The Recipe Box That Came Home

The weekend Rhonda handled the kitchen

My mother, Lorraine, is eighty-two years old. She buried my dad nine years ago, kept the house by herself on the north edge of town, and drove herself to church and to the Casey’s for gas until the spring her hands quit on her.

It is arthritis, the bad kind. Her mind is as sharp as it ever was. She can still tell you what everybody in the congregation brought to the 1978 Christmas program.

But her fingers curl in now, and she cannot close them around a wooden spoon.

She fell in August reaching for a pan on a high shelf.

Nothing broke, thank the Lord, but she lay on that linoleum for forty minutes before the neighbor heard her calling. After that, she was the one who said it was time.

There is an assisted living on the east edge of our town, a long brick building called Prairie View, with a garden out front the Lions Club keeps up.

Mom picked her own room. It looks out on the parking lot and the water tower, and she said that suited her fine.

She moved in the last Saturday of September. Mark and I moved her bed, her recliner, her sewing basket, her good lamp, and the picture of Dad in his Army uniform.

We did it in one trip with Mark’s pickup and the neighbor boy’s flatbed trailer.

Rhonda came that weekend too. She is my older sister, fifty-one, five years ahead of me.

She married a man from Omaha twenty-six years ago and has lived there ever since, in a split-level in a suburb with a cul-de-sac.

I want to be fair about Rhonda, because this story is not as simple as it looks from the top. She came. She drove three hours.

She cried in the car when we left Mom that first night. Rhonda loves our mother. I never once doubted that.

On Sunday, while Mark and I were hauling the last of Mom’s things, Rhonda said she would handle the kitchen.

Sort the dishes, box the pans for the church rummage sale, clean out the cupboards. I was grateful. I hate a kitchen cleanout. It feels like a funeral.

When I came back that evening, the cupboards were bare and wiped down, and there were eleven boxes lined up by the back door, labeled in black marker.

Rummage. Rummage. Tina. Rhonda. Goodwill. She had done a good job. She had always been the organized one.

The recipe box was on the front seat of her car.

It is a gray metal box with a hinged lid and a little yellow rooster painted on the front, and it has sat on the counter by Mom’s stove for longer than I have been alive.

“I’m going to take these home and scan them,” Rhonda told me in the driveway. “All of them. Then we’ll each have a copy, and the girls can have them someday. You know I’m the one with the good scanner.”

“That’s a nice idea,” I said, and I meant it. I hugged her. I waved her off down the street.

That was the last time I thought about that box until Abby stood in my kitchen doorway with her phone.