Anne Woodford was a witch. That was the only conclusion my 10-year-old mind could whittle out as I watched her place the giant copper pot on the stovetop and then open the thick, leather-bound book with yellowed pages.
“You’re making a brew to turn someone into a frog, aren’t you?”
“Why on earth would you say such a thing, Donna Jane?” my best friend Molly’s mother asked and poured a thick stream of oil into the pot.
“Because you have a cauldron and a book of spells.”
“Silly thing, this is my spaghetti saucepot. I’m going to make a big batch, so we have enough to can.”
“But sauce already comes in a can.”
“Not my sauce. It’s from my great-grandmother’s recipe. She brought it with her straight from Sicily when she and her husband immigrated here. It’s one hundred percent homemade.”
Homemade was pretty much a curse word in my family. None of the women cared a hot fancy damn about cooking—and it showed in their burnt biscuits, wallpaper-paste potatoes, store-bought birthday cakes, and Thanksgiving turkeys that resembled styrofoam wrapped in cracked skin.
So, I watched, enrapt, as Mrs. Woodford reached into the refrigerator and pulled out big juicy tomatoes and glossy green peppers.
Mrs. Woodford’s fridge was bedecked with daisy-shaped magnets that held drawings of purple polka-dotted cows in orange pastures, jagged-edged recipes ripped from newspapers, report cards boasting mostly Bs, and Polaroid snapshots of Molly and her little brother.
At home, our harvest gold refrigerator was … well … just a refrigerator.
Mrs. Woodford unsheathed a gleaming knife from an oak block and retrieved a thick wooden cutting board from a hook on the wall. She diced the onions and peppers into perfectly uniform pieces and dropped them into the sizzling oil. Then, the sorceress turned her focus to these odd white bulbs that I later found out were garlic. After separating out and skinning the moon-shaped pieces, she sliced them papyrus thin. Next, she slaughtered the rambunctious tomatoes with a series of swift blade strokes until they were reduced to big, slobbery chunks and added them to the pot. An aroma unlike anything I’d ever smelled—both earthy and ethereal—snaked from the pot and slithered into my nostrils, casting a spell, rendering me momentarily speechless.
Then, Molly’s mother threw open the cabinet door revealing rows of glass apothecary bottles. Gold-embossed labels spelled out magic words in scrolling script.
Witch! Definitely a witch.
“Are those the ingredients to make magic potions?”
“No, they’re spices. This is a spice rack.”
“Spice rack,” I repeated in a whisper, as I crept closer and peered at the contents of the bottles. One contained tiny, intact leaves that look like they’d been plucked from a fairy bush. Another had an orange powder the color of Dorito dust. Several held glistening green flakes.
I stood on tiptoe and leaned in close enough to read the loopy letters. Ooo—rrreee—gaaa—no, paars-leey, maaa—jooo—raaam—I sounded out the words in my head.
Mrs. Woodford wiped her hands on a gingham dish towel and started pulling down bottle after bottle and lining them up on the countertop. “I’m sure your mother has spices. Haven’t you ever seen her use them when she cooks?”
“When my mom cooks, which isn’t very often, she doesn’t allow me to watch. She won’t even let me in the room. She says it makes her nervous.”
“Oh, well, that explains it. Trust me, every household has spices.”
Back at home the next day, I waited until my mother was completely engrossed in her afternoon piano practice and snuck toward the kitchen. She was playing a song with lots of pedal and minor chords. It reminded me of the theme music from a Dracula film and underscored my daring mission perfectly.
I stepped through the doorway and let my eyes dance over the details of the room, seeing it as if for the first time. There really wasn’t much to see. Like the fridge, all horizontal surfaces were bare. There was no whimsical jar in the shape of a bear guarding homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, no KitchenAid mixer, and no coffee pot with decaf still left in the carafe—just a gigantic role of Bounty paper towels, which served as a perfect accompaniment to the overpowering smell of Clorox bleach that lingered in the air.
Filled with a mixture of hope and fear, I inched open the menacing mahogany door to the nearest cabinet and peeked inside—nothing but plates and bowls. Disappointed but not discouraged, I forged ahead, next venturing into a second dark wood vault. This one housed a lazy Susan stacked with neat rows of cans. When I reached the third cabinet, I felt a tingling sensation in my fingertips. Magic was close by.
I swung open the door. Sure enough, hanging inside—just as it had been at Molly’s house—was a spice rack. But in the place of the quaint glass bottles were plastic, cylindrical containers with serious-looking labels covered in black block lettering and numbers with periods in the middle and abbreviations at the end.
In place of mystical plants and powders was a plethora of pills as varied as my mother’s wig collection—small blue tablets, peachy ovals and two-toned capsules. I read down the row of bottles sounding out the words just as I had done with the spices: Diiil—lau—ded, Dex—aaa—drine, Klo—nooo—pin. There were also Librium, Percodan, Valium, Vicadin and others I couldn’t begin to pronounce.
No wonder my mother couldn’t cook.
2024 Finalist Submission for Penned: Non-Fiction