Sitting on a newly upholstered chair at the raised, wood breakfast bar, I pick at the homemade blueberry muffin in front of me. The blueberries are flavorful and the pastry is light and delicious, but my appetite is gone. It’s been almost two months since I heard the news about Emma, but being in her kitchen is still hard. The seizure that took her life was so unexpected that it could almost be a dream, even now. I look across the table and smile at Emma’s mother, Rebecca, and take a bite of the muffin she made just for me.
“These are so much better than those gross Jiffy muffins you used to make with Emma, right?” she says to me, chuckling. I agree whole-heartedly and take another bite.
“Those were nasty!” I say, laughing, “But Emma loved them for some reason!”
“It was the novelty, she was in love with the idea that you could make muffins for 33 cents.”
I have to agree, although I did appreciate those muffins, they were one of the few things I could claim to have introduced to Emma over the course of our thirteen year friendship. Emma fell in love with their fluffy texture, their miniature artificial blueberry specks, and probably the fact that it irked her mother so. Every time we planned a sleepover, she would beg me to bring these muffins to her house, although I grew increasingly terrified when I found out how much her mother detested them. It was almost like I was a spy with a special mission to sneak them into the house undetected.
“Let’s make muffins!” Emma would shout as soon as my eyes opened in the morning. She grabbed the box and raced downstairs to prepare the muffin pan. We would grab a bowl, add the one egg and half cup of water, and stir vigorously, thinking how clever we were to make them taste so good. Twenty minutes later we were munching on golden brown muffins and her mother was telling us how gross and artificial they were, a fact that escaped me for many long years.
It was a relief to be eating these freshly made muffins; it meant that people had finally stopped bringing food to the house. At first it seemed as if they hoped their store-bought chocolate cherry bread would heal the wounds of a child’s death, an idea that made me furious. No amount of food could ever replace the love that Emma had given to so many people, I thought.
In the earliest days, after the news hit, the counters were so cluttered with pies, dinners, cookies, and bread that there was no place to sit and eat. A room that was already full of grief now had to house a multitude of food that Emma’s family probably never had the stomach to eat. Slowly, as the amount of food dwindled, so did my anger. I realized that these people brought food not because they thought it would make things better, but because food is our connection to life. So many memories are wrapped up in food, and bringing homemade dishes is a symbol that there is still hope, and there is still life after a tragedy like this.
Sipping the dark espresso roast in my mug, I see a small, green frog sitting patiently at the bottom of my cup. Two of the coffee mugs in the house have little animals in the bottom, a treat after finishing your cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Often times, I would barely taste the drink in my rush to get to the cute little frog that was waiting for me. Sometimes Emma and I would even make it a race, if we were feeling competitive and didn’t mind burning our tongues. Rebecca reaches across the table and touches my hand.
“My favorite memory of you and Emma is when you would play imaginary games together for hours. It was amazing.” She laughs and I roll my eyes, giggling. This was one of the many embarrassing stories about my childhood that had come out after Emma’s passing. I endured these stories with good humor, happy to have a reason to be recognized as important in Emma’s life. Our favorite characters were from Harry Potter, but when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, Emma and I pretended that the triangles of tortillas with cheese we had learned to make were the lembas bread that Frodo and Sam ate on their treacherous journey to Mordor. Of course, stale Elven bread was probably nothing compared to the chewy goodness of white corn tortillas and sharp cheddar.
I stood and stretched, glancing around the room once more. Everything at Emma’s house had always been more exciting, artistic and unique. Two months ago, all the things, all the food that reminded me of her became things that I couldn’t eat or be around. Now, as I looked down at the remains of my muffin, I grinned. Emma would smile to see me eating breakfast with her mother, discussing our lives and how much we miss her. I hug Rebecca and step out of the creaky side door, saying, "I love you." Even though Emma might be gone, this kitchen is somewhere I will always be treated as family, somewhere I can feel close to her through the simplest things, like eating a blueberry muffin.
**I promise this a real conversation that I had with Rebecca this weekend. Life is so coincidental sometimes, glad I procrastinated in my revisions for once!**
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