Sifting
At a Glance
Section titled âAt a Glanceâ| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2022-02-01 |
| Journal | Fourth Genre Explorations in Nonfiction |
| Authors | Zoë Fowler |
Abstract
Section titled âAbstractâAfter I sorted our books into separate piles, after I boxed up bedding and dishes and sent half to his new apartment, after I closed off newly emptied rooms and found homes for my cats, after all of this, I baked. Call it obsession or tradition or therapy. While the realtor sent countless emails and legal documents covered the kitchen table, while neighbors visited to ask how they could help and my daughterâs school counselor left messages on my cell phone, I baked. Butter and sugar were beaten, eggs were whisked and flour was sieved. I committed myself to the alchemy of it all.Thereâs an irony in needing so little to make a life and, yet, having so much. My husband left me to curate twenty-seven years of our life together. He left me to box his vinyl records, his philosophy books and graphic novels, his worn out shoes and unworn t-shirts from rock concerts he had attended before we metâStatus Quo, Dire Straits, Joy Division. He left me to gather together two sets of second-hand encyclopedia he had never read, a unicycle he could not ride, several cardboard files filled with bills he had not paid, and a collection of empty vodka bottles he had forgotten to hide. My husband left me; he left me everything. For months, I sifted through our belongings, trying to assess what mattered to me: maybe my favorite fountain pen; the ceramic hearts that gather dust on my desk and the woodcut of a crow perched in a hawthorn tree; my grandmotherâs baking bowls.There must have been a day, sometime after her death, when my father packed my grandmotherâs bowls into a box alongside the Lincolnshire imp candle sticks, the handmade brass dagger and my grandfatherâs medals from the Second World War. I donât remember, but my father must have driven this box to one of the many houses in which my husband and I have lived and, there, these things slipped unnoticed into our lives. They have crossed the Atlantic Ocean with us, survived numerous house moves, and remained unbroken among the glory and waste of my marriage. They have gained value to me over time. My grandmotherâs baking bowls matter.The larger of these bowls is a Mason Cash Gripstand Mixing Bowl and it looks like ten thousand othersâthe glaze is yellowish, a pattern of diamonds runs around its outside, a stamp on its base announces it was made in Church Gresley, Derbyshire. A rudimentary internet search tells me this kind of bowl is ubiquitous, common-place. You might glimpse it on the Great British Bake Off or in photos from 1950s lifestyle magazines or in museum displays of First and Second World War kitchens. Mass produced in Derbyshire for two centuries, bowls like these epitomize England.The smaller of the two bowls looks the same and yet. Take a quick look. Look closer. See the slight difference in shade and the tiny eight-petaled flowers where the diamonds should be. These flowersâdouble quatrefoilsâare the kind that might decorate a grander familyâs coat of arms. I am descended from hundreds of years of farm laborers and domestic servants and the closest my family comes to a coat of arms is the double quatrefoils on an old baking bowl. This bowlâs inside is worn to a subdued patina and a tiny chip breaks the smooth edge of its rim. This bowl has known work, this bowl has been used, this bowl is the bowl I reach for most.I remember baking in my grandmotherâs kitchen. In the smaller of her two tiny downstairs rooms she concocted elaborate chocolate cakes, feather-light sponges, decadent cream-filled buns, and extravagant mounds of coconut and egg whites with a glacĂ© cherry carefully balanced on each perfect summit. She made neat-edged pasties and tarts from four different kinds of pastry. Standing on my wooden stool with a tea towel knotted around my tummy, I was allowed to press patterns into the edges of the pie tins and to braid warm dough with clumsy childâs hands. Visiting my grandma felt like entering the pages of a storybook: her ice-cold pantry was lined with towering shelves of brightly colored chutneys, marmalades and jams, the garden shed was an Aladdinâs cave of hanging onions and winter carrots. Beneath my bed, a blue china chamber pot sat alongside newspaper-lined boxes of apples, mud-crusted potatoes and purplish swedes. Every scrap of food was sacred at my grandmaâs house. Butter wrappers were saved to grease pie tins, crusts were turned into puddings, bacon rinds were carefully chopped into tiny pieces and fed to the birds. Slender as one of the canes that supported the vegetables growing in my grandfatherâs garden, she had the gift of making much from little.When I ask my father about the bowls, he tells me the larger one was given to my grandmother by her own mother. I ask if the smaller one is older, and he says maybe. His face furrows in the tiny square of my cell phone; he isnât used to video chatting with me, he isnât used to talking about his motherâs belongings. After a long pause, while our phone signal bounces via satellite between one side of the ocean and