Free Dropped Threads 3 by Marjorie Anderson

are always such a big hit
.
    I know that a different mother might have treated me more like a daughter and less like a sous-chef. While I was helping her in her kitchen she spoke to me as if I wasn’t so much her child, but someone who worked for her and knew just as well as she did when the coconut was toasted or the cream whipped to perfect peaks. Maybe my mother was selfish, for I know it cost me other experiences to be the supporting act in the show of her life. Other mothers, like Mrs. Buckle, spent more time presenting options and helping their daughters discover their own pleasures. Mine did not. I lived in the full-force wind of my mother’s passion—there was no escaping it. I would know it intimately.
    “Why does your mother make you work in the kitchen so much?” Ginny asked me one Saturday, after I had to turn down an invitation to join her shopping for a new, blue mascara. Then, I had no answer. I really didn’t know.
    But I do know now. I realize how much I’m like my mother, and I am grateful for all those days of cooking lessons. Because of them, I would rather be in my kitchen than almost anywhere else. There, the demands of my life fade away, and I get lost in the experience that yields a soup pureed to a silky cream or a salmon poached a few seconds past pink.
    I also know that she gave me a gift far greater than my competence in front of a stove. My mother insisted on bringing her own art and beauty to the few spaces she found in busy family life. By her example, I was able to learn to reach past what I was given and beyond what I know: to “make things special” for the simple joy of it. This, perhaps, was the “interest” she saw in me long ago.
    Now in spaces not taken up by my home and full-time marketing career, I continue to teach myself new recipes and endeavour to write down the stories of my life. And when my mother and I cook together, we take turns as sous-chef, share recipes we discovered while apart and challenge ourselves to perfect and reinvent the ones we know well: my lemon chicken, her hazelnut cheesecake and one that belongs to both of us—the classic and beautiful Tiny Tomatoes.

WEST TO EAST
    This morning as I run down porch steps to load the car, I shiver and my mind clears. Victoria air: not even July can dispel its salt chill. I absorb coastal crispness before my cross-country flight.
    The minute I disembark, past midnight, Toronto air licks me, resists me like water. An oily sweat pools at the base of my throat. Skin bare and glistening, muscles spongy, I have come here to dance.
    THE SCHOOL OF TORONTO DANCE THEATRE
    In Cabbagetown, on a narrow street of tall, peaked-roof houses with bay windows and vine-hung porches, the Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT) occupies a one-hundred-year-old church of warm red brick. A stained glass window filters sunlight into the main studio, where the choir loft has been converted into a sound booth, the pews into raked theatre seats and the chancel into a dance floor that doubles as a stage. St. Enoch’s is an apt setting for a four-week intensive course in the modern dance technique developed by Martha Graham.
    We dancers rise when the teacher enters the studio and then, at a word from her, sit on the floor and draw the soles of our bare feet together. The torso contracts to initiatesixteen bounces. As the back rounds, nose points to navel, and crown aims for crotch. After the pulses, spine straightens in a diagonal; legs lengthen, then open to a wide V. Arms curve, wrists face the floor, abdomen hollows, and, again, sixteen bounces. We expel our breath as if sighing.
    The Latin word
spiritus
means “a sigh, the breath of life, inspiration, spirit.” As I move through the floor work, my centre of consciousness drops into my core. Why was this hidden from me? Why do worldly pressures crush vitality and force us all into nine-to-five ruts? When we could dance first thing in the morning, dance all day …
    I know it is a privilege to be here.