Dispatches from the Rabbit Hole: Kneading

Yesterday, for the first time in three months, I made a challah for Shabbat. I brought out the long neglected bread flour, sugar, salt and yeast, along with the oil and eggs. I measured, cracked, kneaded. Using my beloved Kitchen Aid, I splotched all the ingredients into one bowl, watching the bread hook spin and spin until the separate ingredients became whole. I chose one of the bright and cheery dishtowels a friend brought me earlier this summer – designed to lift my soul – and placed it on top of the dough, covering it like a holy object.

It was holy.  It was food that I made to feed my family.  After three months of food and care being delivered by friends, it felt good to make something nourishing by my own hand.

Kneading, rolling, pounding. Pushing air out of pockets, breathing life into mass.

I was taking the day off, though that term has taken on new meaning this summer. It no longer means a day all for me; what it really means now is a day when I don’t have to be by my husband’s side all day. I still spend the first hours of my day helping him get up and settled, making two breakfasts (steroids make you hungry), planning the snack bag for the morning visit to the hospital for radiation treatment, getting all the many medications ready in their little plastic cups for the right dispensing at the right time of day and making lunch and mini-meals for someone else to provide while I’m out of the house.

I’m still running errand lists in my head, thinking about refilling prescriptions, stalking the records processing people at the old hospital to get the records sent to the new hospital; praying that the final week of treatment will be manageable. Still planning my kids’ sports and school schedules, although it’s unclear how much I will be able to participate in carpooling or even getting to games. Still wondering when my husband will be independent and mobile again, out of the recliner and wheelchair and back on his feet.

Still worrying about whether any of this is doing any good at all, and hoping we will soon find out that his cancer has been zapped to oblivion, allowing him and us to resume some semblance of normal again, for a while.

And that’s my day off.

Once the challah dough was rising, I took a long walk in my beloved urban getaway – our local park just blocks away, where you feel dipped in nature as you stroll along its creek and the long paths stretching from urban avenue to urban avenue. I was accompanied by familiar voices, voices from Israel in the form of a weekly podcast on issues of interest to me. Sometimes, like yesterday, I don’t even listen so much to the content of the words but simply to the timber of the voices, embracing me like an old familiar blanket. I walk and they talk; their beat impels my step as rhythmically as a Madonna song.

My day’s destination was the Torpedo Factory, an art center on a waterfront in Virginia with galleries and artist studios. I visited it for the first time many years ago, and brought my mother here several times, in the years where we were rediscovering each other as adults and I was learning how to forgive.

The ghost of my mother was shadowing me yesterday, as I soaked in the waterfront sunshine. I thought about how I took care of her, in the last three weeks of her life, diagnosed with lung cancer and preparing to die quickly. No treatments to drive to, no medications to prepare. No hope for the future. Just pain and fear and sorrow and loss. My mother’s permanent way of being. I am hoping our outcome is better.

The sunshine felt so warm and pleasant, I debated whether to walk into the gallery, unsure that I would find anything but ceramic bowls and candlesticks, much like the ones I purchased with delight so many years ago. But I no longer want ceramic bowls. I want light and love and good health and good friends and the freedom I had just three short months ago to live normally and happily. I was not going to find any of that in the Torpedo Factory.

Eleven years ago, when my mother was ill, and I walked everyday from her apartment to the hospital in which she was being treated, I would pass by a beautiful jewelry boutique. At first, I only allowed myself peeks in the windows. I was not in the market for jewelry. One day I stepped inside. Everything was beautiful, and sparking with small gems. Prices way beyond my normal reach. But nothing was normal anymore.

I spied a pair of diamond pave earrings. They were perfect. From then on, on my way home from the hospital, I would stop in the shop and look at the earrings. Eventually, I decided to stop at the ATM, take out the cash I needed, more than I had ever spent on a piece of jewelry, and bring the earrings home with me. They became my talisman against the evil eye, reminding me always of my mother and the special time we spent together at the end of her life.

Two years ago, I lost one of the earrings. I mourned it, thought about having its mate made into a pendant necklace, but it still sits in my jewelry box, reproaching me and reminding me that that part of my life is now over.

I decided to enter the long hallway of the Torpedo Factory. I glazed over at gallery after gallery of paintings and tapestries and, yes, ceramic bowls.  Nothing was catching my eye. I was about to leave, but noticed a jewelry studio. Walking in, I sensed my mother next to me.

There in the studio was a silver ring, embedded with tiny, sparkling yellow and white diamonds, brushed with a dark patina. It fit my finger perfectly. The jeweler, an emigree from Serbia, told me that he would give me a special price, much less than the website orders he takes. I stared at the ring, knowing that it was already replacing my old talisman and would become the new. Sitting on my middle right hand finger, I could feel its metal magic radiating strength up my arm and through my bloodstream. The ring would protect me from whatever I need to face.

As I walked back out into the sunshine, ring on my finger, a sob rose up in my throat from a place so deep it choked me. I felt my mother walking by my side, with me as I navigate this next phase of my life.

When I arrived home at the end of my day off, all was quiet. My husband was doing therapy exercises, my children had cleaned their rooms, done their laundry and were getting ready for Shabbat dinner.

I returned to my challah dough. I took off the ring, and began to knead. Pushing, shoving, moving the air pockets. Kneading, needing, kneading, needing.

I put the ring back on. My finger already felt naked without it. We baked the bread, lit the candles, told each other what we were grateful for this week. My husband, the heir to a mystical family, is convinced that the Shabbat angels have been visiting our house every week, helping him heal. Our children, and while skeptical, were entranced, and I am sure they will remember and tell their own children about the Shabbat angels some day. I was grateful for a week of productive conversations and work. My kids are happy that sports are starting. We are all looking forward to a new season.

We entered another Shabbat with open hearts … and with a force of light emanating from my beautiful ring.

Kneading, needing. Kneading, needing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Gina Fiedel]

Thank you again for bringing me close to you.

This time, it was our moms appearing and disappearing. For the first time in so many years, my mom didn't hover around my birthday. Odd how I missed her while other years, I felt somewhat annoyed at her intrusions.

I'm so glad you bought the ring.