Nurture

- Mama? Tell me the story again, about great grandma Vivianne - peeped Jo.

- It’s past your bedtime, sweetheart, and I’ve already read TWO stories - remarked Arianne, but she loved talking about her grandmother, and today would’ve been her 101st birthday, so she smiled tenderly at her daughter, knowing that she would give in.

Arianne stroked her daughter’s forehead. She knew it was unlikely, but still she thougth her daughter looked very much like Mamie Vivianne, or at least something in her daughter's eyes reminded her of her grandmother.

- Have I told you that you remind me of her?

- Yes, mama, like a hundred times - laughed Jo.

- Well, it is appropriate, then, that I say it to you again, because the number 101 has special significance today. Today would have been Mamie Vivianne’s 101st birthday.

- Wow, that’s old.

- “But she learned how to cook when she was about your age” - noted Arianne - “she had to. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was the oldest sister. Back then it meant that she became the lady of the house, and managing the household fell on her. Can you imagine being in charge of going to market, planning and cooking meals, cleaning, and sending your siblings to school?”

- I don’t have siblings, mama.

- “Well, I know that, but imagine if you did. It is a lot of responsibility for someone so young. At least nowadays it is considered a lot of responsibility. Back then things were different” - Arianne cringed a little thinking about that - “back then if you were a woman, you were raised to take care of a home, and going to school wasn’t a priority. Learning how to be a wife, a mom, and a homemaker was the priority. Mamie Vivianne didn’t finish 3rd grade.”

That was hard for Arianne to imagine. A life without school. When Arianne completed her doctorate, Jo liked to tease her that she had finished twenty-fifth grade. “Mama has ALL the degrees!” she would joke.

Camille, Arianne’s maman, had always been supportive of her, but Arianne could tell she had been the slightest bit disappointed when Arianne’s passion for numbers and sciences had surpassed her passion for cooking. When Arianne was a little girl, all her pretend playing involved nurturing: caring for children, growing herbs, going to market to find the best ingredients, making the most delicious imaginary concoctions. Camille was sure that Arianne had inherited the gift. So when Arianne decided to pursue a career in epidemiology instead of taking over the cafe, it would have been only natural if Camille felt that the gift was being squandered.

- “Your great grandmother had a gift, Jo, for caring and nurturing, but above all, for cooking. And not many understood the nature of that gift. It went beyond having the right recipes. Hundreds of people throughout the years have asked Mamie Vivianne for her recipes, and she would give them freely, but nobody could replicate her dishes. Rumors have always circulated that she always withheld some ingredient, that there was some secret to her recipes that she wasn’t sharing. Some people would come back and tell her that they had followed the recipe exactly, but that they had gotten only a mediocre result, so there must be something missing in her recipe, her secret ingredient. “Love” is what she would say only partly joking. Or “maybe it’s all in the hand that prepares the dish” accompanied by a shrug. Those responses would irritate some people, especially those who had tried to impress someone with the dish and failed, because it implied that they had not put enough love into the dish, or that they just didn’t have the talent.”

- “But there was truth in those statements too. If I had to describe the gift, Mamie Vivianne’s statements were more accurate than one would think. Choosing the right ingredients for a dish did involve a kind of connection to the fruits of the earth that, if it had been to a pet or a person, one would undoubtedly call it “love”. Mamie Vivianne knew which was the right potato, the right pepper, and the right tomato for her chicken stew. Even the chicken was carefully chosen, as if it had been bred for the occasion of -for in what everyone else’s eyes was- a simple chicken stew. I could hear Mamie Vivianne having full loving conversations with the chicken in her backyard before the chosen one joined her set of ingredients.”

- “Once in the kitchen, her hands would fly. Honestly, Jo, I don’t know whether the recipes were always the same. Mamie Vivianne had an uncanny instinct to know what a dish was missing. A bit of marjoram here. Some more cardamon there.”

- “But before all that, before she lived in America, when Mamie Vivianne was about 18, a girl from her parish came to ask her for a favor. She had fallen in love with a young man, and wanted to impress him by baking his favorite treat: a chocolate cake. Even at that young age Mamie’s chocolate cake was famous in the whole commune, and some say beyond. The problem was, said the girl, that she knew that even if she followed the recipe exactly, her chocolate cake would be mediocre at best. So she asked Mamie Vivianne if she could bake it for her. She offered to pay her what little money she had, but Mamie Vivianne would not accept any payment.”

- “So Mamie Vivianne did what she did best. She poured herself into that chocolate cake and gave it to the girl. The next day the girl came back to see Mamie Vivianne, and she was bathed in tears. The young man had rejected her after she gave her a slice of the chocolate cake. She was terribly upset and accused Mamie Vivianne of having done something to the cake, some witchcraft, for the young man took a bite of it and immediately told the girl that he was sorry to have wasted her time, but he had realized that she was not the one for him.”

- “But that was not it. Shortly thereafter, the same young man began seeking Mamie Vivianne out, and expressed his intentions to court her. You can imagine how the accusations of witchcraft surged after that. People thought that for sure Mamie Vivianne had put something into that cake; a love potion or something that made this young man leave her sweetheart and become instead enchanted by her. Mamie Vivianne did not know what she had done wrong. In her mind, she had simply baked the best chocolate cake she knew how to, and had done so with love and care, but she had not added any odd ingredients, nor had she ever delved into witchcraft.”

- “Not long after that, when the opportunity presented itself to migrate to America, Mamie Vivianne took it in a heartbeat. Her siblings were grown and could care for themselves, and living in her parish had become beyond unpleasant, with the way that people whispered behind her back and sometimes said nasty things to her face. Some even went as far as to threaten her. So she packed light and came to live here in Maine.”

- “Her cooking skills helped her prosper after she arrived, and only a year later she had opened her own cafe. It was there, one morning, when she was opening the cafe for the day, that she saw him come in. It was the young man, and he had managed to find her this far from home.”

- What was the young man’s name, mama?

- You know it. It was Gustav.

- Great grandpa Gustav?

- Yep. Papy Gustav had tracked her down all the way from their hometown in France to Lewiston, Maine, across an entire ocean.

- And what did he tell her?

- “He told her that he still wanted to court her, if that was agreeable to her. Mamie Vivianne was overwhelmed by his persistence, so she agreed. A year later they were married, and a year after that grandma Camille was born”.

- Mama, do you have great-grandma’s chocolate cake recipe? - inquired Jo.

- I do.

- Have you ever baked it?

Arianne considered her answer carefully. She didn’t know if it was the right time yet. She also didn’t know if it mattered at all. Jo was not her biological child, so she couldn’t have inherited the gift.

- I have - answered Arianne - only once. The day I met your father.

- Can we make it together tomorrow?

- Possibly -responded Arianne cautiously- but now it’s time for you to go to sleep. Good night, sweetheart.

- Ok mama. Good night. I love you.

- I love you too, Jo - responded Arianne lovingly, and she kissed her daughter’s forehead.

Arianne made herself a cup of tea but couldn’t stop thinking about her grandmother and her daughter. Arianne was a woman of science, but when it came to this, she wasn’t quite sure what to believe. She knew that there was more than simply great recipes to Mamie Vivianne’s cooking, and her mom’s and hers for that matter. She had witnessed firsthand the power of their cooking and their nurturing. Did Jo being adopted mean that the gift could not be passed on to her? She meditated on this as she sipped on her lavender tea and looked out the window into Jo’s garden. Her bell pepper and cucumber plants were thriving, a very unusual sight this late into the year.