Paring

By Beck

The phone rang very early this morning, which made me reach for it with that feeling of impending doom. What horror would I hear?

It was my daughter’s best friend. She needed a vegetable peeler for school. Ah.

So after phoning my own mother – I only own one vegetable peeler, which the Girl handily remembered that she needed for school – my child was off to school with her bookbag full of sharpness, ready. And the class spent their day making soup.

My daughter told me this after school. She tells me things in brief installments:

First, I heard that they made soup.

Half an hour later, I heard that it was potato soup.

Later still: homemade cheese crackers.

And just now: homemade cheesecake. Which is really interuppting the lyrical narrative flow of this, I must admit. I would like some homemade cheesecake is what I am primarily thinking right now. I am hungry writing these words, writing potato soup and cheese crackers and strawberry (she has just told me strawberry, whispering the word into my ear in passing) cheesecake.

Today, I read the story of Persephone to my little ones. Hades snatched her away as she was picking wild flowers and took her underground with him and her mother, Demeter, wandered the earth weeping, wanting her daughter back. (“This is an awful story,” said my son, sensibly.) And Demeter turned the world cold and barren and the people were starving as she mourned and raged.

My daughter heads off to school most mornings. And each day she comes home a little bit older, with a little bit more of what she will need to know before she leaves me for good, for her adult life that stretches ahead of her. It snows most mornings now, and I watch her go, feeling hungry for time that will not return. I am also frequently feeling really annoyed, because getting a moody ten year old ready for school is not my idea of fun.

Strawberry cheesecake, she told me, rubbing her stomach happily. And she gave me back my vegetable peeler and skipped away and I thought about Demeter weeping and raging and it was twenty seven below today.