How To Mourn For Something That Was Never Yours

A Recipe

Claire Giannosa

Grandma's Cookies

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 40 minutes (plus a few years to simmer)

Serves: 1 family (lost or found)

Ingredients:

• A spoon

• Crushed anise

• Flour

• Pecans

• A fuzzy memory

1. Fix Mistakes

A spoon is not the right tool for this.

The anise seeds slip out under the curved metal, clanging like a beaded chain on the sides of the

cup they’re trapped in.

My shoulder blades ache as I bend over the cup,

smashing the spoon down with increased vigor.

The recipe calls for crushed anise.

We only have seeds.

Note: Prepare yourself accordingly.

2. Simmer

I peer into the window of the oven.

My nose slightly stinging from

the sweet aroma of the anise,

the crumbliness of the flour,

the crisp brown edges,

the nutty pecans,

the addicting buttery aftertaste.

The perfect blend of thick and soft.

I watch, carefully, as the blend of ingredients rises to form something new.

3. Wade in the past

My grandma’s cookies are the only thing of hers I have left.

If she left behind Italian heirlooms, I am unaware of them.

If she told me stories in a thick accent as a baby, I cannot remember them.

Her laughter is captured on video,

Her handwriting immortalized within the recipe card

held inside crinkling plastic

yellowing at the edges

slick with baking grease

and dusted lightly with flour.

4. Try to remember

My dad tells stories of his family in snippets.

Photographs.

Laughs that fade into tense silence.

Italian is a word that doesn’t belong to me. Never belonged to my father either,

shut out from the language

scratched out of the immigration papers

change the name

change the story

Maria—Mary (easier on the tongue).

I sit here and watch these biscottis—cookies

and wonder

if my grandma remembered

Sicily

Palermo

Salvato (all the letters that made up her existence)

and

the churning waters of the Atlantic that carried her all the way to a little house in Detroit with seven children she didn’t know how to handle—

or if her memory was as fuzzy as mine.

The way my dad tells it,

my grandma is framed in an ocean of contradictions:

Saint, Villain, Lover, Monster

5. Regret

I do not know how I am supposed to think

how I am supposed to feel.

I eat

and think about

The way I stood immobile at the funeral—

Tears soaking pressed cotton suits,

An ocean of memories tucked into a wooden box,

A seed.

Unsure if I am allowed to mourn for something I never had.