Lately

These days I am feeling the loss of my parents more and more. It is like the warmth that remains on a chair after someone has lately stood up and gone away. For a while, that residual heat remains, the person's odor and aura remains in the air, but after a while, it dissipates. The seat becomes cold, and the aura disappears. The room is now empty, full of echoes. My parents have been gone since June; can it be that I am really only feeling it now???
Maybe this feeling comes so suddenly because of the dinner I fixed yesterday. My mom had only a few meals that she fixed on a regular rotation--roast beef, salmon croquettes, fried flounder and french fries, meat balls/meat loaf, pea soup or chicken soup. Yesterday I scored some flounder, which is very rare for around here. Generally, the local stuff that passes for flounder is gelatinous and disgusting, but this was wild caught Canadian flounder, fresh, not frozen, and it was only $3.99, so although flounder is not my favorite fish, I snapped it up. Flounder was the only kind of fish my mother fixed. It is firm fish, white, without small bones, but without much inherent flavor. It makes excellent fried fish, for all of these reasons. My mother always used matzo meal to roll it in, soaking it first in beaten egg. I did that, adding a spice mix to the meal, and using egg white instead of a whole egg, and fried up the fish.
When I bit into it, I was suddenly transported, a la Proust, to my childhood, sitting there and eating a piece of fried fish as my mother clattered dishes in the kitchen, and Lassie, my black cocker spaniel, pushed her silky head into my leg, begging for a morsel of fish. Amazing. Oh, and the fish was good, but needed salt.