Daily Mantra: “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”
{anais.nin}
I can still smell them. Little pillows of doughy goodness rising triumphantly in the old, log fueled cook stove. A small billow of smoke rolled out from the back…a reminder of the last pie baked. I was four, and although any detail of what I did last week {or an hour ago} is difficult to muster, the memory or my great grandma baking biscuits is clear. I would sit on the unfinished hardwood floor and wait impatiently in front of the stove as they cooked; my grandmother and her would sip freshly perked coffee and talk about the kind nothingness that mattered.
“Don’t sit to close, deary…you don’t want them eyebrows comin’ off”, she would say in her coastal Maine, daringly harsh dialect. I would back up at first, but inch closer when they wern’t looking.
A pile of Courier Gazette newspapers sat in the corner in a disorganized pile; a collection of pictured time, she would call them.
My grandmother would call them a cluttered fire hazard and role her eyes.
She shuffled across the splintered floors in her worn soled slippers, and shewed me back with an ugly crocheted potholder. A half grin came across her face {the Irish woman never really smiled} as she grasped the cast iron from the hot stove and placed it on the burner to cool.
Sometimes I find myself desperately wondering if I am giving my girls these perfect morsels of childhood memories. I wonder if my parents, or my grandparents worried too.
by amanda.b.
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