Day 16: Emil's Mother's Kitchen

Virgil wrote that perhaps one day it will be a pleasure to remember even these things.

In the poem it is said to shipwrecked sailors, cold and far from home. Tonight Emil was only cold.

Dear Grandmother,

I took the rest of the plum cake to the ferry house, on a plate under a cloth, and waited on the steps while Emil rang the bell. It was raining lightly, and the sound came back to us from the far shore, thinner, the way it does in wet weather. The lamp in his kitchen window was already lit.

In the kitchen he put the kettle on and took two plates from the rack without asking what I had brought. I think he could smell it. When I lifted the cloth, he stood very still with the kettle in his hand. Then he sat down, cut a small piece with the side of his fork and ate it slowly, the way you taste a stock to see whether it needs salt.

"This is my mother's cake," he said. "Where did you get it?"

I told him about the card in your tin. I did not tell him what was written at the top, and he did not ask. He finished the piece, and then he said, "Your grandmother could not cook. Did you know that? She could teach a child to read in a month, but she burned porridge." His mother heard about it from the children, because the children told everybody everything, and one Saturday she sent him up to the teacher's house with a message: Miss Sorel was to come down to the ferry house kitchen at two. And you came. Every Saturday that autumn, he said, you stood at this same table, in an apron of his mother's that was too big for you, and she taught you bread, and soup, and dumplings, and the plum cake last of all, because it was her best.

I looked at the table. It is scrubbed pale, with a dip worn into the wood at one end where, he says, generations of dough have been kneaded. The stove is the same one too, black iron with a brass rail. Emil said his mother never used a thermometer in her life. She tested the oven by opening the door and sprinkling a little flour on a tray inside. If the flour turned golden in the time it took to count to ten, the oven was right for cake. If it went black, it was too hot. If it stayed white, put in more wood and go and do something else.

On a hook beside the stove there is an apron, faded blue, with a patch on one pocket. I did not ask whose it was. Emil saw me looking and said that his mother had sewn the patch on herself, the winter after you left, because the pocket had torn on the oven door one Saturday when you were in a hurry to get the cake out. She could have thrown the apron away, he said. She mended it and hung it back on the hook instead.

I tried his mother's flour test when I got home, on your stove, and you could try it on any oven whose dial you cannot trust. A pinch of flour on a tray, count slowly, watch the colour. Mine went golden at about twelve. I think that is close enough.

Before there were dials, every kitchen had its own way of reading heat. Some cooks held a hand inside the oven and counted how long they could bear it. Some used a sheet of white paper and watched how fast it browned, and old recipes say "a slow oven" or "a quick oven" because that was all anyone could know. The cook's own body was the instrument, and good cooks were the ones who had paid attention for years. That is how recipes were really passed on: not on cards, but from hand to hand, beside a stove, on Saturday afternoons.

Emil wrapped a piece of the cake in paper to keep for the morning. At the door he said, "She got it right in the end, the plum cake. My mother said she had a light hand." Then he said goodnight and shut the door, rather quickly.

I walked home in the rain thinking of Virgil. Perhaps one day it will be a pleasure to remember even these things. I think Emil found tonight that it is, and also that it is not, both at once, the way the first bite of something you loved as a child is sweet and catches a little in the throat.

Your Vera

Day 17: Fog on the Lake

Lao Tzu wrote that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

He said nothing about fog, but this morning a single step was all any of us could see.

Dear Grandmother,

We had planned the shore walk for weeks. The children were to collect five different leaves, look for the heron in the reed bed and come back along the path by the boat sheds before lunch. When I opened the curtains at seven, the lake had disappeared. The fog was so thick that I could not see the school from the teacher's house, and they are twenty steps apart.

I nearly called it off. Then Tomas knocked on the door with a coil of rope over his shoulder. Mila had told him about the walk, and he had guessed what the morning would look like. "Long rope," he said. "Everybody holds on. You at the front, me at the back." He had tied knots in it, an arm's length apart, one for each child.

So we went. Eleven children holding eleven knots, me in front, Tomas at the end with little Yuri, who kept turning round to check that he was still there. We walked the shore path very slowly. The fog was cold and wet on our faces, and it smelled of the lake and of woodsmoke from a chimney we could not see.

We collected the leaves anyway. In fog you have to bend close to see anything at all, so the children found things they would never have noticed in sunshine: a snail asleep on a birch leaf, beads of water lined up along a spider's thread like pearls on a string, a long grey feather lying on the path. Sami carried his five leaves pressed flat between the pages of his reading book, which I pretended not to see.

Halfway along I tried something I had read about and never dared to do with a whole class. I stopped the line and asked everyone to stand still, close their eyes and silently count every different sound they could hear in one minute, saying nothing until the minute was over. You could do it anywhere, in a kitchen or a garden. A minute is longer than you think. When it ended, Ari had counted nine: a duck, a car on the bus road, the water at the stones, a dog, a door, Noor's boots creaking, someone breathing, a bell that was not the ferry bell, and "a quiet noise, like a pot just before it boils". Noor had counted twelve. She said one of them was the fog itself, and nobody laughed.

Autumn fog on a lake has a simple reason, which I explained when we were back in the warm classroom with wet socks on the stove rail. All summer the lake stores the sun's heat, and it gives it back slowly, much more slowly than the land and the air. On the first cold mornings the water is warmer than the air above it, so the lake steams like a bowl of soup set down in a cold room. The steam meets the cold air and turns to fog, and on a still day it simply lies on the water until the sun is strong enough to lift it.

We did find the heron. Or rather, we heard it, a rough shout from the reeds, and then saw a grey shape lift and vanish, and Mila said it looked like a coat being carried away.

On the way back the children went ahead with the rope to the school door, and for a minute Tomas and I were alone at the end of the path, by the boat sheds, where the shore turns. Neither of us said anything. We could hear the water but not see it. He took off his glove and wiped the wet off a bench with it, and we did not sit down, but we stood beside it together, the way you stand next to someone at a stove, waiting for the same pan to come to the boil. Then Yuri shouted from the gate that Tomas had to come and untie the knots, and he went. At the school door he handed me the coiled rope without a word, and I hung it on the hook by the stove, where it is still drying tonight.

I keep thinking of Lao Tzu. When you cannot see the far shore, you do not need to. You need to see one step, and a rope, and someone at the other end of it who thought about the weather before you did.

Your Vera