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FEATURE

scheduled meals). If grandkids wanted to hang out in the kitchen (and I often did), they’d be ordered to “make yourself useful” — a busywork category that contained any simple, low-stakes task designed to keep a high- energy child busy enough to not break anything. Favorites included fetching black-eyed peas from the linen pillowcase in the outside freezer and snapping the stems from metric tons of garden string beans to setting the table or wiping down the dreaded 1970s vinyl place mats before we could thunder across the house to watch TV. Turns out that you can learn a lot by making yourself useful... After both my grandparents passed away and Morning Glory was sold, the kitchen table migrated to my first New Orleans apartment. I got the idea that “filling the table” once a week was the best way to honor the relic’s high- traffic history. Gather a bunch of folks for a simple meal, don’t be too precious about it, be a little bossy if you have to. I think Lorelle would (mostly) approve. I never did like the place mats all that much — or setting the table, for that matter — so (likely much to Mamma’s chagrin) I never bother. On crowded red bean nights, I put a roll of paper towels near the cornbread skillet, toss a dozen tablespoons on the Formica and propose a toast of welcome. The energy usually feels about right for a casual weeknight supper. Turns out that on most nights, 10 or so random friends with a few bottles of wine pretty closely mimic a mile-long table full of Hebert grandkids telling jokes and operating just a hair short of what we’d consider “company manners.” And so Lorelle’s table — the artifact — has become mine, and I run my kitchen table mostly as she ran hers. As I see my friends, guests and family eat, laugh and talk way too loud, I can’t help but think that she might approve of the spiritual adaptation, even if it is a little heavy on the wine and light on the place mats. So a couple of times a month, during the Tuesday morning cleanup, I see a little ring, and I let Mamma haunt me just a teeny bit. I indulge myself in a small smile, then get to scrubbing...

If Mamma wasn’t in the kitchen already, talking on the telephone or enjoying a bit of quiet between visitors, she’d pop into view seconds after your knock, and after a big, often misty hug, she’d sit you down and get you a little something. It was a ritual for friends and family alike — if you were there for a visit of any length, you spent a lot of it in that kitchen. Part of it was pure logistics — the long Formica® top was like an airport runway. Even if it was clear at the moment (and it rarely was), there was always another inbound flight an hour or so away. As a result, the kitchen always hummed with some kind of family activity. As kids, we’d hear her and my grandfather Leon (Papá) rattling around the kitchen, preparing for the day well before sunup. In gown and robe, Mamma would roll out and cut biscuits, and fry pans full of bacon and patty sausage. Or, on special occasions, Papá would whip up feather-light pain perdu before heading in to work. He’d return to his assigned seat for most meals — at the head of the table, his back to the stove — at a time when “eating out” was a particular luxury. Papá brought a certain authoritarian formality and “library quiet” to the table.To

compensate, Mamma would keep talking, unspooling her sprawling, multilayered yet mundane stories with a complexity that bordered on the biblical. From the pre-dawn coffee shuffles to the evening gin rummy games after supper cleanup, the family more or less lived in Lorelle’s kitchen, which she ran in her own orderly way. Whenever family was in town, she knew her showtimes — breakfast, lunch and supper — and ran the room like a machine with however many helpers happened to be around.With the sprawling network of traveling cousins, we watched in wonder as our mothers became dutiful daughters once they crossed the threshold of Morning Glory. We slowly realized that our mothers called Mamma “Mama” (a slight musical difference that perked up the ear) and worked in that kitchen like they’d been born to it (which of course, they had). And that once we were in that kitchen, we were one big family — with the rights and responsibilities thereof. Over the years, we watched Mamma and “her girls” cook and joke, tell endless stories, drink coffee and do full holiday baking production on the kitchen tabletop (between regularly

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