Food Friday and Death Season

 Tonight we have no company. It still made sense to cook a serious amount of food some of it will go into the freezer for a later and more hectic time.

Every time I cook whole chickens I am stunned by how completely adorable they are once cooked. I will probably serve our chicken whole and carve at the table.

I roasted a few pounds of string beans and made challot.

This week it was Tu B'shvat. Aside from being the new year for the trees, it is the day when my mother marked her mother's Yahrzeit.

A couple of days ago my friend Sue posted a series of frantic posts on facebook about her father's declining health his being moved into hospice stuff about the complexities of travel during these times and finally her father's death. While following these posts I thought about how while I was going through that same frantic time before my mother's death and the crazed time after her death, it was Sue who called me up and took me out for all you can eat sushi so I could organize my thoughts about my mother into a eulogy. 

My mother died after a bitterly cold really harsh and snowy winter. The trip to the sushi restaurant included navigating piles of snow at the side of the road.After my mother died one of the things I took from her apartment was a pretty calendar produced by a museum in Israel that was filled with Yahrzeit dates for the family.

I  noticed that many people in my mother's family died at this time of year. My mother's grandfather died in the flu epidemic in 1918 at this time of year, as did my grandmother and my mother's beloved brother-in-law Sol who had died far too young from cancer.

My mother didn't talk a whole lot about the yahrzeits as they came up or about her loved ones who had died. I just get the sense of generation after generation in my family feeling the sadness of loss at this season of the year and succumbing to it.

Shabbat Shalom