My Mother’s Kitchen

There are a number of Baba Yaga houses in France. These are not huts that dance on chicken legs or turn their backs to the world, but something more rooted, though no less magical. These are homes where older women live together by choice. Not out of necessity, but out of a deep knowing: that the long road of aging is better walked with companions who laugh easily, who know your silences, who pour your tea without asking how you take it. These women are reinventing Elderhood. They embrace aging as a communal blaze of tenderness, wit, and deep resilience. It need not be a slow fade into invisibility as our culture curates. Rather, it can aspire us to become a gaggle of crones. A circle of fierce, joyful women who have nothing left to prove and everything left to share.

I thought of them yesterday, sitting at the kitchen table enjoying the hospitality of my mother and her best friend. Both women are French Canadians and they each embody all the fierceness this conjures. The two of them are just moving in together—both widows, both in their twilight years, both choosing the intimacy of shared life over the sterility of seniors’ housing. As one might expect, I harboured quiet uncertainties about this move. Not the least of which is the labour of the move itself and the myriad of decisions this requires. That is taxing for the best of us, not to mention a woman in her 85th year. I also silently wondered whether this arrangement would work? Would she feel at home? Would the ordinary complexities of aging be softened or magnified by this change?

As I joined them, sipping iced tea in their sunny kitchen, light streaming through the window, laughter and story weaving around us like a shawl, the smell of cinnamon from a spice cupboard or teapot still lingering in the air, I felt a joy that caught me off guard. Not just relief. Not just contentment. But delight. These two women, eighty-five and glowing, were crafting their own version of Elderhood. Not waiting for society to offer something better. Not yielding to a system that treats aging as a problem to be managed. But choosing, boldly and beautifully, to grow older together.

My mother had other options. We offered for her to live with us. We would have made space, rearranged rooms, rearranged our lives. But she chose to stay where her rhythms still hum with familiarity, where her doctors know her name, where the clerks at the pharmacy chat about her kids, where her friends are just a walk or a phone call away. She explored seniors apartments and retirement living. What she longed for wasn’t convenience, but companionship. Not safety, but sovereignty.

And who are we to argue with that?

I think often about how poorly our culture prepares us for Elderhood. We valourize youth, productivity, self-sufficiency. But what if the deepest wisdom is not in going it alone but in drawing close? In creating a kitchen where the kettle is always warm, where someone notices if your step falters, where silence is a comfort and not a loneliness. What if aging isn’t about decline, but about returning to simplicity, to friendship, to ritual, to shared breath and shared bread?

This is the wisdom of the crone. Not the withered caricature so often mocked or feared, but the real crone: the one who sees clearly, speaks truthfully, and chooses love over convenience every time. She knows what matters. She has walked through fire and loss and still sets the table with care. She is not past her prime, she IS the prime, distilled and potent.

In our mythic imagination, Baba Yaga is the wild crone in the woods, feared and sought in equal measure. But I think she also lives in apartments, and cottages, and cozy kitchens. I think she laughs with her friend while they fold laundry. I think she keeps tissues in her sleeve and wisdom in her gaze. I think she’s building new kinds of homes, not just for herself, but for all of us who will, if we are lucky, grow old.

My mother has found such a home. Not a castle. Not a care facility. But a hearth. A friendship. A new chapter that makes space for laughter, for memory, for rest. And perhaps even for a little mischief.

May we all be so fortunate.