Food…

I started pondering food after having a discussion with my sisters sitting on a picnic bench at Navigator restaurant.

We met to discuss good things. Daddy has decided to split off ten acre plots for each of us on the ranch, so we got together to discuss what it might mean and what we will do. How will we deal with surveying costs, and road building, and fencing, and power lines, and wells. Who lives next to my brother Thomas, and who gets the swampier lot. The three of us haven’t gotten together alone for a meal in my memory. I’m hyper-aware, as only the bereaved can be, the meal will become a happy memory.

In passing I mentioned how my relationship with Mama and Daddy has changed over the past eighteen months. I’ve always loved them, and they’ve always been family, but now they’re my NUCLEAR family and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I don’t have any other family. My sisters have full lives, as they should. Without Mama and Daddy I’d be an island. And I can’t be an island. I wouldn’t be alive today without them.

That sounds dramatic, but it’s just a fact. I’ve spent 542 days wishing I was dead. But every damned day Mama shows up with a surprise meal. I have to be thankful, and act right because it’s the right thing to do. So I do.

And sometimes I don’t want to eat. Many times I don’t want to eat. But there it is, all hot and fresh in my hands. An unknown quantity. Like a surprise gift. So I drag myself into the camper and pop the lid on her gift.

The smells surround me, lifting me up just the tiniest bit. Fried chicken tonight, she makes the best fried chicken. I grab myself a paper plate and end up shoveling two pieces of fried chicken, a mountain of mashed potatoes, and black-eyed peas onto the plate. I eat alone, quietly, she goes back to eat with Daddy. But that plate of love is in front of me. Steaming hot and delicious, night after night for all 542 days.

The food can’t make me happy, nothing can do that. But it reminds me that I’m loved. It makes me feel nurtured. I have to step out of my misery long enough to say “thank you.”

Each mouthful tastes like childhood. Before Ben. Before my life shattered.