I’d make giant bowls of rotini pasta, smothered in olive oil, garlic, thyme, and parmesan, all in silence. By nightfall, I would be hunched over the freezer or halfway lost in the fridge, eating handfuls of cheese by where the block would snap at the bend of my hands. I would dive into my Mom’s portion across the dinner table. She would warn, “Only eat your share, Sierra must eat just as much as you, and Mom needs food after work, too.” “I’m not asking for a meal in return, just my bowls.” Oma often handed over stewed red snapper, cucumber salad, and tin foil wrapped breadfruit, steaming. “The lack of broughtupcy with these people,” she would growl. After nourishing her kin the least they could do was return the vessel. Too many times had she lost her pots and pans to the kitchens of others. Bouillon in two Pyrex dishes, with orange tape on the top to denote whom the bowl belonged to. If we weren’t snacking on three weeks’ worth of frozen spaghetti sauce, it would be Oma dropping off our meals. Throughout my own growth, my mother worked endless hours, mimicking her parents. Oma then called for her son a few years later and, when he arrived, she had a belly full of Dana, her last child. Oma, my grandmother, sent for my mother - paying $268 for a one-bedroom in downtown Ottawa. Hers always came out too rough, too small. My mother didn’t know how to mix the cinnamon and brown sugar to fry the bakes just right. My mother migrated at the age of 13, lost her accent, her language and her know-how of rising dough twice before splitting it into palm-sized discs. Savouring her own words the way she would suck strands from a mango pit.īeing the first generation of Canadian-born Lucians, in my family, food was the only thing tying me back to our Laborie roots. You have half a bagel, instead of a whoal.” The rhythmic bounces in her voice would cut through the sizzle of oil in her frying pan. “Sometimes, in the mawrning, you eat one egg, instead of two. It was my first year at university, money was tight for the whole family. And so I learned to devour my lovers the way my grandmother taught me to eat my eggs.
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