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by Cassondra Murray

Tonight I roasted a chicken for dinner.

I do this fairly often, first because it's an easy meal to fix. I crank the oven to 500 degrees, shove the chicken in, drumsticks first, and shut the door. Timer set on an hour and fifteen minutes. Off to do whatever else I need to do. Forty minutes later I dive for the potatoes and start peeling, realizing if I don't get a move on, we'll have ONLY roast chicken for dinner.

Tonight it was roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, and my mom's home-canned green beans and pickled beets.

The second, and real reason I fix this meal is...this meal makes my house a home.

I don't usually have my house in any kind of shape for company. There are piles of stuff everywhere. It comes from having no closets and no time. Stuff comes in, but it does not go out nearly as quickly, and it just piles up. But when I do manage to make a little space and can invite people over, what I most love to do is cook for friends.

It's not that I'm a brilliant cook. I'm not.

I mean, I do okay, but I don't do fancy anything.

It's not that I love the actual work of cooking. I don't, particularly.

And yet, when friends come over, the thing I love most to do is have them sit around my table and eat. Maybe play games later. Maybe go outside and sit around the fire pit. On rare occasions, maybe watch a movie. I love it when they walk in the door and inhale and say, "OH, that smells goooooood!" That smell says welcome.

Whatever the purpose, for me, no gathering at my house is complete without a meal.

Because a meal says home.

At least, it says home to me.

When I was a little girl, I went everywhere with my dad. It started when I was first able to walk without furniture for support. People who remember say that even at that age, I began toddling after him across the yard, down the driveway to the barn. Milking the cows. Picking corn. Hoeing the garden or throwing out hay or walking the fence rows, I followed him.

I remember freezing cold mornings when I was no more than six years old, and he carried bales of hay through the knee-deep snow to the cows in the back field. I had to jump a little to land in each of his footsteps, since the snow was more than waist-high for me. But jump I did, into each one.

The cattle had spent the night lying on the early-December ground, and when they stood, breath blowing out great puffs into the freezing air, steam would begin to rise from the spots on the ground where they'd lain throughout the night. I remember the heat from their big bodies as we walked around and through them to spread the hay.

I followed my dad everywhere. And he let me. And when I was too little to follow, he carried me. I spent my childhood this way, in the gardens and in the tobacco field. And at the end of each day, my mom would have supper ready. It could be anything from her homemade chili or spaghetti, to fried chicken or pinto beans and cornbread.

Sometimes it was game. Okay y'all, don't get grossed out here.....My dad was a hunter, and I grew up eating fried squirrel or quail or sometimes rabbit, complete with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans or peas, and biscuits. My mom made great biscuits.

Whatever it was, the point is that it was always there. It wasn't necessarily a big meal. It was never a fancy meal. But there was consistently a meal on the table. A meal made by the hands of someone who loved me.

That table, and that meal, more than anything else, made the place I grew up a home.

My grandparents' house was different, and yet it was the same. My grandfather was always, always standing at the stove, cooking breakfast, every morning when my mom dropped me off on her way to work. I ate there, then waited for the bus to take me to school. I got off the bus after school, and what was waiting for me?

Yup. Something my grandmother had cooked.

Those tables, with food on them, said security. We were not a wealthy family. In fact, many would have called us poor. But I never felt poor. That's the thing about a farm. Even if you have little money, you have plenty to eat, usually, because you grow it and can it or freeze it.

Too often now, I end up grabbing a quick something on the way to or from wherever I was last. When I was a kid, we almost never went out to eat. Maybe once every couple of months we'd go as a family to the next town over, to eat fish at Long John Silver's. Beyond that, it was weekly trips to Dairy Queen with my dad. But that wasn't a meal. We'd already eaten supper before he dropped mom off at prayer meetin' on Wednesday night, and he and I would cruise by the pool room or the Dairy Queen.

Now, life moves faster. I'm not certain why that is, exactly, but it does. And a lot of people exist on mostly fast food.

I realize there are still families who sit down to eat together, but I don't know many. For the first few years I was married, Steve and I fell right into that grab-something-quick, eat-out mode. Between work, social activities, and errands, the place we lived became mostly a place to sleep and store our stuff.

But even then, I shopped for groceries. It was odd, I suppose, to have a fully-stocked kitchen, but hardly ever use it. But that's what I did. If the fridge or the pantry wasn't full, I'd go grocery shopping. Members of my family would visit from out of town and say, "Why do you keep all this food? You never cook it."

"I dunno," I'd answer. "Growing up with depression-era parents, I guess. I like to have plenty on hand."

A few years ago I lost my dad.

After that, a lot of things changed. Things which had always said "security" to me, were gone.

I don't have kids of my own, so there's just Steve and me, along with the motley assortment of animals we tend to collect and bring into our lives as we go along.

At first I clung to things I brought home which had been my dad's. But we have a small house. You can't keep everything. No place to put it. After a while, having all those things around felt like a burden rather than a warm memory. So I gradually began to let go of that stuff, except for a few items which hold special memories. And as the years have gone by, I've come to realize something.

I keep my pantry stocked because it is food--and all that surrounds it-- which makes a house a home for me. I realize that some folks might read that and think, "that's some kind of sick relationship with food." But it's not. It's not eating which makes me feel at home. It's the presence of food. And not just any food. Home-cooked food.

It's the smell of turkey in the oven at Thanksgiving. Or the sound of the mixer on the counter, whipping potatoes into creamy goodness. It's cooked apples in the fall. It's a pitcher of homemade lemonade or sweet tea in the summer when you come in from working in the yard. It's salmon patties and fried potatoes on a weeknight when you're in a hurry. It's pancakes on Saturday morning.

I cook the things my mom cooked.

Yes, I make a lot of things she didn't. I cook differently. I grill thick steaks medium rare, which she would never do, and make thick, spicy chili which she wouldn't like at all. I'll never be able to make biscuits just like her, or my grandmother's cornbread just that way. Believe me, I've tried.

But I've spent a lot of Saturdays the past couple of years, frying chicken with my mom, so I could learn how she does it. She's having some heart problems now, and I hope I have many more years of Saturdays frying chicken with her, but I know that some day I won't have her here. The love she put into fixing food to feed her family, even when she didn't feel like doing it--that can't be gotten if I don't create it for myself.

So even though, at some point, there will be just Steve and me and our kids with fur and feathers, it's important to me to feel that thing I used to feel...to have the place I live filled with the sights and smells and tastes that, for me, make a place home. If I'm going to have people I love around me, and a life filled with that wonderful sense of home, I have to create that for myself. One day at a time, one meal at a time.

No matter how hard I look, when I bring home a pizza or grab fast food, I never find quite the same sort of love in that sack.

Now, when people look at my pantry and my fridge and say, "Oh, my gosh, there's only two of you. Why do you have all this food here?" I still say, "I dunno." But it's not true. I do know.

That's what makes it home.

I was listening to Pandora earlier as I took the roast chicken out of the oven, and this song came on. It's from How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days. In a way, I think that film is about just this--creating something important where there once was nothing, and doing so with a little help from the divine, perhaps, but mostly by the effort you put into it.




Did your family cook when you were a kid? Did you have a favorite meal growing up?

Do you ever make that meal now?

If you have kids, does your family have certain special meals for occasions? For birthdays or anniversaries, family picnics or potlucks?

What food is traditional for you at the holidays? Did that come from a family tradition? Or is that one you've created for yourself?

Do you have a favorite meal you fix just because it brings back good memories?

Is there something from childhood which still works as comfort food for you?

What makes a place feel like home to you?