This weekend I’m going home. My first stop? The kitchen.
We are living in a world cemented in a post-Covid-19 era, where a good laugh with someone else is a shoulder away but can sometimes feel like miles. A disconnect has been planted and grows fervently without restrain, leaving people desperate for community and third spaces, for hugs and taps from friends, for an outside world where comfort and physical presence are no longer asynchronous. Often, we take for granted what measures one can take to open themselves up to these opportunities.
For me, that third space? That community? it’s my grandma: my Nanay. While I may say my love languages are touch and quality time, they truly manifest in just one evening with Nanay. It really settles as more than just touch. Familiar sounds bubble through her hand-me-down Android as Elvis Presley’s entire catalogue is enqueued, with familiar smells baking up in an oven we’ve both burned ourselves on…multiple times. I can let my heart sing from beneath my lungs, throwing out uninvited voice breaks every so often, because when I sing with my Nanay, I don’t care about how I sound, I care about two voices being heard from next-door neighbors and upstairs parents- our voices. I care less about the harmony of our voices than the harmony of our hearts. Dancing soon follows, with a tiny insular parade of rambunctious love crowding our kitchen near dinnertime. Gradually, a stained glass assortment of our favorite dishes compile the table, a painting of tradition that I can dig my hands into and warm my stomach with, all while laughing with my Nanay.
This is every Saturday for me when she comes home, and it works like an internal clock. Missed sleep? Then my circadian rhythm weeps. Missed Nanay? My whole week is doomed.
At college, devastatingly, she’s a phone call away- on a device she can’t really operate herself. That distance becomes horrifically apparent on a lonely Saturday night when I’m not out with friends.
But this weekend, I went home. My first stop? The kitchen.
Except…she was not there.
Instead, Nanay and I found ourselves having dinner at a prized restaurant back home that hosts impersonators every Saturday. That night’s impersonator? Elvis.
Safe to say we laughed, we sang and we most certainly danced. Nanay jived, I shimmied and the whole restaurant joined in as our not-so-convincing Elvis encouraged everyone to sing along. Slowly, the ornery Hawaiian-walls of the restaurant started to blend into the old Tuscan tiles of our kitchen back home.
Maybe Nanay’s love doesn’t have to start and end in the kitchen.
And, when I hesitantly whisk myself away after the weekend ends, I can carry it with me. I can easily go to my friends and bake some banana bread or some Filipino Leche Flan. I can replace the leftover Elvis queued on my phone with Olivia Rodrigo or Sienna Spiro and let the rhapsody of our voices choke the air with love and community instead. In a world where there is this seemingly debilitating and enormous loss of interpersonal touch and quality time, it matters how you first open yourself up to each other. Small steps matter, and I can trace all of mine back to Nanay’s kitchen.Â
