Something is always simmering here, even when it isn't. The pot on the back burner, the dish towel over her shoulder, the flour that never fully leaves the counter no matter how many times she wipes it. She moves between the stove and the sink in a loop she's walked so many times the linoleum has gone soft and pale in two exact spots, like footprints worn into stone.
She keeps the window cracked over the sink. That's the part I can't get past. Two inches of open air, a strip of screen, and past that the whole sky. From up there you learn how little there is between us and nothing: the entire atmosphere, all the weather and breathable air a person ever gets, is thinner than the shell of an egg.
She's got the window open onto it and she isn't afraid at all. She's watering the plant on the sill.
She hands me a spoon to taste. Asks if it needs salt. This is a woman who has fed people through wars and shortages and the deaths of half the names in her address book, and the whole enterprise has come down to whether the sauce needs salt, right now, for me.
I went a very long way to see the planet whole. Turns out you can also see it in a warm kitchen with the window open, a small woman deciding I should be fed before I leave. Say yes. Tell her it needs salt.
Give her one more thing to do for you while she still can.