My mother died on Valentine’s Day. Death had come upon her suddenly, at 83. My father had risen from bed in the middle of the night to find my mother lying on the kitchen floor. Her legs were crossed casually, and she had already fallen into her final sleep. She died around 1:00 a.m., but it was nearly 4:00 a.m. by the time the local medical investigator made her way through a snowstorm across the mountains to Taos.
My father broke the news to me early in the morning. A cold snap had left the roads too icy for me to make the drive from Albuquerque that day.
“I’ll be up in Taos tomorrow,” I told him.
All day, I kept adjusting the thermostat in my apartment but was unable to raise the temperature above 67 degrees. Wrapped in a fleece throw, I sat on my couch and sobbed. That night, sleep eluded me. I felt as if my heart were the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with thorns poking it and drops of blood spurting out. My body felt as if it were imploding.
The next afternoon, snow swirled around me as I pulled into my father’s gravel driveway in El Prado.
I had steeled myself for the fact that my mother wouldn’t be there to greet me with a warm hug. I wasn’t prepared for the stillness from the kitchen. I was accustomed to being met by the smell of homemade soup or pot roast, my favorite dish. Cooking was my mother’s love language.
I stepped into the kitchen.
“I kept everything the way it was just before….” My father gestured at the butcher block table. A pencil rested on the crossword puzzle my mother had been completing just a day ago. A few drops of red wine had dried at the bottom of her empty glass. A foil-wrapped bar of dark chocolate, just starting to melt, remained half-eaten. The scene felt surreal.
My father and I spent the afternoon discussing the funeral arrangements. I had spoken with the priest to arrange the funeral Mass, but we had not yet secured a burial plot. (That’s a story for another day.)
The winter sun sank below the horizon, and my stomach growled.
“What about dinner?” I asked.
“I don’t know what your mother had planned. Let’s check the menu book.”
Since my childhood, my mother had used a small calendar for menu planning. Each Friday, she would create the menu for the week ahead and then compile her grocery list. Years ago, she would use the pocket Hallmark datebooks that drugstores always gave out for free around the holidays.
I pulled open a drawer. The menu planning calendar was tucked behind a plastic container of rubber bands. I glanced at the entry for that evening.
“Soup,” I read aloud. “Let’s take a look in the fridge.”
The refrigerator was stuffed to bursting: a bit of Chinese takeout, some leftover pasta, half a red onion, several jars of olives. I rooted around. Behind a bottle of maple syrup and a jar of mayonnaise stood a quart-sized plastic container that looked promising. I opened the lid. Kidney beans and vegetables.
As I poured the soup into a saucepan, I noticed an index card clipped to the recipe holder next to the stove: minestrone romano. My mother had made the dish so often that I wondered that she even needed to consult a recipe.
Looking again in the refrigerator, I located two small glass jars, labeled in her handwriting. One read “Parm,” and the other “Sheep.” She knew that cow’s milk didn’t agree with me and always kept some grated Romano cheese on hand for my visits. I felt a lump in my throat.
In order not to disturb the final scene in the kitchen, my father had laid our places at the dining table. I gently carried over our bowls of hot soup. My father said grace, and I looked over at my mother’s empty place. My heart felt as heavy as it ever had. I sprinkled some Romano onto my soup and dipped my spoon into the steaming broth. Kidney beans, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, carrots, zucchini, and celery blended seamlessly with the homemade beef stock base and seasonings. Somehow, when I made my mother’s recipes, they never turned out quite like her cooking.
It wasn’t just her garnishes of grated lemon zest, chopped parsley, or bacon. Every dish that my mother prepared was infused with love. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I realized that this was the last meal she would ever cook for me. With my napkin, I wiped my eyes. Before I was born, she had nourished me in the womb. When I was an infant, she nursed me. Here she was, continuing to feed me, even from the world beyond. I felt deeply connected to her. I wanted to be able to hug her one more time and thank her for the soup, so lovingly prepared.
Her cooking had comforted me many times, even into my middle age. In the spring of 2020, I visited my parents at the start of COVID-19. I arrived feeling exhausted and depleted. I plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table, and my mother immediately served me a bowl of her vegetable soup. She handed me a small glass jar: grated Romano, of course. For months, I had been busy taking care of others: keeping up-to-date on the latest COVID information and requirements, developing and implementing the COVID policy for our employees, and reassuring them. I had had little time to care for myself. I felt so nurtured by my mother’s simple act of serving me a bowl of soup, and I luxuriated in the feeling. I told my mother how I felt.
“That’s what mothers are for,” she had responded with a smile.
My father and I finished dinner, and I cleared the table and began to run hot water over the dishes. The recipe card next to the stove caught my eye. Maybe minestrone romano would become part of my own cooking repertoire.
© 2016-2023 Katharine Spehar. All rights reserved.
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