A Literary Feast

Posts by LuAnn Saunders-Kanabay

Up For Air

Posted on March 17th, 2014

The weight of the hatchet is heavy in my hands. I feel the heft of it, the worn-smooth grain of the wooden handle, the coolness of the metal head, and the sharpness of the blade. It’s the one used by my father, splintering the fallen branches that fed the backyard fires in the cold of winter. It’s in my hands and I’m standing in the shed, surrounded by the workshop bric-a-brac assembled by him over the years: baby food jar lids nailed onto a board, their matching jars screwed on and filled with nails of infinite varieties; dozens of hammers and saws in varying stages of rust and decay; lengths of rope, nylon and manila, new and frayed, dangling off hooks in the roof; buckets, large and small, plastic and metal,…

Mirella’s Kitchen

Posted on June 25th, 2012

My heart was racing a little bit as I tied the apron strings around my waist and prepared to join Mirella in the kitchen at Osteria del Trivio. I couldn’t remember any of the carefully rehearsed Italian “kitchen” phrases I’d been repeating for the past several days and my hands felt all thumbs. Could I do this without making a fool of myself? What did I really know about cooking in a restaurant kitchen anyway? And, in Italy! My confession, spoken to Mirella three nights earlier, that I had dreamed about cooking with her in her kitchen suddenly seemed absurd. But her immediate response, “Si, e possibilie!” gave me the courage to follow through on the hastily arranged plans. I swallowed and walked through…