I’m padding around my kitchen barefoot, late at night, on a rescue mission – making homemade ricotta from the milk that’s set to expire and cooking a batch of broccoli cheddar soup before the broccoli expires too. I love this – this quiet solo time in the kitchen. Pots on the stove. Fragrant aromas wafting through the house. Soft lighting. A shaft of moonlight falling across the dining room table. It’s a gorgeous August night. There’s a cool breeze, a waxing gibbous moon, and Neil Diamond singing “Stones” from the Hot August Night album on the radio. I’m on a massive trip down memory lane, remembering my beautiful best friend from high school, who succumbed to cancer way too early. We knew every single word to this entire album.

I keep stirring the milk for the ricotta, pausing to check the temperature using my mother’s old candy making thermometer. I’m remembering my mother making jam and coconut ice, and old-fashioned boiled fudge with this thermometer. I can see her perched over the pan, oven mitts on, peering at the thermostat complaining that the numbers were just too damned small.

I hung around when she was cooking, just as I’d hung around my grandfather in his kitchen years before. I grew up loving the kitchen, loving what happened in there. The magical, chemical transformations. The productivity. The smells and tastes. The tangible results.  The memories. To this day, even when I’m alone in my kitchen, I’m never actually alone. I’m remembering the people I’ve loved, the people I love. There’s a lifetime of memories in every dish I cook.

In my last post, I talked about living alone for the first time in my life. I married my university sweetheart while we were still undergraduates. We ran away and eloped. Partly so that I could get a student loan to keep studying; partly because we couldn’t keep our hands or our eyes off each other; and partly because we completed each other. That marriage lasted thirty-one adventuresome, beautiful, challenging, turbulent, perfect years.  We moved around the world three times and had a pair of beautiful daughters who grew up between Canada and Australia. Those two girls are adults now, and best friends, and the most kind, caring, loving human beings. One’s a doctor about to marry her own sweetheart and the other is set to graduate with her master’s degree in occupational therapy and start her career. And as for that man I married, the relationship isn’t over – it’s just changed, taken on a new shape. He’s still the same loyal, intelligent, well-mannered, handsome man – still one of my favourite people on the planet.

Keep moving forwards, practice gratitude – these are the things I repeat to myself each day. I have so much in my life. A truly beautiful family. Extraordinary friends with a rare gift for friendship. A sweet little house with a well-stocked pantry. A big shaggy diva of a dog. A pile of books on my bedside table. Places to go and friends to go with. Work that I love. I am blessed, rich in so many things. So many memories. So much love in my life and so much gratitude. And so much more to look forward to.

The milk is boiling and I double-check the temperature even though I don’t really need to. I pour in the vinegar and a bit of salt and watch as the mixture starts to curdle. Pour it through a coffee filter in a sieve and let the curds separate from the whey. Such a simple, beautiful thing.