Of Spaghetti and Spaceships
I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot lately, especially as I made spaghetti sauce to go in the freezer for my solitary Christmas meal this year. My mother made her tomato sauce with fennel seed, which my brother and I still do, and it makes the house redolent of childhood. It’s a dinner tradition my mother started after my father left us, and holidays with our big extended family fractured into tiny shards of what had once included three generations. Our celebrations grew smaller and sadder, with fewer place settings.
My relationship with my mother was sometimes troubled and complicated after I left home, but in this year of emptiness and loss, old happy memories of her are resurfacing.
Like the time she and her next-door neighbor, who drank a little, were completely convinced a UFO had landed in their adjoining back yards because of a burned circle they found in the grass one morning. Or the fit she threw when she grew a big marijuana plant in the back yard one summer only to have “someone” come in the night (I’m looking at you, little brother) and harvest it. And how she loved poetry and Jeopardy and devoured Harlequin romances for the happy ending that always eluded her in life. On this Winter Solstice, at the hinge of the year, there was a heralded conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. It’s not exactly UFO material, but on that night I remembered driving around with my mother to look for spaceships in the dark Kentucky skies on summer nights. Neither of us losing an unspoken hope in alien sightings or happy endings.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.