Her smell was cinnamon and cigarettes. Even though she had quit smoking years before, it seemed her house and clothes had been saturated with the spicy scent of tobacco, and pies. When she saw you, Mémère would hug you fast, and hard, her corpulent arms trapping you. You felt safe in those arms, adored. It’s been 20 years and I can still smell her smell and feel her warmth enveloping me. Her love is indelibly stamped in my heart.
The brown and white kitchen, remodeled in the 1970’s, served as the backdrop for my own real-life cooking show. In her last days, she still baked like a fiend, dragging the oxygen tank and her wasted body around the kitchen. She would lean on the counter to rest, her forearms holding her up, the raspy, periodic sucking noise of the hose that never left her face interrupting her stories every thirty seconds or so. From the avocado-tinted stove she would produce the most delicious dishes; they could have been pulled right from the glossy prints of the Betty Crocker cook book (even though she never used one of those things, damn it.)
Like the blue smoke from her cigarettes, her laughter would fill the room. When I saw her for the last time, it was not in her coffin, but as an apparition in the gilt mirror of her living room. The weight of her long illness was gone, she was young again and her beautiful brown hair was pinned, curls framing her face. The navy polka dot dress that she had loved as a young woman flounced around her as she danced to an invisible symphony. Her head tossed back, she was laughing with her whole self. I could hear it. Filling the room, and my heart.
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