For one moment I could almost hear Elaine in the kitchen, the soft percussion of a wooden spoon tapping the rim of a pot, the particular rhythm she fell into when she was making soup and thinking about something she would not tell you about until she was ready. I did not start with the furniture. I started with the things that could not be replaced.
The photo albums from the hall closet, their spines cracked and soft from decades of handling. Her jewelry case, small and velvet lined, containing nothing valuable by anyone else’s standard but irreplaceable by mine: a cameo brooch her own mother had worn, a thin gold chain with a pendant shaped like a clover, clip on earrings she had put on every Sunday morning for as long as I could remember. The handwritten recipe cards with butter stains on the corners and annotations in her careful slanted script, double the vanilla and Margaret’s version, better crust.
