My mother's handwriting

We moved Mom into the place on Voorhees Road the week before Christmas. She is fine. She is better than fine, she has already organized some sort of faction at the Tuesday card game, which anybody who knows my mother will find entirely predictable.

The house is the part nobody warns you about. Forty-one years of a person in three bedrooms and a basement, and there is no version of sorting through it that is not strange.

I found her recipe cards in a shoebox behind the water heater. Maybe sixty of them, the little ruled index cards, most of them stained through with something. And I stood down there in the cold for I do not know how long, and it was not the recipes. It was her handwriting.

I have not seen my mother's handwriting in years. She types now, and badly, and before that she stopped writing much of anything because of her hands. But there it was in blue ballpoint from probably 1988, that hard forward slant she has, the way she does a capital B like it is a number thirteen. I would know it anywhere. I did not know that I would know it anywhere until I was standing there knowing it.

The amounts on a lot of them are wrong, and they are wrong deliberately. Her rolls say one cup of milk and they have never in their life been one cup of milk. She did that to her sister and she did it to the church cookbook and it turns out she did it to her own recipe box, which is somehow the most her thing in the entire house.

Rob came down to see what was taking me so long and found me sitting on the basement step with a shoebox and did the correct thing, which was to say nothing at all and go back up.

What has stayed with me since is that of everything in that house, the furniture and the photographs and the good dishes we are all supposed to want, the thing that actually held her was sixty index cards nobody was keeping on purpose. She wrote them for herself. There was no occasion. She was just writing down how to make the rolls.

I have taken the whole box. Emma can fight me for it later.

Michelle