Passing of days

I once spent an entire afternoon making gnocci from scratch, at the neighbors house. This was back when I lived at home during college. I used to go lots of places to learn to cook and spend some time doing something other than commuting and being in school.

Knead the warm dough, cut the batch into quarters, and then spend time rolling it out into snakes. There might have been a blessing over them at that point. Then cut it, then running small bits over a mysterious wooden board that had little slats cut into it to make the marks in the gnocci that catch the sauce better. The kitchen was dark and filled with the sounds of women working, and sauce simmering on the stove. Over an over, roll, cut, pattern, and put to the side. We must have made hundreds of them. Grandma was overseeing from her chair. A slab of butter melted in a pan, and then a wedge of bony beef was seared in it, fat and juice sizzling down its sides as each one was browned, releasing the wonderful scent of spiced meat. Then it went into the giant sauce pot on the stove. Then came the boiling of the gnocci bits. One batch after another until they were all gone. Then it was time to eat them, drowned in sauce with a few slices of the beef on top. Hunger pangs were worth the wait as they were quelled quite quickly by the serving I received.

Now two of the people who were in that kitchen are all that's left, well, almost. Lena was diagnosed with pulminory fibrosis of the lungs this weekend. She's unconscious at the moment, in fact she spent her birthday last week unconscious with all her grandchildren around her. I've only heard from scattered phone calls from my mother and her daughter-in-law who also happens to be an old high school friend. She goes off the ventilator tomorrow from what I've been told, at which point, she will most likely pass away.

I will miss her and her wonderful southern italian accent and will always remember her when I make gnocci.

The passing of days hasn't gotten easier as I reach my 30 year mark, just more bittersweet as every year I loose more friends and colleagues. I'm trying to focus on the happy memories, but they make my few hours to myself quite melancholy, remembering people who are gone, of which quite a few have left in the last few months. This one was much closer than the recent deaths I've encountered, so I'm not sure how I'll deal with the emotion of it.