My Aunt Lisa discovered flavor after watching the Food Network during her second round of cancer treatment. When it became clear that her fifth floor walkup was not conducive to chemotherapy, she moved in with my parents on Long Island. While there, she critiqued my mother�s use of one cutting board for both poultry and legumes, worried about our lack of organic produce, and drove everyone crazy regarding their daily food intake.

Throughout her treatment, Lisa would spend hours watching cooking shows. When they were over, she would compile her best choices, print out the recipes and request a dish upon my mother�s return from work. This ritual would continue until hospice care, through the point in which the cancer began to eat away at her stomach, ceasing all ingestion of solid foods. In the end, my parents would put Lisa�s meals in the blender and she would eat whatever she could. At middle age, three months before her 49th birthday and, two weeks later, her death, my aunt discovered the wonders of food that tasted good. In one of those wonderful life twists, she could not eat any of it.

My aunt loved New York as much as I love Brooklyn. For a few brief months after my college graduation, I helped care for Lisa in her tiny studio apartment on the Upper West Side. For what turned out to be her last walk in Manhattan before her death, she requested that we go food shopping. Together we dragged her gigantic granny cart down Broadway to Fairway, whereupon she proceeded to purchase a restaurant�s worth of spices�nearly one of each from the display. She would never use them. Four months later, I removed the same items from her kitchen shelves, placed them in a "to take" pile, and continued to clean out 5B of West 83rd Street, my aunt�s life.

When we moved into our current house, I stocked the spice cupboard. On the top shelf, too far to reach without a stepladder, I pushed in four sealed canisters of expired paprika, dated 1999. These bottles serve two uses. The first is memory, with the obvious connections, and the second is as a reminder. If I have learned anything in my life thus far, it is that living frightened and closed can only result in taste buds unrealized. There is nothing more precious than trying something new. One should never fear the flavor of life.

This April, Fairway will open and I will be one of the first people on line. In the spices section, I will buy one of each canister from the display case. Later that evening, Alexis and I will cook together, and when the house fills with smells of dinner, I will think of Lisa. There are a lot of things that would make her proud of me�loving Brooklyn, finding Alexis, job stability, my daily intake of vegetables. Mostly, though, it is the simplicity of happiness. In the years since her death, I have struggled to find the space within myself to move forward and grow. Recently I realized that I have far surpassed that battle. There is so much joy and that would make her smile.