Writing Identity: What I find delightful!

Delight is love… Not the romantic, fairy-tale one but the warm and cuddly kind of love. The love you feel when you’re sitting on the sofa reading out soap-opera subtitles to your great aunt and in the kitchen the water is boiling for you. Wild roses, those dark red little bulbs, are slowly softening and wrinkling up inside the coppery pot, colouring the water red, like love, like blood. It smells sour, like lemonade, and sweet like Turkish delight… and maybe a little bit like the rum you managed to sneak in it. Life feels like a warm, drunken dream when you smell the little red fog that teases your stomach… and your heart. You take long, throat-filling sips of the warm tea that fills your cup over and over again, and it is as if something better, bigger, warmer, shields you from within and winter can do you no harm. 
Delight is love… like the love of the robust women working in farms where your grandfather lived once. Like their love for the corn they grow in the fields and the grapes they press to make delightful wine, and the cows, and the bees, and the warm milk and the honey. The sweet pine honey and fresh butter… nothing better could ever be spread on a slice of warm bread. Even more delightful is the olive oil, so dark green you can smell the darkness and freshness of the sharp, bitter olives that made it, poured on a fat plate of mashed potatoes and crumbled feta cheese. The dish the village women lovingly devour after their hard work, the same dish that warms you up together with the red fluffy blanket as you watch the soap opera with auntie. 
Delight is love… Love of the kind you feel when you come back from school and throw your bag into the corridor and run behind it from miles away, like a puppy. Because from miles away you have smelled the tomatoes and the onions and the lamb and whatever hunger inducing delight expects you after school. 
Delight is when you lovingly run towards this beautiful angel with big brown eyes, that you call ‘grandma’ and say: 
“I’m so hungry!”
Delight is food.

The art of making pies...

Albanian pies are made of crisp, thin layers of pastry and fillings of all sorts…Onion and tomato, spinach, chicken, yogurt… Pumpkin (yack) …
It takes time, effort and space to make one. Especially when you have a big family and grandma likes to make her own pastry. And she makes enough pie to feed the neighbourhood…
Today I get to help, together with granddad, mum and Annie. They don’t seem as excited as me. I love it when grandma makes pies, especially when she makes the pastry. All the furniture on the first floor gets all wrapped in cellophane and then with some white thin sheets over which Annie pours flour until it looks like it’s snowed inside. A little winter wonderland…
Once grandma has made enough pastry dough, and my obsessive compulsive granddad is reassured that we have washed our hands over and over again the right way, with that skin-peeling, white, brick-like Duru soap; we all take bits of the sticky, soft dough and roll it into our hands until it becomes a bun, the size and shape of a tennis ball. We make lots of them. Thousands even. Then grandma shows me how to open the buns into big, round, thin pastry sheets. I try, but while I’m making my first attempt my mother has finished opening her third. 
Annie laughs. Meanwhile, grandma spreads all these perfect pastry sheets all over the furniture so they can dry. At this point no one else is allowed to touch them. They’re so thin, they can break. 
I manage to touch one a little bit. It’s soft, and smooth, and pretty.