Free Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón

toasts, Nathan’s friend Jason took the microphone in one hand and balanced his two-year-old son in the other arm. “Nathan, this advice was shared with me on my wedding day, and now I’ll pass it along to you: Happy wife, happy life.” Then we cut the wedding cake, and Nathan smushed the piece he was holding all over my face. I licked off the frosting and we went back for seconds.
    When the mâitre d’ presented me with the top of the wedding cake, Nathan wrinkled his nose. “I’m not sure I’m going to want to celebrate our first year as husband and wife with old, thawed-out cake,” he said, so we ate it later that night. The restaurant had given us the leftovers, too, so we ate wedding cake again the next night.
    When people said this was the best cake they’d ever had, I knew they weren’t just being nice—those layers of airy dark chocolate and sweet vanilla resting on ahazelnut filling and finished with pearly white fondant were incredible. And, like most brides-to-be, I’d been dieting like a crazy person for weeks. After two months of naked salad, steamed vegetables, and plain fish, I think even a cake made out of nuclear orange Circus Peanuts would’ve tasted divine.
    • • •
    I was never a picky eater as a kid. Mom remembers that even as a toddler I had a curious palate. “You loved martini olives,” she says.
    “What were you doing feeding martini olives to a two-year-old?” I ask.
    She shrugs. “It was the sixties …”
    When I was five and discovered that our local Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs stand sold frog’s legs—and that they were
really
the legs of frogs—I had to try them. (Yes, they did taste like chicken, probably because they were cooked in the same oil as the chicken, and the French fries, and every other fried item they served.)
    Surrounded by good food made by Mom, Grandpa, and Nana, I rarely said no to anything, but I didn’t gorge either. I was in tune with my body’s rhythms in a way that I envy and miss today: I ate when I was hungry,slowly, tasting the food, humming a little song I’d made up, and pretending I was a giant eating broccoli trees.
    My family had no rules about eating. I was never forced to clean my plate, and when I heard the ice cream truck’s tinny chimes, Mom would give me a quarter for a strawberry shortcake pop. One of the neighbor mothers would ask, “Isn’t that going to spoil her supper?” and Mom would say, “So she’ll eat a little later. It’s no big deal.”
    When Nana died, I was suddenly hungry all the time.
    • • •
    I could tell myself that I’d over-washed my jeans or that the nice man at the dry cleaner had shrunk my skirt, but tight underwear doesn’t lie: the truth of the matter was that I’d gained weight. The metabolism that had served me so well had apparently clocked out, exhausted, on my fortieth birthday.
    I parked my wide load in a chair at a well-known diet center. I followed their strict eating rules and cut out bread, butter, cookies, pasta, ice cream before dinner, and many other things that make life worth living. Instead I ate mulch.
    The results were quick and encouraging, and I developed little tricks to speed things along, like eating only salad (without dressing) for dinner the night before and nothing at all the morning of my scheduled weigh-in. I watched a woman strip down to a tank top and gym shorts before she stepped on the scale and took note: no more heavy jeans and sweaters for me. From then on, when I got my weekly reading, I wore only as much as would keep me from getting arrested for indecent exposure.
    And then I met Nathan, whose love of food was exceeded only by his enthusiastic metabolism, and who had a nightly habit of eating cookies and milk while watching hard-hitting news. And he wanted to share that ritual with me.
    I’d known all about the pleasures of eating, and then the pitfalls. New to me was the romance of it, the intimacy of having someone break off a steaming hunk of toasted