the other, he says he thinks his motherâs grandmother had given his mother the smaller bowl. I imagine a line of women spanning more than two centuries, each standing in their Lincolnshire kitchens with apron strings pulled tight around their waists, each dancing their wooden spoons around the bowlâs edges, each making their whisks dip and spin. Generations of women folding flour with careful deliberation and making plenty from little. I look at my hands and see the shapes of their fingers.For a while, in the middle of the Second World War, my grandmother lived in Plymouth, then German bombs drove her back to Lincolnshire and she lived with her sister in a house across the street from the one which she later made her own; that tiny house where, decades later, she would make the feasts that left her youngest granddaughter wide-eyed and filled with wonder. In March 1944, she received a telegram telling her that her husband, my grandfather, was a prisoner of war. As she read, her eyes must have slipped back and forth between the telegram and the engagement ring which glinted where her wedding band once sat. Two years earlier, her husbandâs ship had been sunk by the Japanese in the Java Sea. Thinking my grandfather dead, she had grieved and mourned and moved on, fell in love with a farmer, said yes when he asked her to marry him. Feel the words slip like sand across her tongue: Japanese, Java Sea, prisoner, prisoner, prisoner.I can imagine myself into my grandmotherâs skin. She places the telegram on the mantle over the kitchen fire. Later she will discuss its contents with her sister, Marjorie, but first she needs to steady herself, to rebalance herself in a world which has suddenly slipped from its axis. She reaches for her baking bowls. It is 1944 and rationing limits her to one egg a week, eight ounces of sugar and a twist of butter. She bows her head for a moment in thought and starts to plan. As she beats sugar into butter, the edge of her engagement ring chips the bowlâs edge. She slips the ring from her finger. That moment is forever.And sixty-five years later, my own marriage dissolves like salt in water. My tongue burns with it. Alcoholism holds my husband prisoner. Al-co-hol-ism. Spoken aloud, the word works every part of the mouth, as though one is savoring the complex flavors of an expensive malt whisky. The word rolls across the mouth and arches the palate and stretches the lips. Alcoholism, a sibilance of despair; alcoholism, the cause of my baking. I know the tentative balance between hope and despair which held my grandmother upright one March morning in 1944; I know the comfort of committing to familiar rituals when all else begins to fray, and I know a cake takes as long to bake and bread takes as long to rise whether you are crying or not.My grandmother never told me she had once been engaged to another man; I learnt that story from my father only recently while he squinted at me through the screen of my motherâs mobile phone. After the conversation, I began to sort through what was left in my pantry, and memories settled like motes of dust. Fragments of details. I thought of my grandmaâs house. The cooker laden with pots and the kitchen dense with steam, the smell of cabbage going stale while we waited for my grandfather to come home from the pub so that we might eat our Sunday dinner. The sound of the television turned high in the front room as though to drown out the sound of the women cooking in the kitchen. The absence of thanks for the food we took to him. I remember sitting, squat legged and perfectly sized on my tiny wooden stool, watching my grandmother stand in front of the kitchenâs bronze edged mirror, spraying Elnett hairspray across her freshly rollered hair and dabbing color on her lips, her gaze distant as though she was looking at, or for, someone else.And in the kitchen of the Vermont home I was about to lose I recreated recipes my grandmother once cooked. From an ancient thrift store copy of Mrs. Beetonâs Book of Household Management, I baked Lincolnshire plum loaves and tea breads, ginger cakes and cobblers. I gave away every cake I baked, handing them to people I barely knew at the same rate that I gave away the other things in my lifeâthe beds and mattresses and pots and pans, the piles of blankets, the boxes of books my husband did not want, the dresses I could not imagine ever wearing again. I was driven by the reverse of hunger, the inverse of appetite, as though my soul might find satisfaction if I could disgorge myself of enough.We all know there are lessons to be learnt from remembering. My grandmother taught me creation can cover a landscape of loss and so I fill the air with the smells of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. I grease baking tins and watch bread dough swell in the shadow of the wood-burning stove. Again and again I cream sugar and butter and I whisk eggs and fold flour and I slide baking tins into the oven and then I wash my grandmotherâs baking bowls in soapy water and I wipe them dry with towels worn soft with use. Generations of women stretch out around me and I see their hands in my own, making plenty from the little which remains when there should be something else.