sketchbook stories: the magic kingdom

every little thing she does

Jelly glasses. Antique tea tins. The pumpkin-colored cupboards my parents painted fifty years ago. A recipe for applesauce clothespinned to the curtain. The faint fragrance of nutmeg.

In this old house, I learned to cook. In this tiny kitchen, no bigger than the galley on my father’s sailboat, we baked Christmas cookies, sang folk songs, licked brownie batter from a wooden spoon.

“It is satisfying and soothing to put a collection of ingredients together in the same room,” my mother wrote in her foodletter a thousand recipes ago, “and watch something magic happen.”

Here, in the shimmering alchemy of memory.

From my mother’s sketchbook, c. 1983