My mom called today from upstate New York, wondering how we were making out with the “blizzard of the decade.”
While it hasn’t yet shifted into high gear, we are having snow here in Portland Maine and much of the normal commerce and activity has ground to a halt in anticipation of the storm.
And so I’m baking.
Today it will be French bread, but I was telling my mom how, earlier in the week, my 2-year old granddaughter Vera and I had our first baking experience together.
Vera enjoys a project and really likes to help; last week she “helped” me shovel the driveway, a task she tackled with earnest sincerity.
I’d had a hankering for molasses cookies for weeks. Normally a batch of chocolate chip cookies will soothe my need for a baked good, but not this time; it had to be molasses.
Someone might say that my body was needing the iron which molasses provides. Someone else might say “that’s what happens on cold winter days, you need some home-baked goodness.” But after my conversation with my mom today, it’s clear something else was afoot.
After I relayed to my mom the details of our little baking project this week, and my mom launches into this:
“Well, that’s very interesting that you baked molasses cookies. All week I’ve been thinking about them, and a few nights ago I even had a dream about them. I was at the farmhouse (in upstate NY where my mom grew up) and had baked a batch for (my) Grandmother and (my) Aunt Roseann. They were really good and I (my mom) was remembering how Aunt Marie (my grandmother’s sister) made the best ones, chewy and soft but not under-cooked. As we were eating them we all said, “Aunt Marie would be proud.”
I don’t pretend to know what it means. All I know is that it is very comforting to feel connected to the women in my family by means of a baked good, and to share such a simple pleasure with my own granddaughter.
I”m glad I listened to the voice of intuition. Without it, this whole experience dissipates into molecules of potentiality. But because I did listen and followed the call, a molasses cookie will never again be just a cookie.
It is a bridge, a connection to people unseen and yet heard. It’s love.
Jeanne Fiorini now has reason to enjoy baked goods even more.
When not baking, she’s doing Tarot http://www.tarotworks.com or being neat http://shesneat.com