Lessons from a Mother’s Day in Isolation

The calendar says Mother’s Day. This year for me, it’s Apple Pie day.

I’ve always known what apple pie was. It’s only recently that I’ve allowed that I didn’t know it as well as I could. The wonderful motherly women in my life all baked. My grandmothers. My aunts. My mother.  Home baked goods were as common as beans on Saturday night, and through most of my child, just as unappreciated. Twinkies, Oreos, McCain frozen cakes, those for dessert lit up my world. Homemade cookies and apple pie? Boring.

Four decades and three children later, I stand in my kitchen with a notebook, tatters of wear and splatters of sauce creasing its sturdy crimson cover. Inside, pages full of my grandmother’s tidy penmanship, recipes for doughnuts and meat loaf and zucchini pickles consigned to paper at the urging of my mother. My grandmother cooked like she crocheted and lived for most of her life: never looking at a pattern, just knowing what to do.

Sweet smell of survival

At an age when girls were worried about their hair and what to wear on their dates, my grandmother became a breadwinner for her family. By the time she would have graduated high school she was married with an infant son and twins on the way. She cooked on a wood stove without digital readouts and convection settings. There was no microwave, food processor or yeast in neat little envelopes, no sliced bread at the corner store for those days when you were sick or tired or forgot that the last slice went into the morning lunchbox. Cooking was not a hobby or a pastime; it was literal survival. But she made it taste like a joy.

As my grandmother’s life turned grey and cool my mother set up in her kitchen with bowls, spoons, pen and paper, watching and asking and helping my grandmother set down a roadmap for the rest of us.

Ingredients and measurements, techniques and cooking time could all be captured and recorded. The joy, well, that could only be shared in two ways: our memories, and our daily lives.

Heart and Core

As a child, all I saw and felt was her joy. When I fell at the playground, she dried my tears and joined in my chorus of ‘Bad Swing’ until I smiled. She would read to me for hours and answer any of my hundred daily questions with clarity and honesty. She made me feel that time with me was the most important thing in the world, as she did with my mother, and I in turn learned from them that there was nothing more important than family. The joy found in millions of daily chores and unsung tasks … that lesson would take longer.

Four decades and three children later, in fact, when my children asked for fresh apple pie. My mother always made the pies, for every Christmas and Easter and visits in between. But this year as we isolated from Covid-19, there was no spring break visit, no Easter dinner with my mother at the table, no Grandma’s apple pie. So I stood, crimson notebook in hand. I remember a picture of my baby brother, barely walking, clad in Tshirt, diaper and a giant grin, his chubby legs swallowed by my father’s workboots in which he eventually clumped around the entire house. I had to fill shoes that felt would swallow me whole.  

But maybe, just maybe, I could fill a pie crust.

Finding the Map

I flipped through the notebook, drinking in memories of cookies baking, my grandmother’s kitchen with its oil stove and neat little pantry and stalks of summer savory hung overhead to dry. I search crimson cover to cover but there is no recipe for apple pie. I call my mother. She chuckles. “I don’t have a recipe,” she admits. “I just bake them.” Pen and paper gave way to Facetime, as we walked each other through the process. How many apples? How high to pile them? How much sugar? How hot an oven? So many questions, and in the end, a partial map. She could lead me so far. I had to figure out the rest. Like good cooking. Like motherhood.

Grains of Truth

Success is in honouring the little things, the sprinkle of cornmeal on the bottom crust to absorb the moisture, the extra dash of nutmeg, the minutes added to the baking time because my oven is cooler than hers. Learn by doing, and sometimes, it will be messy, confusing, not what was hoped for. The joy is in the work, the satisfaction of turning a bag of apples and a few scoops of flour into a one-of-a-kind creation that can be shared and add something warm and comforting to the world. A mother’s hope for the meal she cooks, for the children she raises.

I baked a pie. It was good. It was appreciated. Thank God. Peeling six cups of apples is a hell of a lot of work. Making pastry that doesn’t stick or crack or fall apart is my penance on Earth. But the shortcuts would leave out too much of a journey I want to enjoy, minute by minute, task by task.

I thank my mother and the mothers that came before us for the recipes, the memories, their lives that led to mine. Most of all, I thank them for the ability to discover the joy for myself and make it my own. That is something I can feed my own children, long after the pie is gone.