THE CADET TYPEWRITER

“My mother had become a food writer, pecking out weekly cooking columns for the local newspaper on this old Cadet.”

When I was a kid, my mother and I were inseparable. She adored me, her only child, and I adored her back. We held tea parties for my stuffed animals, took Greek-dancing classes, scavenged our Maine island’s tide pools for sand dollars, played piano duets. She was an artist and a writer, and I wanted to be just like her. Her very essence—the mother who worked from home; the mother who was creative, eccentric, brilliant, witty; the mother who never made Shake ‘n Bake or cake from a mix; the mother who’d rather let chores go undone than give up time to paint and sketch and write—that’s who I wanted to be when I grew up.

Everything changed when I was 11 and my father abruptly left to be part of a different family. The divorce devastated my mother. She barely cooked—barely even ate—and withdrew from our small island community. I wanted to be a supportive daughter, but I also wanted to live with my new family: a much-younger stepmother and at long last a sibling, a stepbrother almost my age. On my weekends with them, I discovered the appeal of typical family things my parents and I had never done. We went on picnics and played Monopoly. My stepbrother and I watched cartoons. For supper we ate boxed mac-and-cheese.

When I was 14, my mother remarried. Though he was a genuinely wonderful man, to me he was a man who would never be my father. So, just as my own father had, I left, impetuously hopping a Greyhound bus and moving in with my other family in a fishing village four hours away. By then my mother had begun what would become a 37-year career as a food writer, pecking out weekly cooking columns for the local newspaper on this old Cadet typewriter. By then I wanted to be nothing like her. By then I had already started the alcohol-fueled journey I would stay on for the next 25 years.

In the wake of my departure, as I kept my mother at arm’s length, she was nothing but loving and kind to me. Even when I legally emancipated myself from both my parents at 16 so I could move in with the man who would later become my first husband—even then, she loved me. Whatever heartbreak I caused her, she never let on. She just kept building her life one typed-up recipe at a time.

By the time I got sober, in my thirties, she had long since transformed her newspaper column into a monthly newsletter. For more than 30 years, she produced every single issue on the Cadet: a dozen(!) pages with recipes and vignettes about country living, adorned with her whimsical sketches. In its heyday, the newsletter was mailed to nearly 10,000 subscribers worldwide. She became a bit of a celebrity around town. Eventually she published a cookbook.

Over time, I became a better daughter, replacing sporadic calls and letters with more frequent visits to the old island farmhouse (whose soundtrack was the clatter of typewriter keys, whose air was sweet with the aroma of molasses cookies baking in the ancient Hotpoint). And when my stepfather passed away, and my mother’s Alzheimer’s gradually progressed, I moved back to the farmhouse to care for her—an unexpected and initially daunting chance, at age 50, to experience motherhood for the first time myself.

She passed away in 2021. Before then, as her mind shifted between past and present and she began to call me “Mummy,” we returned to the comfort of tea parties and trips to the beach and cooking together as we had when I was a little girl. When she could no longer make her way in the kitchen, I cooked for us both, preparing the chowder and baking the blueberry cake, following the recipes she’d long ago typed out word by word, a bottle of Wite-Out ever at her side. I wonder if she knew, as she typed, that she was giving me the recipe for understanding the true depths of a mother’s devotion.

—Amie McGraham

My mom, Karyl Bannister, and I searching for seashells on a summer day.

Mom in her kitchen in 2015, making applesauce from the crabapples in our orchard.

A few issues of Cook & Tell, my mother’s newsy newsletter. I’m not surprised readers loved it as much as they did.

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Amie McGraham still spends summers on the Maine island where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, Intrepid Times, Maine Magazine, Wild Roof Journal and elsewhere. Her foodletter Cook & Tell reprises installments of her mother’s monthly newsletter, and she writes a weekly 100-word newsletter, the micro mashup.

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