Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Even the things that I have no answers for have made me who I am and who I am becoming and I like that notion.


WOMEN IN THE KITCHEN

My youth is buried in ground frozen too hard to set a stone marker.

While my four brothers discovered the precise art of stick ball – the key to whacking the ball as far as the Moreno’s, five houses down – I cut linguica. Short, fat sausage pieces, raw and stuffed with garlic and spices that gave me belly-aches in the morning.

I learned my lessons from scratch. Measuring the days into tin cups, spilling them out again into blue and beige crockery bowls. Milk, water and sweet butter seeped into the flour and I felt dizzy from staring at the thick, pasty rivers, traveling nowhere but around the walls of a kitchen. My head hurt from he oven heat and smell of the round, egg-crusted loaves steaming on the counter.

My mother and my father’s mother were born kneading, fingers caked with white, punching the dough on cue. Rolling out, folding over, never slipping beyond the edge of a bread board. Never take your eyes off the center of the board, they advised me. My brothers moved past street games to fast cars.

All my life I’ve meant something I don’t really know how to say.

--Catherine Fraga