BFFs in Boston

Do you ever just feel blindsided by grief?

The other night I was riding home on the T, listening to folk music and thinking about how beautiful it is to be a woman and to have inherited a history of baking and cooking and sewing and babies.

I was thinking about those precious nieces of ours who are growing up so, so fast and becoming such interesting individuals. Last weekend when we stayed with them, one had us in stitches with the lyrics to her "Beethoven" song (Hey! Hey, Beethoven! Milk the cow! Ride the donkey!) while the other one asked me to just to lay down and talk to her for a while while she sketched and I marveled at how similar her request was to my requests at age 6. It's a beautiful thing.

Anyway, I share all this to let you know what sort of a mindset I was in coming home the other day. I'm so blessed to be able to live near my nieces because when I was little I was always so jealous of the people who had aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents all living down the road.

For some of you this may seem odd (Nathan just can't really imagine living that close to extended family), but when you grow up in small town North Carolina, it seems that everybody is related to everybody else. Except, you know, I wasn't related to anyone else. My parents moved out of Randolph County, NC when they were young and first married and we never came back. I never had all that.

Luckily, though, I got to see my extended family fairly often and because it was always a special occasion when I would see them almost all of my memories with my grandmothers are wrapped up in food.

Well, I'm putting together a family cookbook and I received my first recipes in the mail the other day and I wasn't at all prepared. Enclosed in the letter, my aunt had written out my grandmother's banana pudding recipe and it's a beautiful thing, y'all.

I just sat and cried and cried and cried--totally blindsided by renewed grief.

I still haven't gotten it together enough to type out the recipe for the cookbook. But I will. And I will be reminded again how beautiful it is to be a woman. How beautiful to inherit comfort foods and the ability to make them. How beautiful to be a part of the never-ending chain.