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Making Connections

© Amy Condra-Peters

When my husband and I moved to New Orleans shortly after the birth of my first daughter, we lived with my grandparents for a month. During this time my grandmother and I would spend our days together tending to routine and everyday matters, but with a welcome twist — while previously I had cooked and cleaned by myself, now I had a companion. We shopped for food together, prepared meals and washed dishes, and our tasks were accompanied by the steady rhythm of our conversations. We discussed everything from baby cereals to her experiences in Japan, from how to balance my checkbook to how she and my grandfather, as newlyweds, would save ten cents from every paycheck so that they could splurge on hot dogs once a week. And during this time my grandmother and I transcended our former relationship as grandmother-granddaughther and became true friends. Sitting on the porch with my husband and grandparents, sipping wine together in the late afternoon twilight, I was completely at ease.

So much of our work as mothers is performed in isolation. For one of my college courses, we read books and diaries detailing the material culture of American women throughout the past few centuries — "material culture" proved to be a lofty euphemism for the more lowbrow implements of "cooking, cleaning, childcare . . . " While the course was concerned with the functional works of art created by and for women, what was emphasized was the unique role that women have traditionally played in sustaining our culture. I admit that cooking has never been one my primary interests (or one of my primary talents, for that matter!). Still, I was impressed with the descriptions of women's pride in the food that they prepared for family and friends, the pride of possession in a new, time-saving oven, the pride of creativity demonstrated in a delicious new way to prepare canned peaches. Women wrote of taffy-pulling parties, of shelling peas on the porch with their neighbors, of taking pies to the homes of bereaved neighbors. The kitchen often proved to be the center of the women's sphere, and for many the porch became a welcome extension of their workplace, a refuge where one could scrub potatoes while still calling out to a neighbor. The sense of camaraderie in these stories is both comforting and depressing — comforting in the way that anything domestic invariably is, but depressing because I notice that such fellowship with "kinfolk" is noticeably absent in my everyday life. In our increasingly suburban world, the back porch is more likely to be surrounded by a fence than to be an open invitation for neighborly visits. Every so often this absence makes me wistful; at these times, I try to convince myself that perhaps the lack of privacy between friends and neighbors was more often a source of irritation than of true camaraderie!

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