The recipe card is for banana bread.
That is what it says
in my grandma’s slanted blue cursive,
the capital B all loops and flourish,
leaning forward
like it was late for something fancy.
Three bananas, very ripe.
Half a cup of butter.
A note in the margin:
more cinnamon than you think.
But the card is also
a grease stain shaped like Ohio,
a corner softened by thumbs,
a coffee ring from a morning
nobody wrote down.
It is the radio on low
and someone humming
only the part of the song
they knew.
It is my grandma at the counter
in a light pink robe
that certainly had a tissue
in the pocket.
Outside, the sky has gone
the color of dishwater.
Rain is coming.
Rain is always coming
to somebody.
Memory does not show up in order.
It comes the way the smell does
when the oven door opens—
all at once,
from every direction,
a little too hot to hold.
The first drops hit the window
one at a time,
each finding its own way down—
no two
remembering the glass
the same.
So I do what she did
on days like this.
I bake the bread.
I use more cinnamon than I think.
It is not the same,
which is not a failure,
only a fact,
like distance,
like an old address,
like her house
now belonging to people
who probably wonder
about the pencil marks
inside the pantry door.
Height of a child.
Height of a child.
Height of a child.
Then nothing.
Someone has painted over them by now.
Or hasn’t.
I will never know,
and that, too,
is part of the recipe.
The rain has stopped.
The maple drips anyway,
still letting go
of what the sky
already let go of.
I slice the bread while it’s still warm,
against her advice,
and eat it standing at the counter
the way she did,
which makes this
a snack,
a habit,
an inheritance,
a conversation
neither of us has to finish.
— Iris Lennox
