Sister Salad

                Living in Louisiana, the neighbor’s garden was an enchanted wonderland where I could take whatever I wanted ripe off the vine. They assured me from their back porch that it was fine. How could they refuse my dimples and curls? They would send me home with an red apron-full of tomatoes and cucumbers that were sweeter than any I’ve tasted since.

                The warm skin of a tomato breaking on my tongue with tangy juice begged for a cucumber complement. I’d run into the kitchen with my vegetables and beg my sister, Dawn, to make me a salad. She’d peel one cucumber and then have to peel a second when I’d eaten the first one like a banana, letting the slimy, sweet seeds sit in my mouth for moments at a time.

                Dawn loved to make salads for me, but she hated all the ingredients. Maybe it was fun for her to experiment with foods that she had no temptation to taste. It was one of the only things she did for me on almost a voluntary basis. She never refused, and never sighed at having to acquiesce. For years I tried to replicate the taste of Dawn’s salads. It was hard to get right-tasting vegetables, for one. Sometimes the farmer’s market would surprise me, but even then, there was something missing.

                It wasn’t until a few years ago I realized what she had done. One day I sat at her house watching her fold a slice of American Cheese into pieces to add to the Mac-n-Cheese she was about to feed to her children. She always did that, ruined everything with her crappy American Cheese. That’s when I remembered there being flat chunks of orange in all of the salads she had made for me.

And now that I know, I still have no desire what-so-ever to make it the way she did. I’ll make my salads with shredded cheddar, parmesan, feta, and brie: all wonderful contributions to fresh, raw vegetables. To try it with American, and find satisfaction that I’ve duplicated her work, would mean the demystification of my sister’s culinary skills, and something else. I’d like to live on believing that there was something more than the cheese, something special that only Dawn knew how to do. And it might be cheesy (pun intended), but I’d like to live on believing that her secret ingredient is something I could never duplicate: love. How your mom’s cookies just don’t taste the same when you’ve done the work to make them, even though you used the same exact recipe.