Mom at the beach, summer 2002.
Mother’s Day, 1950s and 60s — In the opening shot I am dancing in the sunlight of my childhood kitchen. Any story about my mom would have to begin here. Mom’s kitchen was the center of the universe. It was the place where every insignificant detail of every day took place and every special event got its start. In hindsight, I suspect the least important activity we did in the kitchen was eating.
I learned about traditions. In the spring my mom and her sister Thelma made crepe paper flowers at the kitchen table to decorate the graves on Memorial Day. They started weeks ahead, creating tulips and roses and chrysanthemums with red and yellow and orange crepe paper, winding the petals one-by-one around a thin wire cut to size, which they wrapped in green. I learned how to cut the proper petals from a pattern and fit them tightly into place. We dipped the blossoms in a pot of melted paraffin and allowed them to dry. The flowers filled baskets and were fitted into “sprays” and wreaths. On Memorial Day the cemetery bloomed with flowers that held up even in the rain.
Summer in the kitchen was all about canning – corn and tomatoes and blackberries for jam. We peeled the labels off empty Van Camp’s Pork and Beans cans and made vegetable choppers for the garden relish making. Mom filled a big aluminum pan with cabbage and peppers and onions and spices and we chopped until there wasn’t a shred bigger than a sliver. Canning wasn’t especially my idea of a fun summer day, but I learned a lot about patience and rewards. There was nothing better on a cold, snowy morning in winter than to wake up to biscuits from the oven and hot blackberry jam made from a jar of berries picked and canned in summer.
For one full day in November my dad took over the kitchen space, though Mom was always quietly in charge. The hogs were killed and she ground the meat for sausage and deposited it in one huge lump in the middle of the kitchen table. My dad liked to add the herbs and spices, the sage and pepper and salt, and supervise the kneading and mixing of the meat. Sausage was made into patties for the refrigerator and freezer and for canning. My mom fried some of the patties and canned them in gallon-sized glass jars, sealing the tops with a sufficient amount of pure grease to cover. Yes, that was good sausage!
I liked to watch my mom cook. She always made perfect fried chicken – the skin a crisp, golden brown. I took note of the way she salted and peppered and rolled the pieces in flour before adding to the bubbling grease. What I didn’t take note of was the timing or the need to simmer the meat for a while. The first fried chicken I cooked had that same golden brown look, achieved in a few minutes time, but the drumsticks were tough and raw inside. I learned that there is a time for everything and that the timing is as important as the process.
My mom would get frustrated when she was trying to cook and too many other things were going on in the kitchen. She’d drop a hint – “it’s hard to get around in here” – but rarely raise her voice. Dad would spread the newspaper across the table, reading Parade magazine and the comics aloud. Dagwood and Dogpatch. Sometimes I wasn’t the least bit interested; sometimes I couldn’t wait to hear the story or the punchline. But I learned that hints rarely work if you want something done. My mom knew that too, of course, but she wasn’t one to demand anything.
On Sunday afternoon in winter we played board games at the kitchen table – Monopoly, Careers, Dominoes. I loved Careers because you could choose to be anything you wanted to be for an afternoon – a movie star or teacher or prospector for gold. Players earned stars and hearts and dollars based on the choices they made. In the game, happiness was a competition measured in money and fame and love. It was a little like life, except the choices were temporary and had no effect on the real future. Still, winning was important to a house full of competitors and things didn’t always end well. Mom usually chose to do something else and had a way of putting things in perspective. “It’s just a game,” she’d say, trivializing the angst. I learned that a little less drama is not a bad thing.
One night a week, my mom ironed in the kitchen. She put a “sprinkler” on a Pepsi bottle filled with water, dampened the clothes, and rolled each shirt and blouse and dress into a ball fit snuggly in a basket, and she took out one at a time to press. I learned to iron handkerchiefs and pillowcases and aprons. It’s a skill I don’t use now, but I enjoyed those times together.
Sometimes she told stories while she worked. One of my favorites was about my grandma who had run away from her first husband on their wedding night. Her parents had chosen him against her will. So she went out to the privy before bedtime and just kept walking. The family didn’t see her again for two years. She decided to return home after another long walk, 50 miles across the Cumberland Gap to meet my grandpa, the man she’d always loved. They were married. The legality of this was never discussed, so I have no idea how it was resolved. I do know they had 10 kids and stayed together until she died.
The kitchen looked like my mom – the shelves of “State plates” she had collected from her own travels and the trips of others, canned stuff lined up on the cabinets, the flour in a big bowl kept in a drawer in the cabinet because the flour bin/sifter was a place to keep cash. The 25 silver dollars used to pay the doctor when I was born had been stashed in the old flour bin. Her cabinets had real glasses and jelly jars for drinking, mismatched plates, and carnival glass bowls. She had a rolling pin, but never liked to use it. Instead, she used a tall glass to roll out dough for biscuits and cookies and pies. It didn’t matter whether she was using the appropriate gadget or not; she did things her own way.
Much of what I learned in childhood I learned at the kitchen table. Most people who came to visit, relative or friend, came in the back door to the kitchen. It was a place to cry and laugh and hope and mourn. A place to talk and sing and argue and explain. A place to dance.
I remember spinning round and round on my toes, living in the moment, dancing with the abandon of childhood. Not thinking of the past or future. My mom used to say that today, the moment, is all we can be sure of. It was all about living in the present. I think that’s what we lose when we get older — that youthful joy in the moment. As we grow up, decisions are made based on past experiences and future hopes. The “now” quietly dissolves.
My mom enjoyed living in the present. She had a profound faith and she practiced what she preached. She was completely certain about who she was and what she was meant to do, and she was always optimistic, never being too concerned about controlling the future. Those traits are a gift. And her life was a gift to all of us who spent time in her kitchen.
“If you have kids, every day is Mother’s Day,” Mom used to say, at the end of a hard day doing mostly stuff for the rest of us. She was right.
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HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!!
I am a writer, traveler, birdwatcher, gardener, cook...and always a dreamer.
