It isn’t the moment of impact that throws me, that thing that happens in a corner of my brain, the rupture that chews distinct layers and folds of my cortex into chyme. No, it is the days following, confusing days home alone. Days ignoring papers that need grading, papers my brain cannot digest. Days spent rummaging for answers, for chores I can cross off my list between spasms and naps. Folding laundry. Cleaning the catbox. Taking out trash. The simple act of cooking dinner.

Not a stew, heated from the bottom by open flame. Not a braise, that trifecta of time, heat, and moisture that melts the toughest cuts. It is a casserole that breaks me: ground beef, green beans, mashed potatoes, onions, and cheese layered in a clear glass dish. Neat repeating rows surrounded on all sides by the circulating forces of radiant heat. Dinner on display, culinary transparency, cross-section intersection of pasture, garden, and barn.

It is a sturdy Nebraska recipe written years ago in a farm kitchen, miles south of a village settled by German immigrant farmers. A simple one-dish meal written in blue sloping script, the ingredients classic, the instructions clear, an ace-up-your-sleeve solution for all things that threaten a timely country supper. A city one, too, I have since learned, my faith in casserole steadfast long after I shed the butcher paper beef, milking buckets, mason jars, ceramic cellar crocks.

Not a cassoulet or moussaka. Not a ragout. Not hotpot, tajin, or savory cake. Casserole: early 18th century: from French, diminutive of casse. Little sister of the Middle French word meaning pan. A word meaning both vessel and the thing it contains.

I stand in a city kitchen with my index card, lost in the layers, unable to follow the recipe. No neat repeating rows of cursive, but words rising like steam to the line above, buttery letters melting, the scaffold of meaning a soufflé, collapsed. The hot glass of working memory cracks in the cold water of a stroke. I am shards.

Resilience is an impulse, a compulsion to grab pen. I draw in the margins, trace index card lines, box five of them in, a set of rectangles one upon the next. I fill them in with bite-sized symbols my brain can chew: tiny pebbles for ground beef, dashes for green beans, waves for potatoes, quarter moons for onions, and x’s for cheese. I tape the card to the range hood.

I cook dinner.