When I stop to think about it, I don’t have that many regrets, except two, and they’re really not that big in the grand scheme of things. I’ve enjoyed. my life so far, there have been a lot of happy, happy times and a few really, really sad times, but those times happen in everyone’s life, I think. I’ve lived a good life.
The two regrets I do have though are not studying photography in college ( yes, I know that an English degree is a good thing to have, but if I had studied photography instead, who knows what my career could’ve been) . The second regret I have was not paying better attention to my mom and grandmother while they were busy cooking. It seems that the older I get, the more I’m coming to really enjoy cooking and baking. I’ve found that after a long season of shooting mountain bikes and trail runners and everything else that David and I photograph, to be able to get in the kitchen and try out new recipes and make a mess, to succeed or to miserably fail, is great therapy for me. I feel connected to the stories and the history of the recipes as I try to decipher my grandmother’s spidery handwriting for her recipe for Forgotten Cookies, to be able to look at my great-aunt Vada’s face while I follow along with the newspaper article featuring her sunshine cake and dinner rolls, even laugh at my mother’s “WAIT!! I forgot! You gotta add mozzarella cheese in-between the layers!” for her lasagna recipe written in her school teacher’s hand. The more I delve into Southern food history and read about the stories behind so many recipes, too many for me to try, the more I regret not learning alongside my mom. She tells me stories now over our weekly lunches about particular dishes, and I have a beautiful, yet vague, memory of my paternal grandmother hovering over the dinner table making sure that the crowd of uncles and aunts and cousins all had plenty to eat. It was her recipe for fried okra that got me hooked on that vegetable, in fact. I had just shoveled a second helping on my plate, when my dad glanced at me with a little twinkle in his eye and asked if I knew what that was. I told him no and he laughed and told me it was okra. I studied the pile of green and golden brown round objects for a second, looked back at him and said, “Okay, but I like them!” and put a big spoonful in my mouth.
I wonder if I’m leaving stories behind with my recipes.