Mother’s Day Memories

I crunch the apple skin shaving between my teeth and tart juices release flavorful memories along with its nourishment. The flour and water has been mixed and both the rolling pin and pastry cloth removed from their storage place. Once a year I perform this ritual, which brings back recollections from long ago.

My mother and I loved to bake together. Pies, cakes, cookies of every shape and size that were stored in tins for gifts to friends and neighbors at Christmas. But what I loved to bake the best was Apple Dumplings.

First she peeled the apples. Holding the paring knife at the top of the apple, she’d begin cutting between the skin and the apple. It was a game to see if she could peel the whole apple with one long perfect circle of apple skin. We’d both laugh whether she succeeded or if it broke, as I next popped whatever had been cut into my mouth, munching up like a piece of spaghetti. My job was preparing the sugar and cinnamon combination that would fill the cored apple while Mom peeled off the skins. Then it was time to roll out the dough. Mom’s individual dough wrapping for each apple was perfectly formed and evenly rolled. Mine tended to split and be lop-sided. No matter. We each wrapped our apples and placed them in the glass dish for baking with a dollop of butter on top of each dumpling. The final step was mixing a sweet sugar and cinnamon syrup that when poured around the individual apple dumplings made them look like little ducklings in a pond. We’d pop the pan in the oven and I’d gather up leftover dough pieces and the cinnamon sugar mix, making cinnamon crisps that we’d bake after the dumplings. Then we’d clean up the kitchen together, washing and drying the bowls and rolling pin before getting ready to fix dinner.

This is what I remember as I peel the apples, roll out the dough and prepare my pan of apple dumplings today in honor of the times we spent together, mother and daughter. It is how I celebrate each Mother’s Day. She passed away when I was only 25 and while I was grown and married myself by then, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. When I am in the kitchen baking, as I am here today, I can still feel her beside me. It is when I feel the very closest to her again.

So today, I celebrate as I bake. I remember the gift of love and warmth that comes from sharing simple tasks. I pop the finished dumplings into the oven, knowing that soon a sweet aroma will fill the kitchen. Another reminder that she, too, wafts through my life in invisible ways, and is with me still.

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“Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.”

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Stowe is best remembered for the melodramatic and sentimental “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, an antislavery novel written in 1851. This work, which made Stowe famous virtually overnight, intensified North and South antagonism in the pre-Civil War era, making her a hated figure in the South and the darling of the English abolitionists.