a birthday
I’ll get back to new recipes next week. Promise. Today is about honoring love, kindness and being thankful—thankful I got to spend 16 years of my life with Mikey. I get a little worried when I think about the years to come. In five more years, he’ll be gone as long as I knew him, and after that, the balance will shift to imbalance, time accruing in a way that makes my life without him longer.
I never know how I’ll feel leading up to his birthday. This past weekend was especially trying having gone 50 hours without heat or running water in the dead of winter. We got hit with an ice storm that crippled a wide swath of where I live, and it exhausted every last emotional and mental reserve I had leading up to today, what should be Mikey’s 62nd birthday.
When I woke this morning, warm thanks to power restored, and slightly better rested than the previous two nights, I felt a stillness within, a kind of calm and numb at the same time. It’s the first birthday that Isabella is away at college, and it really hit home how our children will have to figure out how to navigate these kinds of days alone. I know what that’s like, and the confusion, sadness and happiness that comes bundled together. But I suppose for them the happiness may be non-existent because they were so little when he died. Their memories are far fewer, and in many ways stand no chance to the number of years he’s been gone.
A few hours after our power was restored, I headed into the kitchen to make him a peanut butter pie for his birthday. 51 may have been the last birthday we celebrated together but I shall forever celebrate the day he was born.
The recipe below is a refresh on the original recipe I posted almost 11 years ago. I wanted to include the post which explains why I changed up the recipe a bit. The words are a time capsule of my life five years ago, and a reminder for me that sometimes the further you travel emotionally and mentally, you realize the ground covered is not a straight line—it’s a labyrinth. I don’t know that we ever really find the center but maybe that’s not the purpose. Perhaps life is meant to be a never ending exploration of ourselves. Maybe we’re supposed to get lost in some of those corridors to find clarity for the paths that follow.
—xo, jennie
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