Going Home is Going Back to the Kitchen
At the first sight of those towering canyons of Praia Grande, we children would start with our own private anthem. “Tamo chegando! Tamo chegando!” “(We are arriving! We are arriving!)”. Homecoming never felt so close as when I arrived in Praia Grande, the land that birthed me, birthed my mother - and where my grandmother made her home. Homesickness was always for this little slice of the Brazilian south - for the way the floor tiles creaked in my grandmother’s kitchen; for the rosca de polvilho that would be dipped into scalding coffee; for the silence of the afternoon as we all napped after lunch; for the smell of wet soil and forest in summer, and burning wood and bergamot come winter.
Our granny always greets us at the door as we arrive. She hobbles with her fragile, crooked legs towards the entryway as soon as she hears the sliding of the gate. There she’ll stand, resting by the door, her flip-flops sliding in the wrong directions. The smell of her hair, her clothes, her neck. The same familiar aroma we find in her bedding, her towels. She claims it to be the cheap, artificial soaps she hides in her cupboards, but I’m determined that it’s something else, as despite my best efforts to recreate that smell in my home, I can’t manage to do it. The kitchen greets us with the smell of sautéed onions, meat, white rice, maybe some orange juice freshly pressed from her orchard. The table is always covered with a fruit pattern oil-cloth, which she takes extreme pride in.
Going home is going back to a place where I am the purest and most loving version of myself. And despite being able to name innumerable places and people that are able to trigger that feeling, the kitchen is a space that never fails to bring me back home: back to myself. Kitchen sounds speak for me, when words don’t seem enough next to the absurdity of the feelings that spring without warning. When I break a thumb of ginger, or rip up coriander and release that smell of pure life, I am reminded that to be alive is to taste, smell, see, touch and feel. Certain foods spur certain emotions, certain smells unearth buried memories. Inevitably, home will forever change as we transit through life, through love, through landscapes and through different versions of ourselves - but the kitchen, and the feelings that bubble inside as I make food for myself and those I love, remains a home that I will forever call my own.
