Sunday, May 9, 2010

Mother's Day



















Last week a friend said to me that when someone who has lived a full, long life passes away a library dies with them. My sad news is that my Mom passed away on April 28. I have tried very hard to learn as much as I could from her library. She packed her 95 and half years full of life, cooking, gardening, and taking care of her family. Those are certainly passions that I have learned from her. Since December, it was a long five months of caring for her but she was as comfortable and content as I could make her right up to her last hour.

So here I am on my first Mother’s Day without her with a hole in my heart and wonderful memories. She gave me a lifetime of instruction and insight and shaped my interest in cooking and gardening as well as teaching me how to aspire to be a good person.

She taught me how to make Angel Food cake from scratch when I was 9 years old. I loved the cake and was always requesting it. She had a hen house full of chickens and a bountiful supply of eggs so she just taught me how to whip the egg whites and fold in the flour so I could make the cakes myself. Together we wore out that old Sunbeam Mixmaster mixer with the milky glass bowls!

















Here's a photo of her in her element--at the kitchen table surrounded by our family celebrating what looks like my 16th birthday!

She taught me the fine points of making pie crust; use lard for the flakiest crust, don’t add too much water or the crust will be tough, bake your crust at 400 degrees for 15 minutes then turn down the oven. Of course, filling the crust with fresh or frozen fruit from the garden was an essential component.

Then there was jam making; hours of picking and pitting then mixing the fruit with sugar in Grandma’s soup pot and boiling and stirring. Ladle that hot, sweet fruit into jars so you can have the taste of summer on your toast in January.

She was my introduction to growing things. As a girl I helped her plant the kitchen garden. Onions, corn, beans, tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers for pickles were just the beginning. Then there were flowers. Heirloom perennials like honeysuckle, roses, iris, and peonies and annuals like zinnias, cornflowers, and petunias were all in her palate. One year when I was in college she arrived at my apartment in St. Louis with two five gallon buckets overflowing with peony blossoms! In the last twenty years we planted things together and in the last couple of years she gave the orders and I did the digging!

Many of her peonies and iris were blooming last weekend so I found a florist in town that would use them in her casket spray. She would have been so proud of how beautiful her own garden flowers were. I hope that wherever she is she was wearing a huge smile.


The hole in my heart will heal but I will always have the things she taught me and her love to guide me and give me strength.