Monday, May 13, 2013

To My Mom

 Dear Mom,


Happy Mother's Day!

I am very grateful to be your daughter for many reasons including inheriting your courageous spunk and musical aptitude. Thanks for feeding me encouragement, your sense of practicality and food.

The way I remember  growing up is by thinking of what we ate. 

I want tuna casserole and french bread pizza. I want nachos, but I want them specifically at 11 pm on Christmas Eve.

I want your spaghetti. That spaghetti tasted like the Pacific Northwest to me. That's why I moved there, because it's where you lived. I wanted to know how you became you.

I want spritz cookies. Sugar cookie dough stuffed in a tube and pressed down through different shapes onto the cookie sheet. You were so excited to find a cookie press! You made spritz cookies with your mom in Seattle, (right?) and we made them again when I am a teenager in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I want a mimosa, but only on Christmas morning and only with you, Dad and Chris at our dining room table, sitting on the chairs with the sweethearts carved into the backs.

I want milk toast. Is it just bread soaked in milk? I remember you bringing it to me when I was sick and me turning up my nose at it. I'm sorry. That was so sweet of you.

I want an egg fried by you. I've almost got the "Marilyn method" down: crack an egg in a skillet over medium heat, watch until it's almost done with just a bit of runny yolk left on top and then splash a little water on top of it. Just about a tablespoon. Then cover it and let it steam and sizzle for 30 seconds to 1 minute. In my grown-up life I love fried eggs on almost anything. In my growing up life, I don't think I ate many eggs at all.

I want salmon baked with lemon. I remember your dad, my Grandpa Al making this is Seattle, the moist, citrus-flavored fish pairing with the damp Pacific air and mysterious gray sky. I remember you and Dad making it on the barbeque on our redwood stained deck in our backyard. We ate in the cooled off evening air of the hot high-desert summer as we look up at the Wasatch mountains which rise a jagged 12,000 feet into the atmosphere. Those majesties look like a giant theatre backdrop. Almost flat from where I sat on our deck. I wanted to run my hand along the front of them, feeling all the crags and hollows between the peaks.

I want to make cookies and let them cool on paper bags cut open and laid out across the Formica countertop. Paper bags are fine cooling racks. In my adult life, a wire rack would be nice, but until it's a reality I have many brown paper bags waiting for their turn to be the cookie settee. I am so glad I learned this trick from you. You can drain bacon this way too.

Thinking of this repertoire makes me ache for a home. At least though when I make this food or cut open a paper bag for cookies, I make home wherever I am. Except that I will be missing you. But, then, you are present because you made it all first. It's because of you that I remember any of it at all.
Remembering what we ate helps me remember you.

Thank you for nourishing my brother and I as we grew in your belly and even after we became screaming children.

 Love,

Mindy