A Lament, of sorts.

I’m not particularly nostalgic. Wait, never mind, I can’t possibly defend that. I’m not excessively nostalgic. Much better.

I had an opportunity to do some work in a city in the centre of the province – Kamloops. Nice place, amazing scenery – it’s actually a desert – gets about 2 inches of rain per year. Three hours north of the border. Strange place, Canada.

Kamloops is about an hour’s drive from Salmon Arm, where my father grew up. He emigrated with his family after WWII. They came from Birmingham, or what little was left of it after the War.

My brother commented once that our grandfather wasn’t much of a traveler. However, he did pick up and move his family to Western Canada from the middle of England, which as far as my brother was concerned (and I agree with him) probably used up all of my grandfather’s wanderlust – what little there might have been of it.

I knew both grandparents rather well. My mother (for which I will be eternally grateful to her for) insisted that we get to know them. As a consequence spent a lot of time with them, and with my aunt Hylda, my grandmother’s sister, who was the one who actually found Salmon Arm and got them to move West.

To the title of this post – my lament is that I didn’t pay near enough attention when my grandmother was cooking. Well, baking. She could do a decent meal, even though she was British (ha) but my God, could she bake a pie.

I lament I didn’t pay more attention. It wasn’t up to her to show me her secrets – which she would have done, no question. It was up to me. I lament that the dominant paradigm was that men (and boys) just didn’t spend much time in the kitchen and were never really asked to help or given much instruction. I close my eyes and I really want to picture her making her pastry. I think I can remember her rolling it out, and I certainly remember this great floral apron she had. I remember the tiny kitchen of their split-level house; I remember the fact that there was no dishwasher and we all had to take turns washing dishes – thankfully my gender didn’t preclude me from that task. But picturing her deft touch with the pastry eludes me.

I really want to ask her about her cherry pie. And her apple pie… And the pumpkin pies she used to make…

I want to know how she did it. How she survived the unrelenting bombing; survived having measles when she was 3 and losing an eye ; surviving tuberculosis and living for decades with only one lung… And, of course, how her pastry was just so much better than anyone else’s. The British Reserve was in play, of course. Not for the pastry, but for the rest of it, definitely. And she didn’t want to talk about such things. She was always much more interested in politics and current events.

I can find the perfect pie recipe in a book, but of course it’s not quite the same thing.