The Shadow
I’m baking today.
I have an assortment of various bowls that would work just fine, but today I choose to use grandma’s bowl.
Grandma’s bowl, the big gray crockery bowl is sturdy and round and deep — perfect for mixing up a banana cake or some luscious date roll with nuts.
I never really like nuts when I was little, but at grandma’s house — where everything always seemed to taste better — sometimes I’d try a few nuts, especially when they were chopped up very fine and sprinkled on date roll, along with a dab of whipped cream.
Grandma’s kitchen was small, but her welcome was huge.
Sunday dinners with all the cousins squeezed in around the table; wintery Friday nights when Dad drove us all into town and we’d watch television at grandma’s house and she always went into the kitchen and brought out a fragrant cake fresh from the oven; Easter dinners when the fried chicken was plentiful and the kitchen bustled with aunts and in-laws.
Grandma’s kitchen.
I tie my apron on, adjust the bib.
Funny how putting on the garb of your profession makes you feel ready, puts you in the right frame of mind.
My apron makes me feel nurturing, ready to bake.
Grandma’s aprons were soft and smooth, made of pastel flowered calico, with decorative rick-rack trim.
She always had several to choose from.
I liked those aprons.
Grandma’s bowl, the bowl I choose to use today, looks like a simple gray bowl, but for me it holds the memories of years gone by.
Because of it, I and my modern kitchen are connected to another homemaker who lived long ago.
She is my grandmother, a woman named Elizabeth, a gentle woman who prepared many a dish in this very same bowl.
It’s an oh-so-ordinary bowl, but special somehow because it’s been blessed with her goodness, her gift of hospitality, her desire to share.
It is more than a bowl that I cherish, it’s a tradition that I share in.
My baking today includes chocolate cake — with nuts — and also something new called apricot/oatmeal bread.
I love to experiment in the kitchen, to try new recipes.
I wonder if that’s how Grandma cooked.
I wonder if she had a favorite apron.
I wonder if her time in the kitchen were times that she remembered her own mother or grandmother and maybe shared a sentiment of love in the memory of a mince-meat pie recipe or an oatmeal cookie recipe.
Grandma had a little round biscuit cutter with crinkled edges and a wobbly wooden green handle that always fascinated me.
She had the most marvelous glass dish meant for squeezing the juice from a lemon. (I thought it was wonderful not to have to squeeze and squeeze with my two little hands and end up all sticky! The glass dish was so neat and efficient!
She had an entire kitchen drawer filled with long-handled spoons that struck me as so funny because they all had holes in them; probably for all the pickles and jams and strainings and such.
And she had a crockery bowl.
A large, round bowl that was sturdy and functional and always waiting to be filled with something good.
A bowl that now works in my kitchen.
Today I bake.
And preserve some memories of love.
