Recollections

Home on a second grade
afternoon, I sit at the small
red formica table in
Gramma’s kitchen, doing
homework — inhaling thyme
and lemon from bubbling soup stock.

She said “I don’t have recipes”,
“it’s shitteryne*, a little this,
a little that” her English still
tethered to the Pale of Settlement.

She tossed a two fingered
pinch of sour salt into chicken
stock for today’s batch of shaav,
a sour grass and egg soup, straight
from her 1896 Ukrainian
village.

In Rochester, no Russian
sorrel, so it’s spinach, kale,
and sour salt.

Was it smell or taste that pulled
this over the transom of memory
from my hippocampal sea — no matter,
my lips are turning upwards.

*a Yiddish term meaning a little of this and a little of that

Gary D. Grossman
Poetry Breakfast, March 18, 2024