And I'll Never Have That Recipe Again

[ornoth]

I wouldn’t say my mother was a natural cook, but she was willing to try anything that struck her fancy. While building her repertoire, she used an old typewriter to commit her favorites to index cards that she stored in a hinged wooden recipe box.

Over the years, I sifted through her recipe box countless times, looking for her instructions for sour cream cookies or nisu bread or the family’s traditional spaghetti sauce.

After she died—a year ago today—my brother and I sifted through her belongings, finding homes for all the things she left behind.

Naturally, I went through that recipe box, intent on preserving everything I wanted before passing it on to other family members.

At the back of the box, hidden behind everything else, was another unremarkable index card, yellowed with age like all the others. It looked like this:

Although she didn’t note it, those lines are the final stanza of a poem called “A Testament”, published by American sculptor and poet William Wetmore Story in 1856, a hundred and sixty-two years ago.

As you can see, the index card is old and hand-typed… It had clearly been sitting in the back of that recipe box for years and years, although I had never seen it before. Perhaps she wrote it back in 1991, after her dramatic multiple-bypass surgeries, or then again, maybe some other time.

And yet why keep it there, of all places? If she had intended it to be a parting message, she could have left it in her home safe or her bank safe deposit box with all the rest of her important papers.

But if it wasn’t an intentional message, then why was this poem stored in her recipe box? That might have been a good place to leave a hidden message to her husband, but my father passed away twenty years ago.

Irrespective of whatever her design was, finding this note shortly after her death was startling. It remains no less moving, a year later.