thyme for Cooking, reminded me that the French word for "mother in law" is "belle-mere," which translates as "beautiful mother." Much, much more appropriate than the stern English term for My Beloved's mother! She was truly a beautiful woman, inside and out.

My niece, Ann-Marie, reminded me that the cocktail party in heaven just got better. Nice to think that she was welcomed there with open arms and cries of delight, given a martini (her doctor didn't allow alcoholic drinks here on Earth for the past several years) and sat down for a catch-up with some of her favorite folks.

This photograph reminded me of happier times spent with her. We took this picture on her 90th birthday, three years ago. She had to be sprung from the health center for the party and her doctor would have grumbled at that chocolate bombe that you see before her, but she relished having her children and grandchildren with her to celebrate - and she relished that cake, too!

I would need a book, rather than a short blog post, to begin to tell you what a wonderful woman she was, so I won't try. Suffice it to say that she will be missed by virtually everyone who ever knew her and that she leaves for me a daily reminder of how to live life well and fully.

Passing

Time passes. Life passes. If you're not careful, life passes you by. But, that can't be said of My Beloved's mother. She has had a fine life, all 93 years of it. She worked her way through Sarah Lawrence College, met and married the love of her life while doing what they both loved best, sailing, and raised three great kids.

She has four grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, and a whole lot of related and unrelated people who think of her as a favorite aunt. She has been a mainstay of her church and her local Meals-on-Wheels program, always giving back to her community whether it be as scout den mother or volunteer at her college.

She is leaving us. We got the call while here in Hawaii on vacation and we are flying back to the east coast as soon as we can get there (why are airlines so damned unhelpful at times like this?), but we probably won't be in time to say goodbye. We'll have to be content with the time we had with her a couple of weeks ago. Those memories and a long lifetime of stories and remembrances will have to sustain us once she is gone. We are thankful we had that time.