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As the rain silvers past the window, darkening the tree trunks and puddling in green grass and rain lilies, I can smell the cinnamon from the carrot cake drifting back to the office from the kitchen. It’s my mother’s recipe, and she died six years ago last April.
People ask me sometimes where I learned to love cooking. Did I grow up as a child cooking at my mother’s elbow reading recipes? No. Mostly I set the table and made the salad. We were a sizeable family, and I think my mother found it easier to cook without children underfoot. Still, I have an early memory of spring in California, when sweetheart roses spiraled through the rain at the kitchen window. My mother was making a cake. Probably it was carrot cake, and I was underfoot, so she set me down with a bag of flour, water, an egg or two, and whatever ingredients you give a child when it’s too rainy to make mud pies and there’s some serious baking going on. I remember a fascination, a sense of unlimited possibility as I stirred alongside |
my mother with the rain thrumming through the blue hydrangeas, the cinnamon, the roses. Then, suddenly, it was naptime. But my cake, I said. What about my cake? I’ll save it, she said.
When I awoke, all traces of the cake—and there had been traces—were gone. Where was my cake, I wailed in a high pitch perfected from much practice. So my beautiful dark-haired mother picked me up in her warm arms and sat me on the counter where she told me about how she had baked the cake while I slept and ate the whole thing fresh out of the oven because she couldn’t help herself. She was sorry, but it was so good. I remember the huge swelling of my heart, the amazing jolt of happiness. I don’t think I realized until I was in high school that probably that’s not what happened. And by then it was too late. The world is spinning all too fast these days, the children growing even faster. But we can heal each other. Stop to smell the cinnamon. Share the carrot cake.
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