A Recipe for Grief

Pull the weeds out of the desert soil. Twist the wild mustard gently to yank out the long tap roots.

Do not make eye contact with the dying roses. They hold nothing but hatred for you, the interloper who is withholding the water.

Stare instead at the small roadrunner darting across the dirt road leading to her adobe house, disappearing into the pecan trees.

Your mother insisted on growing roses in the desert. They were beautiful. Your mother was not made for small challenges. She had no interest in a cactus garden.

Less a woman (a mother, a wife, a teacher) and more a force of nature, someone around whom things (people, places, roses) rearranged themselves.

Everyone is trying to work out how to be in her absence.

A friend of your mother’s takes you shopping. Fill your basket with half a dozen varieties of cheese. Tell yourself that you are self-medicating.

Wrench the wild mustard out of the cracked ground in the blazing sun, as if this were a battle you might win.

Consider the name. Try a young leaf. It tastes of dust and desert and mustard.

You don’t know why this surprises you.

A friend of your mother’s brings a dozen freshly-laid eggs, overflow from an unknown hen house.

This is what you need, milk, butter, eggs, cheese. The garage is a makeshift pantry of shelf-stable food. The mice have moved in, devouring her oats. Faded stamps on cans Cans with faded stamps declaring best before 2018. Bulging condiments. A wide array of spices, all faded to the same beige color and flavor.

But many other items are fine: flour, salt, vinegar.

Use the vinegar to clean the limescale from her wine glasses, remnants of the well water.

A friend of your mother’s invites you to an evening out of the haunted house, to get loaded in her honor. Another offers an afternoon on her deck with a shared bottle of champagne.

Your mother had very good friends.

She would have brought nibbles.

Keep at the wild mustard growing across the grass, the gravel, the roadside canal. Ask the internet, who quickly identifies the yellow flowers and dandelion-like leaves. You are eradicating London Rocket, named after the Great Fire of London, when the weed sprung up in the burned soil which had once been city.  It sprouts after winter rains, thrives in disturbed soils. Almost as if it knows your mother has left.

Catalog the things she left behind. The creaking adobe house. The brightly coloured plates. The roses.

The internet assures you that London Rocket is edible, can be used in place of any bitter greens. Try another leaf. Spit it out. The internet is maybe wrong.

Be brave. Set aside the youngest weeds, with leaves almost tender. Wash them repeatedly in well water, in hopes of removing the taste of the desert, before chopping them fine to mix in with an egg.

In the back yard are five compost pits, shallow graves in the crab grass. There will be no one here to turn them over, to feed the roses. Put the egg shells in the compost bucket anyway.

Find her favourite ceramic pot, Le Creuset in bright orange. Light her aging gas stove, almost as old as you are, installed when the house was built. Bring butter and milk to a boil before dumping in the flour, mixing hard until you have the paste at the heart of choux pastry.

Add the egg and chopped mustard leaves, stirring hard with a wooden spoon. Curse yourself by the second egg, having somehow forgotten how hard it is to stir the dough by hand. Create a coherent mass. Be grateful that at least something feels coherent. Stir in your cheeses. Consider that this is surely an upper-body workout and add more cheese.

Your mother has seventeen boxes of ziplock bags. She used to bring extra to you when she came to visit, because you never seemed like you had enough, because they aren’t real ziplock. You wonder what post-war trauma has left her with a horror of running out of ziplock bags.

Snip the corner to pipe the dough. Watch the plastic split the wrong way, the dough spilling through. These bags have gussetted seams, an accordion fold at the base.

Give up.

Spoon the dough out of the bag into messy lumps on parchment.

Your mother loved making gougères. This seems altogether too posh a name for what you are making, like your mother, too European, too refined. You want something savoury and hearty. It is OK to call them cheese puffs.

The green-speckled mounds of dough look deeply unconvinced about their prospects. Transfer all your hopes to them, that they might grow up to be something real. Unlike the roses, whose tears you imagine you hear every time you look out at her front garden, if they had water left to cry.

In the oven, the dough rises into domes, as if you had carefully rounded them in the first place. They rise to twice their size, flecked with gold. Turn the trays, turn down the heat.

They come out perfectly: crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. There is no bitterness from the green leaves, just a breath of the scent of mustard as the cheese puffs dissolve in your mouth. In this, at least, you have done well.

The weeds are still growing. The roses are still dying. But for a moment, standing in her kitchen, you can almost imagine her with you.