Tiles of smooth, faded linoleum, the woodpecker’s log full of toothpicks, massive white and black, porcelain and iron, fired by gas and tears, the stove squats dominant, brooding, a hulking spectre on lion’s feet, the burners popper to life by uncounted matches struck uncounted times, the plain cupboards laden with the charms of learning to cook during the Great Depression. Chrome, vinyl, and Arborite stand utilitarian under the window that looks out over the alley, the perfect place for little boys to watch the busy lumberyard from. The fridge is bright white, art deco, an Oldsmobile stood on end. Strong switches on the walls, heavy, round and brown, guard the lights from small hands. Cross-shaped silver handles flank the graceful spout over the white sink. A door at the back opens onto the long porch where we all ate perogies. The light is the weak light of February. The window is slick with the exhalations of the labouring pots. The alley’s activities are blurred. Paint is layered, year upon year, over the window frame, many painters having lost their hand, smearing the panes while trying to paint the wooden frame, like emotions run amok. The cactus, that foreigner dressed oddly, stands erect and silly in his little pebbled pot protected from the rain outside that he can’t need. I can smell the loaves of kuchen cooling on wax paper, laid over a plain linen towel on the plain wooden table that lives in the porch. Did that plain table once live in the prairie dustbowl kitchen too, where all these other mute children of history once lived? The woodpecker knows but he won’t say. The black porcelain cat, the mason jars, the broom only knuckles now, the thin aprons, they all know. She is beautiful as a child’s peaceful dreams. Nickel-grey hair pulled back into a practical bun, her peasant dress a monochrome of tiny flowers flowing loosely about her square shape. Her face is cracked with lines and channels that speak of love and security to me. She is humming a hymn, German humming— she talks to me in both languages. Her back is turned, she is at the stove. I see her now with my adult eyes, the incarnation of loving sacrifice spent on the hopeful golden plain of a breadbasket life I can never know. The rain jangles musically and thuds softy on the six imperfect window panes, six square eyes watching old Mr. Ginter limping under lumber loads that would buckle a younger man. The singular scent of butter frying mixes with her cooing and clucking while she creates a meal from little and memory from nothing, inked black and deep and powerful, then pressed into diamond by her children’s children’s children and the stacked plates of time. She is epic in the bone-spur labour that mercilessly bent her, the gaunt hobos who owe her a meal still after sixty years, they all think so. The land, vast and flat that first cradled her boot and felt the bite of her plough as she and her husband shook the empty, mournful prairie into a cold and stiff-jointed isolated first winter’s home; that land knows her titanic grip. But we were quicksilver, young and bent on play, her grip could not hold us long as we raced out, leaving her to watch from her living-room window, old and small, even then more memory than flesh, closer to heaven but fighting for the purchase of gravity so as to watch her beloved second seed at play just a little while longer.
