Pasta Board, 3am

The board remembers his hands.

Flour dusting the maple
where his mother once taught him
this patience.

Three a.m., March 1946,
too excited to sleep.

Tomorrow he brings Anna home
as his bride.

He works the dough like happiness,
each fold a promise
of Sunday dinners,
children learning
at this very board.

His thumb finds the worn groove
along the edge,
carved deeper by his mother’s thumb,
her mother’s before.

She taught him this.

Joy, like grief,
demands motion.

Let your hands speak
what words cannot hold.

The dough grows silk
beneath his palms.

By dawn, there will be pasta enough
for a feast,
practice for a lifetime
of feeding love.

He’ll wrap this board
in white linen.
His wedding gift to Anna.

Someday, he tells the darkness,
small hands will learn
this groove,
this motion,
this way of making happiness
tangible.

March 2024.

She finds it in the attic,
wrapped like a gift
in yellowed linen.

Her grandfather’s pasta board.

She never knew him.
Only stories.

How he cooked
when he couldn’t sleep.

How his hands knew dough.

Three a.m.,
a week after the funeral.

She carries it to her kitchen,
runs her fingers along its scars.

Her thumb finds the groove
worn smooth as worry stones.

The wood feels warm.

Expectant.

The old rhythm returns.

Flour well,
eggs nested in the center.

As she works the dough,
something shifts.

Not memory
but transmission.

Joy rising through her palms
like yeast,
someone else’s happiness
soaking through.

Her grandfather, she understands.

This same board,
this same hour,
but his hands singing
with tomorrow’s promise.

His wedding dawn.

The grief doesn’t leave,
but now it has company.

She feels him here—
young, laughing,
making too much pasta
for pure celebration.

His joy spills across
seventy-eight years,
pools in the groove
where their thumbs meet.

She finds herself smiling.

Then laughing.

His gift unwrapped.

Delivered.

Three generations never met
collapse into the width
of a groove.

In the worn maple,
time bends.

His wedding dawn
touches her grieving night.

Every 3 a.m. is the same 3 a.m.

Every thumb in the groove
receives what was left there.

Hope.
Laughter.

The promise that sorrow shifts.

That happiness can be kneaded into wood
and passed along—

a gift that arrives
exactly when needed,

exactly as given.