My knees near gave, because inside the base of that dented coffee pot was a bundle of index cards bound with a ribbon, and on the top card, in Nadines handwriting, it read: my recipes, finally written down, so you never go hungry without me.
I sat right down on the kitchen floor with them.
For thirty-four years I had begged Nadine to write down how she made things, her pot roast, her biscuits, her Sunday gravy, the peach cobbler that made grown men weep, and for thirty-four years she had laughed and said it was all in her head. But it was not all in her head anymore.
She had written every recipe down, in careful detail, in her last months, and sealed them in the coffee pot, because she had known, somehow, that a day was coming when I would be alone in this kitchen not knowing how to feed myself, and she could not bear the thought of me going without her cooking.
Each card had more than measurements. She wrote little notes. On the biscuits: do not overwork the dough, you always rush. On the pot roast: this was your mothers recipe, I made it better, do not tell her. On the cobbler: our first Thanksgiving, you ate half the pan, I knew then I would marry you.
The last card was not a recipe. It said: I wrote these down so you would have a piece of me at every meal. When you cook these, I am in the kitchen with you. Now eat something besides sandwiches, you old grump. I love you.
A whole year I had been living on cold sandwiches and takeout, too heartsick to cook, and all along my wifes cooking, her love, her voice, sat sealed in a pot I thought was junk.
I have been cooking her recipes ever since. Clumsy at first, better now. When I make her Sunday gravy the whole house smells like thirty-four years of Sundays, and for an hour it is like she never left.
I had the cards copied and bound into little books, one for each of our children and grandchildren, so that Nadines cooking, and her funny notes, would go on feeding this family long after I am gone too.
I keep the original cards in that dented percolator, on the counter, where she hid them. The cheapest-looking gift she ever gave me holds a lifetime of her love, written down at last, one recipe at a time. I make my coffee in that pot every morning, and I cook her supper every night, and I am never quite as alone in this kitchen as I feared I would be. She saw to that. She always saw to everything.