Tricia’s Bio:

Tricia Bowering was born and raised in Victoria, British Columbia, where she eventually studied Psychology at the University of Victoria. She now makes her home in Vancouver, where she keeps busy working as a physician and spending time with her partner Alan and energetic daughter Sophia. She recalls writing short stories as early as grade two and all throughout high school, but years of study and work slowly pushed writing aside. Finally, she has returned to writing as a serious pursuit, and has enjoyed reconnecting with her creative voice. She looks forward to writing more short fiction and entering lots of contests in the future.

When My Grandmother Made Perogies

By Tricia Bowering

 

When my grandmother made perogies, it was a grand affair. Her kitchen became an assembly line, starting with a large wooden cutting board to peel and slice potatoes and grate cheese, followed by sheets of soft dough rolled out uniformly by hand on the Formica countertop. It finished in an area dusted with fine white flour where the individual dumplings were put together and stacked into old wax-lined paper milk cartons with the sides cut out. In summer when overripe fruit fell from the trees, there would be sweet plum perogies, but she was partial to cheddar cheese and potato, and those were my favorite too, boiled and topped with melted butter and bits of crisp bacon.

Grandma lived a bit away, so we drove to spend the weekend with her every few months when I was growing up. My grandfather had died when I was five and she’d taken in her frail older sister after that, so she always had someone to care for. When we visited, my sister and I slept in the attic of the small house that my grandfather had built forty years before, and we entertained ourselves playing old board games that were stashed in the closet or climbing cherry trees in the backyard. The visits, and the perogies topped with butter, marked my childhood as vitally as a calendar.

When the visits and my childhood were long past, and her sister had died, Grandma decided to sell her house so she could move closer to the city, unable to keep up the place on her own. I had a six-year-old child who had never tasted my grandmother’s homemade perogies or climbed the cherry trees. Grandma’s house had become a casualty of my busy life, but I hadn’t noticed until its impending sale.     

“Grandma, teach me to make your perogies,” I said one day on rare trip back to her house, while my daughter played outside. The yard had called to her, and she’d left her plastic toys like detritus on the living room carpet.   

“I’m not sure it’s worth the effort anymore,” Grandma said. “You can buy bags of them at the grocery store. I saw them on sale for a steal last week.”

“Did you buy them?” I imagined a plastic bag filled with machine-perfect dumplings in her freezer instead of the old milk cartons.

A pause. “No.”

Out came the potatoes and the cheese, the flour and the heavy rolling pin. As we made dough, I put my face into the bowl and inhaled the yeasty smell. I made a half-hearted attempt to write down quantities as my grandmother boiled potatoes and threw them into a bowl with the cheese, but she shook her head at me, her wrinkled eighty-five year old face crinkled with amusement. I put the paper and pencil down, understanding that this recipe didn’t need to be written, only experienced.

When we were ready, I called my daughter in from the yard and the three of us stood together at the counter. We plopped a generous dollop of filling in the centre of a dough circle, and Grandma showed us how to fold it over and pinch the edges together. I watched her strong fingers encase my daughter’s hands, instructing her in the finer details. It was a lot of work, and the last time that my grandmother would make perogies in her old house. 

We boiled the perogies, melted the butter and fried the bacon, and when we sat down to eat at last, I tasted the enormity of what we had done together in every bite.

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