Recipe for oliebollen

Missing a person is the smallest waiting.

No one tells you, when you’re a child, how sore your feet get when faced with tradition. It is Christmas and too much is unknown. I fry tradition in a tiny room, stack paper plates of hot dough next to my office supplies. It splatters me, the need to share this.

The sky eats itself every morning. My friend went for a walk dressed in my name and never came back. The wasps refuse to leave the shower. Every day I watch their black-bean-bodies trace circular paths on clay nests. Missing a person is the smallest waiting.

“You just love broken people,” my ex said once, frustrated. No, I tell my ghosts. I love people and then they break.

Was I scared of happiness? I spend so much of my life insisting that I deserve nothing. I call it detachment but it is despair. A torn screen door unsure what to do about the wind.

I put out “Missing Name” posters for my friend. “I would do anything for her,” I tell the wind. “But I want my name back.”

When we were children, every Sunday, her hips would beat rhythm / sway. The poster reads: Looking for a girlhood told in soukous time. Grief is like the moment someone changes costumes in the middle of a play. If you’re lucky, there are many hands to help you.

I make plates and plates of oliebollen. I bring them to friends who knew the sweetness of sugar-powdered fingers. The hot dust of a name. Who know what I didn’t: how much of myself I’d get back. How much of myself there was to lose. •

Instead of searching my archives for a picture of oliebollen I’ve made in years past, here’s a delightful historical photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Tomorrow is Sinterklaas, also known as Dutch Christmas. One of my family’s traditions is to make croquetten on this day. Two years ago I didn’t have the kitchen capacity for croquetten, but still needed the grounding of tradition. I made oliebollen instead, a traditional New Year fried dough ball, frying them on a tiny single-burner kerosene stove. I was in southwestern Uganda and my friends were bemused by the tradition, but no one turns down sugary donuts.

I’ve discovered that rituals and traditions help me collapse time and remember years, often spent in quite different locations and communities, into a single life. Do you have a favorite tradition you’ve maintained?

Last week I promised I’d share my top three favorite books recommended in MFA classes this semester. But given that this is my final week of classes, I just haven’t had a moment to pull together images and recommendations. It’ll be in the next A Broken Tulip missive, two weeks from now.

Until then,

Maaike