Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 9. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
This week was different.
I have been sitting at this desk for weeks now carrying the weight of all of it. The box. The slides. The grief. The loss. The roller coaster of feelings that comes with writing about the people you have loved and lost.
This week I got to write about Chris.
Not the grief. Not the loss. Not the anxiety of opening something you have been keeping closed for twenty-four years.
Just Chris.
The first time I saw him. Those blue eyes. What it felt like to be six months into something and not yet sure where it was going but already knowing somewhere deep down that it was going somewhere real.
I smiled at my desk this week.
I laughed out loud more than once.
That has not happened in a while.
The First Christmas
I was nervous bringing him home.
We lived in a very small Southern Maryland town. I kept thinking what is he going to make of all this. The Thai Buddhas. The incense at the altar. The fish sauce. My mother in the kitchen cooking the way she always cooked. Like the food was the most important thing happening in the room.
Because for her it always was.
I did not know what he would think of my world.
My mother did not share that concern.
She did not ask what he wanted. She did not check if it was too much. She just decided what needed to be made and made it.
Massaman curry.
She cooked all day.
I watched him eat it.
That was the moment I knew.
My mother knew too.
She did not say I approve of this man. She did not say welcome to this family. She did not say anything at all. She just put a bowl of curry in front of him and watched.
Food as a love language does not need words. It just needs a bowl and a person willing to receive what is in it.
He received it completely.
That was enough for her.
That was enough for me.
“She understood that feeding someone was not a small thing.”
Two Worlds. Same Sunday Dinner.
Here is what made me laugh this week.
Shortly after that Christmas we went to his grandmother’s farm.
The whole family was there. His great grandmother McCully. Aunt Dot. His grandmother. His mother. His four aunts. Eight cousins. Some of their friends. A southern Sunday the way southern Sundays work when a family has been doing them the same way for generations. Food everywhere. Voices everywhere. Everyone knowing their place in the kitchen without being told.
I stood there and felt something I did not expect.
I felt at home.
Because it was not that different from what I remembered of our Thai family getting together at my grandmother’s farm in Kamphaeng Phet. Two worlds. Two countries. Two completely different tables.
Same Sunday dinner.
Same instinct. You feed the people you love. You do not wait to be asked. You just cook and you put it in front of them and you watch them eat and that is how you say everything that words are not big enough to hold.
My mother said it with Massaman curry on a Christmas day in a small Southern Maryland town.
Great Grandmother McCully and Aunt Dot said it the same way on a farm on a Sunday afternoon.
Food as a love language crosses every border.
I laughed when I realized that.
Forty years later sitting at my desk in Florida writing a book about my mother’s hands I laughed out loud at how nervous I was. At how much I worried about what he would think of my world.
He fit into it the same way I fit into his grandmother’s farm.
Like he had always been there.
Those blue eyes.
Forty years together.
And it all started with a bowl of curry and a young man who ate every bite.
The Massaman curry is on the site. Start with the paste. That is where this curry lives or dies.
But what that bowl meant. What she knew without being asked. What it said about a young man with blue eyes sitting at her table for the first time.
That story is in the book.
“Not exactly hers. Nothing is ever exactly hers.”
What I Know Now
This week reminded me why I am writing this book.
Not just for the grief. Not just for the loss. Not just for the weight of everything the box has given back to me.
For this too.
The laugh at my desk on a Tuesday afternoon in Florida.
The realization that two worlds were never as different as I feared.
The blue eyes that showed up forty years ago and never left.
Food as a love language. My mother knew it. Great Grandmother McCully knew it. Aunt Dot knew it. Every woman who has ever stood in a kitchen cooking for someone she loved without being asked has always known it.
I am writing it all down.
For Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know where it started.
So they know about the bowl of curry and the blue eyes and the Sunday farm and two worlds that turned out to be the same world after all.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 9 of Her Hands His Eyes, a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
In Entry 10 the chapter I almost did not write. The one that took me the longest to start.
