The Last Pot
Fran Honan has been contributing her writings to theglorifiedtomato.com for the past 13 years, and her stories have always resonated with me. I’m excited to share this heartwarming piece with you. – Paula
Recently I was in my kitchen getting ready to saute some canned tomatoes to make a little marinara for dinner and I grabbed an old pot from the cabinet – my mother’s pot, part of a Farberware collection she received at her engagement party in 1947.
I have lifted and held and cooked in that pot for decades. But this evening, it slipped out of my hand from the cabinet and fell on my Italian tiled kitchen floor. The black handle shattered into many pieces and I felt my heart sink. I tried to cook without the handle but I knew it was done for.
Fran’s Mother, Rose
That night I mourned a pot that was in my life since the day I was born.
So many of my memories of my mother involve her standing by the stove in all of our different apartments, sauteing and boiling and reheating food using that same Farberware pot. There were copper bottoms that she maintained well with my father’s help; he’d scrub them after each use with a wire brush and copper cleaner. She never burned the pots, never let the sauce boil over. She was a perfectionist, a stay-at-home mom after her working in the sweatshops sewing from the age of 15, and she lived to take care of her family – my father, my older sister, and me.
When she wasn’t cooking she cleaned, taking meticulous care of everything. She ironed the bedsheets, she mopped the floors. She treated these pots with that same love and care she treated everything in her home.
She died more than 30 years ago, and I took the pots to my home. I kept her legacy, cooking and caring for my husband and my own two girls. I am different from my mother; I don’t care about cleaning as much, and I did not scrub the bottom of the pots with copper cleaner like my father did. The bottoms turned black. I often burned the eggs I boiled, and sometimes the sauce bubbled over.
I have shattered dozens of glasses and dishes and coffee cups on my kitchen floor, and I’d simply clean up the mess. It didn’t bother me.
But breaking the pot cut me deep. I foolishly thought the pot would last forever, even with my neglect.
I put the pot in the recycling bin and those memories came back. I saw my mother in her snap-front house dress, her apron tied around her waist, in every kitchen we ever had. She was there when my sister and I came home from school, preparing dinner. I remembered the smell that wafted up from the pot when she took off the lid, whether it was lentil or chicken soup. On Sunday it might have been braciole or meatballs in tomato sauce.
Those pots represented the love and care she showed for us in her favorite place. Losing the last pot, in what I felt was hasty carelessness, was as if I was losing my mother again, so many years later.
All of that thinking about my mother eventually left me feeling happy, not sad, for the legacy I try to continue. I ordered a new pot for probably a lot more money than my mother’s whole set cost, and promise to treat it with more care. I will always miss that last pot from my mother`s hands but I truly miss my mother each and every day.
Fran Honan is a retired NYC educator and a mom who loves to cook and eat. She grew up mostly in Brooklyn and has lived in Rockaway for over 40 years making memories with her husband Mike, two children and her community. “In nearly every memory stuck in my head and heart there’s food lurking in the background. From time to time I’ll reflect on these old stories–not just of what I ate, but with who, where, why, and how I felt. Food is love, they say, and it’s all you need.” – Franny
