If You Get Through It All, You Really Love Me

For my family, and the memories at our old Miami house.

There was so much wood, and there was so much red. An old white refrigerator with photos and magnets busting off the front, a veritable hodgepodge and constant reassembling when items would inevitably fall off. I sat on the side of the table facing the kitchen. Must have logged days of hours sitting in that chair. Pouring sparkles on top of a single eggshell container, cut from the dozen, to make a halloween or maybe christmas decoration in elementary. Pounding biology chapter after calculus chapter after history chapter, my notebooks and papers sprawled before me. Abuelo, when the sun started setting, and I never remembered to pay attention, turning on the overhead light above me-- a Tiffany chandelier with deep colors of fruits and vines. Abuelo, banging limes on the side of the red ceramic sink to soften them, make them juicier. 

I’m not sure when we settled on the seating arrangement. Mom at the head, the chair closest to the back door, me facing the kitchen, Teddy across from me. In all my memories of meals they are sitting in the same place. One morning, on a WEEKDAY, Mom had made cinnamon rolls and the house phone rang, the number that I still use to get CVS coupons. She left the tiniest morsel of cinnamon roll on her plate, the white ones with burgundy edging. She explained later, it was “something sweet to come back to.” She took the call but by the time she returned, I had eaten the bite. 

I was a climber and an explorer of not having to wash dishes. The counter was wide enough for me to hoist my full body up, stand with dirty feet on cleanish cream to reach the cups and bowls on the top shelves. The dishwasher was most likely never used. Always a place to store less often used dishes and serving plates. One time, making EZ-mac, I didn’t want to wash a bowl and put a quart pan in the microwave, convinced that it didn’t matter if the handle impeded it from actually circling around on the dish. It was only with the smell of burning metal and small smoking did I realize (hello!), that metal could not go in the microwave. Nati was always making soup and luckily, rightfully using the quart pan. While drinking soup from a Flanigans drink cup and drinking water from a Campbell’s soup cup, Teddy asked if she was trying to be ironic.

That old wooden table saw so many cakes. There was a whole drawer dedicated to old and new candles, lighters, matches, Lucila’s plastic cake knives, an assortment of balloon napkins. A drawer with take-out menus and ziploc bags. Above the house phone and taped to the wood shelf, was a small index card that had all the important numbers. Mom’s careful script, for once legible, detailed extension lines and the personal/work cell phones, to make sure we could always reach her. The Tuppwerware situation was out of control. On one of her visits, Cristy sat her ass down on the terracota floor and declared “we are going through this.” (Cristy also once helped organize my closet, same trip?) Throwing out mismatched lids, old plastic waterbottles, she just wanted us to keep what was useful. 

Barbie, the stepgrandma, once gifted me a book of hometown midwestern recipes, and I thought I could bake. First me and Teddy couldn’t even figure out where to find the ingredients-- had to ask a couple store employees where to find shortening at the local Winn Dixie before one man knew exactly where it was. The most epic baking was of course, Hugo’s Birthday-at-the-Cabana Red Velvet cake. To this day, the closest I can assume is we had mistakenly put the oven on “cleaning” mode while still actively baking the cake. But somehow or another, the should-be delicious, aromatic, buttery waifs of fresh cake baking was actually some sort of noxious fume that made everyone’s eyes burn. (Why were we always setting our bodies on burn? Let us not forget the incident of expired (? again, we make conjectures) baby sunscreen lotion that made our skin itch and turn purple, even when you tried to aggressively wipe it off with green pool water.) 

There were always small sneaky things happening in the kitchen. I was sixish, trying to escape Abuela’s view with a handful of strawberry thumbprint cookies. I was twelveish, cutting sliver by sliver of Entenmann’s pound cake, until Mom walked by and remarked, “it’s half gone!”. I was, well, always, being rushedly handed two or three small Hershey’s kisses by Abuelo. He even showed me his “stash” of wine in the door of the fridge (it was Kosher, nonalcoholic grape juice). That kitchen. That oval dining room table. Those wood cabinets with the white porcelain knobs, with the dark brown dot in the center. Absolute inundation of childhood, celebration, bonding, and reverie. When I dream of home, it is still the house at 9515.