the heart for it
My mother’s brother was in the foreign service, and for many years he and his family lived his work in country after country around the globe. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, almost 25 years ago, friends and colleagues came from all over the world to offer condolence. Unbeknownst to most living beings, myself included, I was newly pregnant with my first baby at this time, and whatever it is that pregnancy and birth and grief do to our powers of recall, that dynamic trio has mercifully allowed a few moments from that time to stand in perfect detail.
One thing I think about often is how a close friend of theirs rushed from wherever she was living at that time (which was, um, somewhere very far away—ah, memory) to the funeral, which was definitely in Washington, but she missed the occasion. The winsome ways of trans-oceanic travel meant she arrived in their living room after even the aftermath, in an hour when all the hoopla and post-hoopla clean-up was done with and the house was quiet. She was a lovely, lovely person, and I remember she sat on the couch by the sunny front window with my aunt and cousins, clasping their hands and sharing stories from the time when they had all been stationed together somewhere (also very far away) and everyone bittersweetly held their breath a little bit, waiting for my uncle to step through the doorway in his gangly way and join the little reunion.
I have a hard time knowing where to start stories, can you tell? Because everything reminds me of something. I’m in that living room in my mind now, looking at the needlepoint my grandmother made over by the fireplace. Remembering childhood thanksgivings in the dining room there, seeing the perpetually comedic mismatch of my short little mother and her very tall baby brother. My grandmother’s given name was Corinne, but she was known her whole life as Cookie, and to my beautiful Brazilian aunt she was ‘Mom Cookie.’ There is a great story my aunt tells about my mother arriving in Rio for their wedding, only to find my grandmother having a fit of the vapors in some fashion. “I remember we were all terrified about what could be wrong with her and here comes your mother, just off a plane from New York and looking so glamorous to me, marching down the hallway of the hospital with her long braid swinging,” says my aunt, “and she said so firmly to Mom Cookie ‘pull yourself together and get out of that bed! This is not about you!’ and that was that.”
We could go a lot of places from there! Yes we could! But back in that sunny 1995 living room, the kind jet-lagged friend is telling us how before she left to fly here, she told her son about the death, and answered his questions about its cause. She remembered that when he was very young and they were sitting together making Valentines, he had asked her why people like to render hearts in the symmetrical way that makes cutting them from construction paper so simple and satisfying to do. She told us that the explanation came to her as if delivered by angels, so tidy and beautiful, and she recalled it as one of those rare moments when a parent feels they are really hitting it out of the park.
We make them that shape, she said, as a way to show where love comes from. Two halves, she told him, to symbolize how your beautiful heart is made from a piece of my heart and a piece of Daddy’s.
Several months later, he came into the kitchen to find his mom doing that thing you are about to reenact to make sure you understand what I mean, which is tapping yourself on the sternum area to remind yourself why you came into the room in the first place.
“Is it still bothering you?” he asked her, clearly very worried.
“Is what still bothering me?” she asked.
“The hole in your heart,” he said. “From when you made me.”
So all the time she had been enjoying the residual high of offering a poetic origin story for the source of love, he had been harboring secret panic about his parents’ imminent collapse.
Not long after this day I learned I was pregnant, and in the always-vivid dreams of pregnancy my uncle figured prominently. Most days, if I don’t write them down on the bedside notepad which isn’t usually there, I have forgotten my dreams by breakfast. But I remember some of those pregnancy dreams from decades ago like I remember that afternoon visit in the living room. In my favorite one, the baby had arrived and all our families were gathered around me in the bed, where I sat holding her. I noticed her gaze was trained not on this loving circle of relatives but on the door, and I followed it to see him standing on the threshold. It was clear, in the way things are clear in dreams, that only she and I could see him and that my ability to see him was by grace of the fact that she could. He walked around behind the group and peered over their shoulders to take a look at her, smiled and nodded to me. “Just wanted to make sure she got here ok,” he said, and off he went.
They share a middle name.
Some years later, on the night my son was born the midwife heard a telltale whooshing when she listened to his chest, and she suggested that we see a cardiologist as it sounded to her ear like there could be some little holes in there. It was a long week until we could make that appointment come to pass, and when we did, her suspicions were confirmed. We were reassured he would likely heal them on his own as he grew, and that also came to be confirmed, over a period of years. When we got home from that first appointment my mother came by with a tray of cookies, little shortbreads cut in the shape of perfect, perfect, whole and symmetrical hearts.
Pshaw to Valentine’s Day, with its many-decibiled commodification of romantic love. But hurrah to cookies and hearts and the pulsing of love in the veins. I hope you feel it all around you. xxoo
buckwheat hearts
makes about 2 dozen
These buttery shortbreads get a little je ne sais quoi from nutty buckwheat flour and a bit of goat cheese, which almost disappears but not quite. Rolling and cutting is optional; you can also form a slice-able log and achieve the same end result in terms of flavor and crunch. A quick dip in melted chocolate and a sprinkle of color dresses them up nicely for giving and receiving, welcome any day of the year. Use the best butter you can; a foncy type like Plugra really shines here.
For the cookies:
1½ cups oat flour (165g)
¾ cup buckwheat flour (110g)
¾ cup powdered sugar (75g)
1 teaspoon coarse salt
½ cup unsalted butter (8 tablespoons)
3 ounces soft fresh plain goat cheese
To finish:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
2-3 tablespoons freeze dried raspberries, strawberries and/or rose petals, lightly crushed
In the bowl of a food processor, combine the dry ingredients and pulse a few times to mix. Drop in the butter, cut in 1” pieces, and the goat cheese. Pulse several times, until the mixture resembles damp sand. Remove to a mixing bowl and compress and knead together into a ball. Cut the dough ball in half and press each half between two sheets of wax paper. Roll to just a little less than ½“ thick and chill until firm. You can alternatively just roll the dough ball into a cylinder and wrap it securely in wax paper to chill.
Heat the oven to 350°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cut the chilled dough into the desired shapes, or slice the log into ½“ coins, and arrange on the parchment. Bake 6-8 minutes, until set on top and golden at the edges. Carefully remove to a cooling rack.
Melt ¾ of the chocolate in a small bowl set in hot water. When it has melted, remove from heat and stir in the remaining chocolate (this will temper it for a shinier finish). Dip the cooled cookies in the melted chocolate, using care as they are somewhat delicate. Before the chocolate cools, drop some of the crushed fruit and/or petals on top.