Birthday Tomatoes

The red-ripe tomatoes from my garden
are cooking down to a juicy broth
in the cast iron skillet with the garlic.
Today is my birthday,
and I’m hungry for Lebanese food, my heart and soul food,
so I’m cooking myself a birthday treat.
I crush up the fresh spearmint I just harvested,
toss it into the skillet with black pepper and cinnamon, spin the spatula,
and the aroma of my history surrounds me.
Every significant kitchen of my childhood—
Mom's, DeeDee's, Tita's, Sitdy's—
swirl into my presence,
a signature of scented memory imprinted with the bustle of chaos and warmth.
I’m three decades and three hundred miles from those kitchens of my past,
both near and far to a source of the familiar, the familial.
Through my tongue, I’m trying to make tangibly present
the ephemeral past of food and family.

I spoon piping dishes for Greg and Raynah,
heap steaming buttery rice topped with
a simmering ladle of the tomato brew.
I’m excited to share this meal with them.
What I really want to know is if they feel it,
these flavors of my soul, these spices of my childhood,
the part of me that cannot be fully known through photos or stories,
that cannot be conveyed except through the direct sharing of this food,
through this embodied moment
when these flavors pass from my skillet to their palate.
With these flavors I am conjuring
both the ancestral and childhood homeplaces of my past,
both honoring and evoking a history through my
very specifically personalized present—
a present that is radically different from, yet significantly infused with,
the Lebanese influences of my childhood.
With these tomatoes, grown from seed and harvested by my hands;
with this meal, alchemized in my kitchen
as ghosts of my ancestors hover in the aroma,
I can begin to convey to Greg and Raynah a part of who I am.
It is like sharing a poem, but even more intense.
And so I watch their expressions from the corner of my eye,
and I see their faces open
in the way a face opens when it has tasted more than the savory:
when it has sampled the alchemy of my fully embodied history.
This is the story not historically recorded,
the story that can only be told through taste.
This is preservation of the motherline.
The sister of the mother tongue of language is the mother tongue of flavor,
the food element of sustenance,
passed palate to palate, generation to generation;
my story of cultural survival recognized in the gestalt of the senses,
shared at the homeplace of the table
planted on the soil of tongues.

Here, on my birthday, I am happy to bring these flavors
of my embodied ancestry to my kitchen table,
to the palates of Greg and Raynah.
I am comforted by the knowledge that no matter what is bad in this world,
I will always have these seasonings of my life to share.

Birthday Cake