Sometimes I have more patience with a batch of cookies than I do myself. That doesn’t seem right.
I was always amazed that my grandma never measured anything. A rule follower from Mrs. Strand’s kindergarten class, I just didn’t understand. I put my head down on the desk when she asked. Raised my hand before speaking, and even drank the milk that made me gag. But then in Grandma Elsie’s kitchen, flour and sugar flew with wild abandon and I found myself caught up in the twirl. Still a bit uncertain, I would ask, “But what if it isn’t right?” “Then I’ll know soon enough,” she said.
I wanted it — whatever that was — confidence, experience, trust, or maybe a combination of all it. Making the cookies yesterday, I found myself once again in the twirl. I made a test cookie to get to my “soon enough.” It was perfect and I finished the batch.
The years have given me the strength to brave the twirl. To let go the worry of what if it’s not right, or good enough, but to simply try. I can feel the trust in my Elsie hands and kitchen heart. I feed my soul. And I taste this life.
The Christmas carcass became yesterday’s soup. Aproned and worry-free, I Grandma Elsied my way through the process. Adding everything. Measuring nothing. And it was delicious. Steeped with holiday and attention, it tasted rich and full, but for me, the added pleasure, satisfaction, joy, came with nothing being wasted.
I try to practice it — this making use. A scrap of metal turned into a frame. Discarded wood into panels. Yesterday’s still fresh oil paint into tomorrow’s tableau. And to me it’s all important, but I hope I pay the same attention to living. Using everything I have. Every speck of courage, because we’ll get more tomorrow. Loving with every piece of my heart, knowing it means nothing left inside. And perhaps it’s not as easy as pot to stove, but I was taught to attempt in Elsie’s kitchen. To abandon worry and just create.
She’s smiling over my soup bowls, but more over, my heart. Telling me daily to give it all, and just become.
If you dip the cookie in the frosting, pick it up slowly, turn it over, sway it a little side to side and front to back, the frosting will level itself out. I don’t know how it knows, but it does. It’s the gift before the giving.
I think we’re all given the tools. Right from the start. Oh, sure, it takes a little turning. A little swaying. But when you know. You know.
I used to go into my room at five years old and color my emotions. I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, but I had 24 Crayolas that could relay the message. At six, — as Mrs. Bergstrom gave us the spelling, the words — I began to write poems. Thus began this cookie’s life of self leveling. And the real gift is, I now have something to give.
I’m not special. We’re all given the tools. Maybe you garden. Maybe you bake. Or build. Or teach.
Yesterday, after painting in the studio, feeling the magic of this new portrait beginning, I wanted to call my mom. Oh, how she loved magic!! And perhaps frosting even more. So I returned to the kitchen, dipped the cookies that I had made earlier that day, and turned and swayed and leveled myself in all that love, and somehow I knew she knew.
When you love something, you want to share it. In my youth, I used to think that meant that the other person not only had to love it, but love it for the same reasons. Childish, I know, but I’d like to think I’ve gotten better, more secure. It is more than enough to simply love.
I enjoy making Christmas cookies. Thanks to a childhood friend, I have one cutter in the shape of Minnesota. Of course no one here in France knows what it is, but the shape of my home state is just as delicious as the Christmas tree, or the star, and they enjoy it. Sometimes I watch. I smile when I think, oh, my husband just took a bite of Duluth, and that same shape that rests in my heart, without his knowledge or permission, is colored in the morning blue of a fresh snow, and is silently full.
Is that what love has always been? If so, what a relief to know it is in the giving that we become filled. Oh, the stress of waiting and wanting to receive… So I offer my love, in all the shapes and colors I know, and find myself with more than I ever could have asked for. And I am saved.
Shopping Michigan Avenue, my mom and I wanted it to never end. We went in every store. Up and down. Miles and miles of Chicago’s “magnificent.”
We weren’t big Nike fans, but the store itself was gorgeous. We feigned affection. Running our fingers against t-shirts and track suits (long before leisure wear, that’s what we called them.) I don’t know who stopped first, but we stood in front of the poster and read. Words could always hold our attention. There was a woman running on a country road with these words, “There are clubs you can’t belong to, neighborhoods you can’t live in, schools you can’t get into, but the roads are always open.” We both smiled, and ran along beside her.
The places we traveled in that truth! I still do.
I’m still sometimes thrown by Mondays in France. Nothing is open. Yesterday morning, I told Dominique that we were out of treats. Before he finished asking, “Where would you like…” we both realized the Mondayness of the situation. By mid afternoon, I was able to travel to Chicago in order to find that my French kitchen was always open. Monday didn’t stand a chance against my molasses. I made the cookies, and may I say, they are magnificent.
I pride myself in finding a way. My mother saw to that. She’s still guiding me through Monday. Tuesday is here. Wide open! Let’s run!
It wasn’t like she didn’t have enough people to feed. Yet she never seemed to mind when neighbors (neighbors whose houses could not even be seen beyond the fields) popped over at the first waft of the oven’s scent. Her wide knuckled hands waved off the intrusion and welcomed them to the kitchen table.
On the rare occasion that her lap was open, (usually during Days of Our Lives), I would sit and twirl her thinning wedding band. Still able to move at the base of her finger, I knew she would never be able to get it over the middle knuckle. “Did it shrink?” I asked. “What?” “Your ring.” She let out a laugh that sounded like a leak of a hose. “No, my fingers got bigger.” I was shushed to listen to Ma and Pa Horton on the tv.
It makes me happy to think it wasn’t because of the work. I know now, it was the wave of the welcoming. Her hands, just like her heart, got bigger with every visit.
