Great poem!  But pasta and meat sauce and cheese pierogis on the same table?  That's mixing Italian on one hand and a Polish/Slavic dish on the other hand, and they're both heavy on the dough.  

The blog title says it all, childlike simplicity, it's also full of nostalgia. I like it, you can almost feel the love of the memory.

21 hours ago, Bill W said:

 Great poem!  But pasta and meat sauce and cheese pierogis on the same table?  That's mixing Italian on one hand and a Polish/Slavic dish on the other hand, and they're both heavy on the dough.  

you could walk into my grandmother's house, and she was stewing tomatoes for the sauce with dinner. there was ALWAYS sauce for something. She grew up in Eastern Europe as an orphan of the First World War. She became a cook and never stopped. My grandfather had a massive tomato garden with 5 different varieties. Some were for sauces; some were for canning, others to be used with his homemade mayonnaise for tomato sandwiches. He grew up on a reservation during the Depression, so if they wanted something, they had to make it. I remember a few things they tried to teach me, but I was so young, so it's all very fragmented.

This is the clearest memory I have of the house, and even it is fragmented between the day and night because the house was so dark to prevent my grandma from getting headaches. We probably had tomato sandwiches for lunch, pierogi with garlic, onion, and brown butter sauce one night, and pasta with tomato sauce another night. It might have been a weekend, which is why the light got changed out the next day (I wasn't a fan; it didn't make cool shadows).

It's still WILD to me that I can remember this kinda stuff at all since for so many years, everything before like 12 was blank. I knew stories, other people's versions of it, but no real memory of it myself. 

I grew up in an area where there was both a large Italian community in one location, so there were large selections of Italian dishes in the various local restaurants, and not far away was a large Polish/Ukrainian community.  In fact, during lent the Ukrainian Church would take orders for for homenade cheese perogies, onion perogies, and sauerkraut perogies, and my family would order large quatities of each, so I'm very familiar with both cuisines.  I was only commenting that I was surprised to see both types of items on the same table at the same time.