Forgotten Lifetime

It always seems to rain on the night I hold a dinner party.

Tonight I’m making roasted garlic Fettuccine Alfredo. I roasted the garlic beforehand so the house smells like it.

K refused to change Molly and Bozo’s bedding after Bozo had made a small mountain of poop so I cleaned out their cage and gave them new bedding, fresh water, hay, and some pellets.

(It smells much nicer than it did before I changed it);

Of course I’m homesick. The kind of aching that seems to open up in me that I try to fight back with a fanged cynicism. I have no proof that anything back home has changed.

And so, I’ll make the Fettuccine Alfredo. Like my mother loved. She preferred my sauce to my sister-in-law’s but swore me to secrecy that I’d never tell another soul about it.

It’s a simple sauce, consisting of one part unsalted butter melted, heavy cream simmered just so, and one part Parmesan and one part Asiago, grated finely. I’ll cook it all together until it reaches a viscosity I like (not too creamy, but just enough) before adding a bit of grated flaked sea salt and some cracked pepper.

I’m warming the roasted garlic so it’s pliable and easy to melt into the sauce and noodles. Then, as always, I’ll top it with Italian flat-leaf parsley that I’ll chiffonade with a very sharp knife.

As always, I’ll do it all myself and clean up the kitchen simultaneously, then, I’ll do a load of kitchen towels and take a long, hot shower. I’ll probably settle in with a motion picture I enjoy and take cover from the rain.

Maybe I’ll even make a cup of chamomile and lavender tea sweetened with a bit of honey.

The rain doesn’t help my broken heart. The broken heart I try and ignore even when it pounds against the walls of me like a creature trying to break free.

I found a thrift store full of used books. It had two copies of The Bridges of Madison County on sale. Their pages were yellow and smell of camphor and time.

And there was that delicious ache again. And I tried submerging it beneath the depths of myself, only for it to buoy back up, stubbornly. Perhaps I became a mermaid for just a second, and perhaps I saw a man delved beneath the indigo depths of the ocean in his ramshackle diving bell.

But perhaps that was just some daydream from another lifetime ago.

That delicious ache.