I felt it yesterday as I passed some cookies fresh from the oven over the fence to our neighbor. Her five year old granddaughter was visiting. She said her love for the cookies was bigger than the sun and the moon together! I felt the Elsie-ing of my hands and heart. What a welcome feeling!
They differed in so many ways. Grandma Elsie would have laughed at the thought—harder than she’d laugh when beating us at a card game whose rules went unexplained — “iron my dish towels?????” I’m not sure a towel was dry long enough in her house for it to be ironed. A constant rotation from laundry to sink. From hot pan, to table wipe, to sticky face. Tucked inside her waist, then back to the laundry. I know for sure that after ironing mine, and hanging them just so on the rack, that’s all my mother.
But too, as I stand aproned and covered in flour, baking the bread that could easily be bought at the nearest boulangerie, I am my grandma.
Margaux, 14, will only know them by what I share. She loves the bread. She may not call it by name, but as she Elsies her way back for another slice, I think she knows. Excited for her shopping trip, I tell her to wear a button down, for speed in the dressing room, and to save on her hair and make-up. She smiles, and Ivies her way to Paris.
One day, will she Jodi her dish towels? I can’t be sure. But while I am here, she will feel us all, and know she is home.
It doesn’t matter how many times I see it. It always fills me. The Gold Medal Flour. The Guthrie. The Stone Arch Bridge. Anything downtown Minneapolis. Maybe it’s the case for any place you begin, but here, I will always keep beginning.
I never baked bread before moving to France. Flour was merely the golden sign that lit a Minneapolis summer night. Bare shouldered in the warmth of evening, nothing could tire us. Nature’s season of laugher (and youth’s season as well) we could go all night. It’s funny, so many years later, I can still feel it. Not throughout my whole body, but in my heart’s mill, where I keep such pressure things.
Waking this morning after the long flight back home, from home, it’s always a little disorienting. Neither time, nor yesterday seem real. But I make sense of it, mixing flour and yeast, water and salt. Fueled by the sweet light of what was and what will be. Nothing lost. All grist for the mill. Dough rising. And a new day begins.
I can put anything in front of her. A whirring mixer. Splattering dough. The most tempting of cookies — made with a French butter that could lure the strongest of wills. Even steaming loaves of bread. But she doesn’t look up. So engrossed in her book. Dazzled by the words on the page. And I know, but for the dress and the hair, she is me.
I don’t remember not loving it, reading. It started with the Golden Books. Books I still have sitting beside me. And so rightly named, Golden, for they were treasures indeed. I suppose it was my mother who taught me, not to break the spine. To cradle them with care. “Use two hands,” she would say. “Why?” I asked. “You’ll need the support when you crawl inside.”
So that’s the way I read. Immersed. Just like she taught me. And that’s the way I love. Deep. Just as she loved me.
I boxed up some of the Christmas cookies that I made yesterday and gave them to the neighbor kids. I held them out with both hands. Their gasps of delight went deep. I can feel my mother smiling.
If I worried about anything, it certainly wasn’t the raw egg in the yellow cake batter my mother occasionally mixed up, along with the aid of boxed Betty Crocker, or Duncan Hines. Begging for the beater in mid-whirr. I sandwiched myself between apron and cupboard, inching my fingers toward the spinning bowl, my mother trying to push me out of danger with one thigh. She spun the dial back to stop, and cranked the neck, lifting the dripping attachments just out of my reach. She unplugged the mixer, because she thought of things like that — ways to protect me. Perhaps she had been bitten or pinched before. Or maybe it was other dangers lived through that told her to beware. With the power off, I felt like it had all been given to me. I cupped both hands as the elixir dripped into my palms. We had spoons, even a spatula, but I couldn’t be bothered with either. She then pulled the beaters out of the neck and handed me the first. Licking one rung left two pale yellow lines above and below my mouth. I was a warrior — a “battered” warrior.
Of course we never used those words, because they would have been too close. Too close to the actual battles ahead. And if there were warnings, would we have even heard them? Over the mixer’s motor? (I’m not sure anyone can, or does.) The laughter rang as she wiped a line of batter from my face and tasted it? Sweet was the taste of no real fear.
I don’t know if he left that day, my father. Did the cake get baked? Did we eat it? Did it get thrown away? This yellow cake of innocence? I don’t remember hearing the mixer again. Did we sell it at the garage sale? Probably. It was big. Too big to fit in our future small apartment. Too loud for those above us, or beside us. She would have thought of things like that. Not disturbing the neighbors in the duplex. The fourplex. The eventual apartment.
We never really baked again. But she filled my palms. First with security. Her hand in mine. And when the hunger returned, for something sweet, when the baked-in trust awakened and said it was ok to enjoy things, the laughter came as well, by the handful, by the heart full. Sweet laughter. It rang over rumor. It rang over fear. And it WAS sweet. Not like at first — when I didn’t know about the “eggs” — when I didn’t know that bad things could happen. (Once you know about them, it’s hard to forget.) But sweet nonetheless. Even baking now, I don’t give it worry — it’s just a part of it. And life is still so very sweet.
It’s happened once or twice before — just as it did this morning. Walking on the path, it nearly stopped me in my tracks. This sweet taste in my mouth. So clear. So delicious. So transportive. Yellow cake batter. The taste tickled my tongue. Inside my cheeks. I put my finger to my lip. Surely it was there. It was so real. My finger came back dry. But the smile remained.
The certainty of gravel remains beneath my feet. I stand unafraid. She is still finding a way to protect me — she still thinks of things like that. Reminding me. Pointing me to all things good. And the laughter rings above the birds, singing “Fill your heart. Feed your soul. Taste this life.”
