As if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

...

Her culinary prowess was one of our family's primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents' marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us.

...

He responded simply, "Everything is possible again." It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational, or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.