Sometimes I forget how much I love cooking. Not fancy 100 step cooking, but cooking that is part of the generation-to-generation tradition that my Nana gave to me. Making popovers, jam, pie crust, zucchini bread.
It's so soothing: the familiar motions, the soul food taste. It can cut through all the other stress and soul ache.
Academia, particularly mathematics, is full of designated identities. Rarely are these ever 100% true across the board. For example, we are supposed to be intellectual first and foremost. Logic will always prevail over emotion. We are like Spock or Data, ever analytic, cool under pressure. But even the hardest of us have feelings. While I consider myself pretty graceful under fire, everyone has a threshold. I just had a cousin and a coworker colleague die of cancer within a week of each other, the funerals the same day. I have another coworker colleague on leave towards retirement due to cancer. And I have a fourth who I know has been battling the beast, but I've honestly been too scared to ask him how he is doing. Things are changing at my close-knit college community, driven by the President and board. My portfolio is in for promotion to full, but my Dean is brand new and not particularly supportive. I question everyday whether I am serving the right people - why am I not serving the public education system. I'm pretty sure its is part of the 7-year itch, aggravated by confronting my own mortality.
As I mash the blackberries, grown on the bush in my backyard, I think about how much I love being able to do this. The nature of this activity is so close to the earth. I reminisce about my grandmother, my Nana, showing me how to make jam. Years later she would discover freezer jam and excitedly she gave me the freezer jars with purple caps. I was always a bit intimidated by the canning process, but this I could do. I lived with my Nana for about three years. The first time, it was just as I was starting grad school. My grandfather, Pops as we used to call him, had just died, and my husband and I moved in with her. In those years, I became close to her. She had her faults, but she also had an amazing amount of love. Everyone that knew her asked her for a hug, "because she gives the best hugs." I once went to the nature center for an activity and had to stop at least 5 times for people to get a hug from Nana. She taught me how to make pie crust (it took me about five times before I finally figured out what a little bit of this and a little bit of that were in cups and tablespoons), how to make perfect popovers (a Maine tradition), zucchini bread, and other baked goods. Sometimes I feel guilty about taking joy in these domestic activities, because I in my work life, I live in a man's world, like a man would. Am I compromising my toughness, my feminism, by participating in domestic chores? And I always come back to WHY I'm soothed by picking berries, like I used to pick with my Nana, by the smell of pot pie in the oven, by the taste of cream beef on toast - this feeds my soul as much as it feeds my stomach.
I've always felt that my life straddles two worlds in most dimensions: logic versus emotion, domestic vs feminist, white vs brown. Mama Alicia was my Nana on my dad's side. I grew up on the other side of the country from her and most of my dad's family, who had immigrated to California. Sadly, Mama Alicia also didn't have the cooking skills of my Nana to pass along. Her version of cooking for a family gathering was calling in an order for "El Pollo Loco." Despite this, I still can feel her genes come to life in my body when I taste Peruvian food. I don't have just one set of food that speaks to my soul - I have many. I don't have just one country or culture or language that is part of me, I have many. Lately, the part of me that is Latina has felt attacked. Ironically, the more it is attacked, the more pride I feel. I post a lot about Latin@ issues. But I am not just Latina - it's just a side of me that has needed more rejuvenation and reassurance. Making jam, making zucchini bread, reconnects my aching soul to the rest of me - to my mom, my Nana, and my Pops. It completes me.
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