Our loyal readers may wonder, “Where have you been? Why did you take another long break after your last posting?” I’ll answer those questions after I tell you about a dream I recently had. Natalie, with pigtails and her sweet, innocent face, said she was back with us again. She woke me when I was sleeping in, around 8am, not some ungodly hour like 5am when she knew I would be grumpy. I jumped up in bed, hugged her tightly, and kissed her soft cheeks. She saw the big smile on my face and grinned.

“I’m hungry. I want to eat sliced sweet strawberries on toast with fresh whipped vanilla cream on top and deep fried mochi sesame balls,” Natalie demanded.

Her words delighted me; it was wonderful that after all these years she still remembers how much I love to cook, especially for people who know exactly what they want me to cook for them. I squeezed her little hand. “Just give me a few minutes and I’ll have all of that ready for you,” I declared and rushed down to the kitchen.

We were at our Mozden condo, the first home Grant and I purchased. From the quaint green tile roof to the attic full of toys to the memories of coming home from the hospital with a newborn Sean, this was the home that gave my children so much joy.

My parents were sitting at the dining table with forlorn faces. “There are ants everywhere,” Ma moaned. “We can’t cook anything in the kitchen until the ant problem is taken care of.”

“No worries! We can still make toast and I have strawberries and whipped cream in the fridge,” I answered, with a little tightness in my throat. I didn’t want ants to ruin the moment.

“You don’t have sesame balls! You said we would have sesame balls!” Natalie cried.

Natalie was right. I needed a clean kitchen to make sesame balls from scratch. The red beans need time to simmer and I needed space to roll out the mochi dough to wrap the sweet red bean paste in when they were done.

I didn’t know what to say so I ran up to Natalie’s room to make sure the ants had not made their way up. I didn’t want the ants to hurt Natalie. To my relief, Natalie’s room was pest-free. I stared hard at the cheery yellow paint on the walls, hoping they would help me clear my head so I could figure out what to do next. It came to me.

I walked down to the dining room and told Natalie we would go to San Francisco Chinatown to get her sesame balls. Sean gestured for me to pick him up so I swung him up with my arms. It felt so good to have both my children with me again! I kissed Sean and told him he would stay with Popo and Gung Gung while we took his Teh-Teh to the city. He didn’t fuss about having to stay behind and we left immediately.
Grant carried Natalie on his back as we boarded a bus. I snapped tons of pictures of the two of them on my phone. I wanted to remember every detail of our trip together. The bus carried us across the Bay Bridge. When I saw the big, blue San Francisco Bay surrounding us, I could not resist taking twenty pictures of Natalie and Grant with the calm water.

“Everything is just the way I like it. I feel like we’re in a place of bliss,” I noted dreamily while I scrolled through the pictures.

The bus stopped at a restaurant when we reached San Francisco. It wasn’t a dim sum or Chinese restaurant but we decided to enter it because we were hungry.

Our good friends, Maritza and Nate, were in the restaurant and they started talking passionately about food. Nate was excited because they were going to Charter Oak, Christopher Kostow’s new restaurant up in Napa. It had been over 10 years since Grant and I were gifted with a multi-course prix fixe meal at Meadowood, Kostow’s three Michelin star restaurant. Unfortunately, Meadowood was destroyed by the Napa fires on September 28, 2020.

I told Nate we ate at Meadowood once but the roasted chicken dish we had just eaten at Café Zuni was better than the chicken we had at Meadowood. Nate replied this was good to know because they were going to eat at Café Zuni, too.

Sadness came over Natalie’s face. She mourned the fact she never got to go to a lot of the restaurants we ate at when she was apart from us. I became sad too. I told her that now that she is back we will take her to eat anywhere she wants to go. I promised to give her details about Meadowood and all the places we’ve been.

We walked out of the restaurant to catch our bus to Chinatown to get sesame balls for Natalie. There was a large tin tub outside of the restaurant and Natalie suddenly jumped in. It was the kind of tub our church uses for baptisms. I knew it was shallow so I expected Natalie to stand up any second to show us her “water boots”, a term Natalie used when she stood up in bath water at home. I forgot how she came up with it. Perhaps from Grant? Or maybe because the tub water that came to her knees was the height of her pink snow boots?

I panicked when she remained underwater. I plunged my hands into the basin, now covered with neon orange scraps of paper, to anxiously grab my little girl out. She had been under those pieces of paper thinking the water was deeper than it really was. She was trying to breathe underwater the way her swim teacher had taught her. When I pulled her out, she was breathing hard. Suddenly, she wailed, “ You lied! You lied! You said you would tell me all about the restaurants!”

I told her I didn’t lie to her. I would never lie to her because I love her so much. I would take her to all the restaurants and I would tell her everything- the food we ate, the food I cooked when she was gone, and so much more. And her brother and papa would do the same. Then I woke up and wrote the dream down so I wouldn’t forget. I cried a lot while I wrote. I realized I had taken a break from the blog because it made me cry too much.

Back to the question from the beginning: What have I been doing? I have been writing and working on other stories about my life before I met Grant and before I had our two amazing children. Those stories filled enough pages for two books. I planned for Fishing and Love to be the third book. However, Fishing and Love was so painful to write that I kept waiting for the day it would be easier. It never got easier.
Now that I have promised Natalie we would tell her everything about the food we ate when she was not with us, I feel compelled to focus again on Fishing and Love and this blog. For Natalie I will do anything, even if it’s hard. I’ll cook, eat, and write and cry. And do those things over and over and over again.