How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [5]
Suddenly, I want to make a list of all the food we had at my going-away party, and I’m sure it’s because I don’t want to forget any part of the event that was held in my honor. After all, how many good-bye parties does one get in a lifetime?
Before i grab a napkin to jot down the names of the various dishes from my party, I see another gift—one that begs my attention—and I pull it from my purse. It’s a hardcover journal Chef B gave me. “Writing down your heart is healing,” he told me when I opened the blank journal. “One lady, father die, then her sister, then her cat. Next, she does not want to keep on. She write her heart onto the pages of her journal. She find some peace.”
The shiny cover of the journal features a slice of peach pie next to a goblet of a clear liquid and a white mug of a dark beverage—my guess, Costa Rican coffee with a rainforest blend.
“Write each day. Date on the page,” were Chef B’s instructions to me.
Writing and I have never gotten along. Writing makes me remember a creative writing class I was forced to take in high school.
“How many writing courses did you have in high school?” Sally asked me once when I complained about my lack of desire to write.
I was icing a coconut chocolate cake in my apartment for my friend Jeannie’s thirtieth birthday. I thought a moment as Sally swiped a dollop of buttercream frosting from the bowl. “One.”
“One class?”
“Yeah, one creative writing class.”
“And it was awful?” She licked her fingers, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“It was terrible.”
“Why?”
I needed no other prompting; I told her. “The teacher went on and on about the muse and words and the value of them. Her husband had Alzheimer’s, and she had to tell him good-bye long before he actually physically died.”
“One class?” said Sally. I don’t know why she felt she had to repeat that again.
I took a spatula from a drawer and used it to scoop the thick, creamy frosting from the mixing bowl into my decorator’s bag. “Her husband loved roses, and she’d pick one from their garden each morning. She always placed the rose in a slender crystal vase—one he had given to her the first time he’d ever bought her roses. Then she’d push his wheelchair to the kitchen table and ask him, ‘What color is it?’ He would stare at the rose and answer whatever color it was. Until one morning when she brought in a red rose and her husband called it yellow.”
“Sad,” said Sally. She thought a moment longer and repeated, “Sad.”
“The teacher read a poem she wrote about it, and then a short essay, and then another poem. All about her husband and this rose.”
“Alzheimer’s is a nasty disease.” Sally had a faraway look in her eyes, and under other circumstances I would have thought to ask if she’d had experience with a loved one with Alzheimer’s, but no, I was on a roll.
“She even wrote a letter to the editor of the paper about her husband and the rose.” My voice had somehow reached that annoying high-pitched timbre. I took a breath and added, “All these tips on how to deal with losing your loved one before he’s really gone.”
Sally sighed as she watched me pipe fleur-de-lis—three shells—along the sides of the cake. “So you really hated that class, then,” she concluded. “You make it sound like you’ve suffered through dozens of creative writing classes.”
True, I’ve only had one creative writing class, but it felt like a dozen.
Does Chef B really expect me to write down my feelings? When pigs fly, I think as I snap the journal shut. If the slice of peach pie on the cover were real, it would have fallen onto the floor from the force of my closing the cover.
I need a slice of peach pie.
The door swings open, and I look up to see a couple walk into the diner. They are both young and beautiful,