Kitchen Greenery

I'm typing today with a bubbly blister on my index finger.  And since you're wondering, once again, I touched the hot stove.  Something about a road cone colored coil draws me in like stray cats to trash cans and I just have to do it.  But in honesty, I'm here to admit that I'm an idiot, wasn't paying attention to a hot pan of sauteed pasta and popped my didget on the stove.  So I, like any other self respecting male, waited until no one was looking and sucked the hell out of my finger until the pain was gone.  No tears, just a little lower lip biting and some gasp for air sounds (like the ones you let out when your mother would spray a cut with that damn antibacterial before the Band aid.)  I healed, this go around without a stinging mist of medicine, and continued cooking.  

But my kitchen cluster made me think of Mae Mae.  With calloused clay hands and hips wide enough to fit all three kids, Mae kept the peace for a family too on- the- go to notice how much they all meant to each other.  And good Lord could that woman cook.  My little blister brought me on that well needed day dream to cooking lessons in the summer, not really a structured education but more of a watch and copy.  It started with breakfast- essentials of eggs and grits and bacon and hash browns.  She'd hum some old tune that I could only make out as years of repeating the same simple menu, but somehow only getting better rather than monotonous.  I caught myself, from time to time, trying to hum something I knew.  Maybe some Billy Ray Cyrus.  George Strait even.  But I didn't seem to have it all down like her.  Something in her song made her food all the more wonderful.

She was a cook.  Not the next Top Chef, no competitor for the likes of Iron Chef.  Something more than that.  In all this commotion about chefs I just don't see where they went wrong.  In my opinion, the chef goes out to please the pallet.  A cook aims to please the heart.  The way Mae would drag her finger through seasoned flour and sprinkle the mix on her tongue just says more.  It would fall down her shirt and across her brown hands and she left it all there because that was her.  She didn't watch for trans-fats and caloric intake, she watched for color in the face and a grin, and most importantly, she didn't want the recognition.  Because that is her job.  Not to putting food on a plate, but it is almost like her divine career of feeding the well being of those she knows.  Her work with the human spirit is not comparable too many other things.  She is a healer. In my South, that is what people do.  They feed each other.  

© blake jackson