Kitchen Talk


My grandmother whom I write of here, mother of my own mom, has been gone from us more than 30 years now,  mere months after she held our youngest newborn daughter. As I spend time now with my older granddaughters who are 7 and 9 years of age, in the kitchen or elsewhere, I remember spending time with my grandmother. In her kitchen, after she moved off the farm. Enjoy!





Kitchen Talk                                                                                                                                

While my grandmother and I made pancakes
she talked of home
starting with the sifting of flour into the bowl
continuing through the cracking of eggs
and measuring milk

Fast as her spoon stirred
all this talk of sisters and hijinks
like the ingredients had loosed her tongue

She was silent for awhile
as if she had let out one too many secrets
in her kitchen spiced with sausage and sauerkraut
and geraniums flowering in summer windows

Poured batter into sizzling oil
watched the bubbles rise
and the stories build
faster than her homemade bread

Flipped over cakes, perfectly browned
added them to the steaming heap
Grandpa ready with his fork
maple syrup and butter waiting

and the stories stop here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One Last Moonlight

Another owner of my mother's original home had built a new house, and the old one was going to be torn down. Before that happened, the owner contacted the family members who had lived there and invited them for one last look.  This is what I wrote after I'd learned of the last visit. It was about that house that I visited as a child, what I remembered, and what I thought might have happened in the mean time One last moonlight A vacant house          dim as moonlight’s glow      in its west windows bare of brocade and lace once a proud house shelter from the heat and cold rain and snow hosting games of hide and seek laughter and song Sunday family dinner its doorpost etched with children’s growth a notch for every measure wooden stairs worn smooth by a hundred pairs of feet tearful good-byes at the front door thistle and wild carrot grow where civilized gardens flourished a leaning picket fence weathered down to its wood it’
Read more

The Editor Falls Asleep

  When I studied grammar in my editing courses with Ryerson, this poem evolved and was subsequently published in our editors' 2006  Edition newsletter. It's still one of my poems that catches a playful spirit. Perhaps you have to be a grammarian to fully get it.   It was also published in What's Your Favourite Poem contest by Craigleigh Press in January 2006.     The editor falls asleep   grammar books next to her pillow, she dreams of a party and invites all her friends:   coordinate adjectives do-si-do with the nouns, arguing which one will lead, but verbs call the action     parenthesis pairs waltz with quotation mark couples   with strings of words, like secrets, between them   high-flying apostrophes flirt with its and with s’s amusing the audience, embarrassing the hosts   reds, whites, and blues, and their serial cousins converse with Sir Oxford, that old dashing fellow   fanboys join independents in convivial laughter grabb
Read more

Deep into Winter

Image
photo by C. Wilker Today it's snowing, just the light snowflakes borne by the wind. Tracks in my backyard make me think that some rabbits in the neighbourhood had quite a time in the crisp clean snow. We could ask, what if they had a party out there, but I think this was a smaller gathering or one rabbit frolicking around having fun, making his own tracks. Then I think of fields covered with snow and of corn stalk stubble showing through. When I was small, we always seemed to have a lake in one front field, a place that was lower than other areas, at least  until Dad hired people to lay tiles to drain the water from the surface and draw it away. What I remember is skating on the small body of frozen (not deep) water with corn stalks poking through at intervals. Dad brought a few straw bales out from the barn that we could sit on to put on our skates. We played hockey or just skated around the stubble. My memory in a poem: Frozen weeds were goalposts where
Read more