The Kitchen The Church Took Back

I should tell you how it started, because it matters later. Thirty one years ago my mother died in February, in a cold spell so hard that the ground had to be broken open with a backhoe because the frost had gone four feet deep. Forty people came back to the church basement after the graveside, half frozen, and there was nothing but a coffee urn somebody’s daughter-in-law had thought to plug in. Louise’s husband had died the year before that, and she had stood in that same basement at her own funeral with nothing either, and she never forgot the hollow feeling of a room full of people who had come to feed your grief and found no food. So when my mother died, Louise showed up at my door at six in the morning with two casserole dishes of scalloped ham and a jar of her own canned green beans, and she said, “Opal, get your coat, we’ve got a lunch to put on,” and that was that. Wanda and Eunice came within the hour. Marge joined us two years later when her own mother in law passed and she saw what we did and never left.

We built it the way you build anything in a small town, out of what you have. A funeral shelf in the church pantry, stocked year round so we were never caught short: canned green beans, canned corn, dried noodles for the hotdish, two hundred paper napkins, a case of instant coffee for backup when the real grounds ran low. We kept a list taped inside the pantry door of who in the congregation had dietary trouble, who was diabetic, who could not have dairy since her gallbladder came out, so nobody with a loss fresh on them also had to worry whether the scalloped potatoes would make them sick. We knew, without anybody writing it down, that a funeral lunch is not really about the food. It is about a widow sitting down at a folding table and somebody setting a plate in front of her without her having to ask, so that for twenty minutes in the worst week of her life she does not have to take care of one single thing.

Pastor Shay came to us eighteen months ago, young, earnest, fresh out of seminary in St. Louis, the first called pastor Zion had had in eleven years after old Pastor Ohlrich finally retired at seventy nine because his hip gave out climbing the chancel steps. The congregation had shrunk the way these congregations shrink, forty families down to twenty two, and the call committee had prayed over it and voted to bring in somebody young, hoping a young family in the parsonage might draw other young families back. Shay brought his wife, Tamra, twenty nine years old, bright and busy and full of ideas, and for the first year she mostly left the kitchen to us, helping some Sundays, learning our names, learning that Eunice took her coffee black and Marge could not eat onions.