There must be some spread in heaven today

Published April 30, 2007

"I love stories. Stories keep alive those who have gone before us."
And with that, jazz singer Dianne Reeves launched into a song about her grandmother during her appearance at the Tri-C Jazz Festival this weekend.
I couldn't help but think about the stories we will always have about my mother-in-law, June. She died last Friday, after being sick and bedridden for more than a year.
She would never recover to come to live with us in the house we bought with her in mind, a house with a kitchen big enough for her to work her magic.
And "magic" is as good a word as any to describe what the former school secretary and mother of three sons did with food.
God love her, she may have been the worst cook to ever put a head of cauliflower in the oven.
It's true. One of her favorite dishes involved coring a head of cauliflower, pouring milk over it, sprinkling nutmeg on the top and then baking it in the oven.
Then she would proudly squeeze it on the table between a roast, a pitcher full of "gravy" (grease drippings) and candlesticks, a centerpiece, and salt and pepper shakers in the theme of the nearest holiday.
Add a bowl of pureed coleslaw - she made it in the blender - and champagne glasses filled with still-frozen mixed fruit to the crowd in the middle of the table and you had Sunday dinner at June's house.
But her love of cooking wasn't limited to Sunday dinners; she baked, too. And it didn't matter that anything she baked had the consistency of the nutmegged cauliflower.
When my husband and I were first married, she invited me to help her bake Christmas cookies. I'm no whiz in the kitchen myself, but I didn't want my new mother-in-law to know that - at least not yet - so we set off to holiday baking.
Three hours and batches and batches of cookies later, the kitchen was as white as the snowy backyard. There was flour everywhere, even on the ceiling, but it was all in a day's baking to June. What she lacked in culinary skill, she made up for in enthusiasm.
She loved holidays. Maybe it's because she was born on the Fourth of July. Every day had holiday potential. What better time for a Thanksgiving feast than a hot July day?
In a beach house. In New Jersey.
Why wait until a cold November day when you can cook up a turkey and all the trimmings any day of the year?
When my boys were young, we would join my in-laws for vacations on the Jersey Shore.
Imagine my surprise when I came up from the beach one day to find a 20-pound turkey thawing on the counter. For three days, that bird sat there slowly becoming unfrozen.
I don't remember how the meal went, but I do remember fearing for the life of my young son. But we all survived, just as my husband had survived a childhood of living in a house where "refrigerate after opening" was seen as an option and not a mandate.
We'll miss all those Sunday dinners with June. We'll miss her company and her joy in putting them on for us.
And some of us will even miss her cooking. My younger son told me not to forget to mention how good her "rolled meat" was. In this, another of her specialties, she took some sort of beef, rolled it around onions and raw bacon, cooked it in her favorite cast-iron pan and then served it with the grease from the pan ladled over it.
Hmmm. Greasy beef of undetermined origin.
Would someone please pass the coleslaw?