Message from the Past

Yesterday, I felt in the mood to brake in my 1/2 new kitchen and do some baking. Yes, both my brother and I know how to cook. When you have two parents working full time, us kids often started dinner when we got home from school so it would be nearly done when the parents got home.

In the freezer I noticed some frozen strawberries that my mom had given me. After 3 years of grad school and no time to cook, I decided I needed to take some time and make some comfort food. It had been such a long time since I made pie dough I had to get out my mom's oil dough recipe. As I opened the cook book, the past jumped out at me. This particular cook book originally belonged to my grandma (my dad's mom). Ninety percent of the recipe cards in this book are written by my grandma. Out from the cards jumped her very distinct hand writing that was so familiar to me as a child. I don't even remember how I came to possess the cook book. Memories came flooding back into memory. Baking cherry and prune Kolachis, yum. Was her recipe for Kolachi in this book? No such luck.

As I mixed the dough up, added sugar and starch to the strawberries, I suddenly realized the past was present in my kitchen. The rolling pin; grandma's, the Pyrex measuring cup; grandma's, the cookbook; grandma's. I slide the pie into the oven and pull open my kitchen drawers. Inside I also find a potato masher, also grandma's. Maybe I was searching for something comforting that evening and these things allowed my good memories to well up from deep inside me. It did make me feel good to have these thing around me last night. I wondered if any other grandchildren had such treasures tucked away in their homes. I rather doubt it, I don't think they came around to visit that often. My older sibling might have a thing or two but I very much doubt my younger sibs took the time to acquire such things.

I wonder why I collected these things yet, to date, have cared for them so unceremoniously. Today, in a rather off and on fashion, I continue to ponder what these things met to me, mean to me and will mean in the future to anyone. Things that belonged to someone they never knew personally and will only know through my memories of them.