MargenMy grandmother spoke a language nobody speaks any more. In the end she used it only for the plants and the cat, creatures that asked her for no translation.
When I was small she taught me three words. The one for bread while it is still warm. The one for rain that arrives at night. The one for the person who left and still hurts. She said that with those three you could live a whole life, and that the rest were ornament.
I forgot two of them. I kept the one for bread, perhaps because it was the easiest one to need.
Now, when I take a loaf out of the oven, I say it under my breath so that nobody asks me what it means. It does not mean bread. It means that there was a woman, and a kitchen, and a little girl, and that for a moment the whole language exists again in the air of my kitchen before dissolving once more into the silence it came from.