My Grandma to your Grandma

Another one for my upcoming collection Rag Baloney

(with Apologies to Mike Quinn and Mary Carol Catanese)

You stand, a young girl and later a young grown up women,
at the elbow of your Italian grandmother, making pasta,
making meatballs and so many Italian desserts,
the smell of spices and sweet pie fillings flavor
the air of your northeastern big city home.

Aunts and uncles yelling and waving
their hands and laughing, your cousins
missing all the action playing in the snow.

I stand in the kitchen in rural Alabama,
my mother’s mother showing me how
to chop the celery and onions,
and crumble the cornbread,
how to add the bacon fat and broth
and huge scoops of rubbed sage
to the bowl almost big enough to swim in,

then carefully pour the hot celery and onion
mix into the bowl and stir it with my fingers
into the coldness of the other ingredients,
still burning but not too much.

She, at 70, retired from the burning of her fingers
and even as time went by she would sit and watch me,
without doing, just coaching.

Then as my mother would fill the pie crusts
with the amazing egg and sugar and godknowswhatelse
I would pick out perfect halves from the nuts
we picked up that morning and cracked a bit earlier,
laid out in perfect circles to top the pecan pies.

And then to Jackson, Mississippi where my father’s mother
put on bacon and percolating coffee and we ate
the bacon while we battered the nearly blacked fried okra,
and scraped the fried corn from the ears into the cast iron skillet,
with her, every once in a while saying okay get back,
and she opened the door and basted the turkey.

Dead since ’81 and 91’ they are as alive with me
in the kitchen as they were in 1967!

Grandmothers never die, they just sit
at the table and talk to me while I cook.