CNF: The Scent of Cinnamon
by Alison Colwell
Scrub the counters, put away the dishes, open the window to let the May breeze into my kitchen. Outside the sky is robin’s egg blue. I flip the pages of my red binder: Cinnamon Buns, Brownies, Caramel Squares, Dream Squares, and more.
I tighten my clean apron. Breathe.
I begin small. But it’s so hard to choose, I end up making more than I’d planned.
Measuring sugar and butter into the mixer, cracking eggs, adding vanilla, a pinch of baking powder, sifting flour, my hands remember their tasks. Scooping cookie dough onto baking sheets to slide into the oven.
It’s been eighteen months since I filled my bakery stand.
Eighteen months since I rolled raisins and brown sugar into brioche dough for a batch of cinnamon buns.
Eighteen months since my daughter was hospitalized for anorexia. Since food changed from being how I express my love, and creativity into something darker.
She almost starved to death.
While my skin smelt of cinnamon and vanilla, while racks of baking crowded the kitchen counters, I almost lost her.
She’s okay now.
It took a long time.
Now I’m in my kitchen again, reaching back to the time before, when food was love, when customers fought for the last raisin scone, when feeding people was a pleasure.
Early the next morning I pull cinnamon buns from the oven and slide one onto a plate.
“Time to wake up.”
She opens her eyes.
I set the warm pastry onto her bedside table and she smiles up at me.
Alison Colwell is a writer, mother, domestic violence survivor and community organizer. Her work has been published in several literary journals including: The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Roi Faineant Literary Press, Hippocampus Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and is forthcoming in Grist. She lives on Galiano Island, Canada.
Connect with her at: alisoncolwell.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Scent of Cinnamon”? My daughter was hospitalized for anorexia on her 15th birthday. I hadn’t even known she was sick. The long process of recovery was incredibly hard, and both of us emerged changed by the experience. I had been a baker. I still work in food security, keeping my small island community fed. And at the same time, my daughter almost starved to death. There was a horrible irony to her illness. And afterwards I needed to learn how to love food again, which is what this essay is about. I have returned to her illness and my role as parent, over and over in my writing. It was a traumatic and transformative time that upended my world, and writing is how I make sense of hard things that happen. “The Scent of Cinnamon” was a challenge because I wanted to figure out how to capture some of that experience in a compressed form.
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