The Recipe Box My Mother in Law Left Me

On Evan called Wednesday evening to ask whether I had opened it, and I said not yet, and he was kind enough not to ask why. I set the box on the kitchen table and ate my supper at the other end of it.

Let me tell you how it started, so you understand why a woman of fifty five would be wary of a pine box for two days.

Dennis took me out to the farm for Sunday dinner in the fall of 1993, when we had been dating five months.

Eldora’s kitchen was square and yellow, with a table that sat ten and a wall clock shaped like a teapot.

She had milked eighty Holsteins with her husband Harold until he died, and she still got up at four every morning of her life, even after the cows were sold.

She was tall, and she wore her apron until noon and not a minute after. She shook my hand at the door the way you would test a fence post.

She said, “Dennis says you’re a secretary.” I said I worked in the office at the elementary school. She said, “Well.”

That was the word. Well. She had a way of saying it that could cover a whole conversation, and in thirty years I never learned to read it.

When Dennis brought me home with news, she said, “Well.”

When we got engaged, she said, “Well.” When I stood up in her church fellowship hall in my wedding dress, she looked at me for a long moment and said, “Well, it fits.”

The first Thanksgiving I cooked for the family was in 1994. We were married that June, and I wanted to prove something.

I made my mother’s turkey and my own gravy, from the pan drippings, thin and pale, because that was the way it had always been made in my mother’s kitchen.

Eldora lifted the lid, looked in, and said it.

“Well.”

I held on to that word for thirty years. I am not exaggerating. I took it out at night sometimes, in the dark, and looked at it.

I had asked her to teach me, once.

It was a couple of years in, and I had just had Evan, and I stood in her kitchen with the baby on my hip and asked how she made her noodles.

She did not look up from the board. “You wouldn’t have the patience,” she said.

So I stopped asking, and I got stubborn about it. If I was not going to be taught, I would not be a student.

I decided, somewhere around 1998, that I would be the daughter in law who brought rolls from the Kroger bakery, and I would set them out in the plastic dome like a dare.

She ate them without remark.

There were good moments, and I should say so.