The most memorable conversations I ever had with Mama happened in the kitchen.  There are many Saturday mornings in my own kitchen that conjure up thoughts of Mama and her morning rituals.  It’s funny that things that seemed so routine and trivial became the highlights of my reflective moments about her.  Every morning she made a pot of coffee.  Before the coffee was done brewing, she boiled water for her grits or oatmeal (In her later years, it was usually oatmeal.)  She cooked two slices of bacon and put a slice of bread in the toaster.  She would generally eat half of an apple and chop the other half to cook in her oatmeal.  This behavior became her normal and my expectation.  What I see now is that her daily practices in the kitchen were symbolic of her life.  Simple. Consistent. Truthful.

Mama was raised on a farm in rural Alabama.  She was a country girl at heart.  The beauty of most folks I knew from the country was their ability to achieve successful ends with reasonable expenditures of resources.  The good country people I knew recognized the need to be good stewards over the resources they were blessed to possess. And those who lived through the great depression seemed more capable than others.  Good stewardship meant careful measurement of resources, meaningful use of the resources, deliberate decision making in order to remain consistent in the day-to-day operations and owning the truths of related rationales and the outcomes.

Although Mama like fancy things, she lived by the Ecclesiastes time and place guidelines.  Lola did not spend a lot of time cooking omelets or baking casseroles.  Those dishes were reserved for special occasions.  She kept her routine menu items tasteful and well-seasoned.  Mama acknowledged the need to balance meals based on the prescribed food groups and color coding.  In addition to watching her mother create a colorful spread at the family dinners using the fresh vegetables from the field, she had been a home economics teacher at one point in her teaching career.  It was in her role as a teacher that she met Emily Post whose teachings were consistent with Mama’s philosophies on presentation of self and everything you touched.  Emily Post also affirmed Mama’s belief that everything had an appropriate time and place.  Meeting Emily Post, via her etiquette book, affirmed Mama which gave more power to her teachings and practices about the beauty and essence of simplicity and consistency.  After meeting Emily Post, Mama relied on her lessons from the country folks “out home,” the Bible and Emily Post.

Mama’s simplistic living extended beyond the kitchen in our early morning conversations.  Some mornings she would talk about her childhood and the boxes of fruit and nuts she and her siblings were so excited to receive Christmas morning.  Other mornings I learned about how my mother and her siblings used their imaginations to make dolls from the remnants of shucked ears of corn.  Maybe it was this ability to envision clothing and hair from the parts of the corn most often discarded as trash that enabled Mama to see potential and hope in other challenged areas of her life and mine.  I think the lessons from the country taught her not to focus on the things she did not have, but to engage herself in a process of surveying her resources and then developing a plan to achieve the desired goals.  Hence, her family couldn’t afford dolls so they used the corn husks to make dolls.  We talked through many life challenges with this type of processing.

Mama was a master at helping me see the resources and opportunities that made the glass half full.  Mama could calm my uncertainty and clouded vision with a believable promise in an unforeseeable future because she had the ability to see traits and resources I was too immature or afraid to see and own.  I needed that kind of faith talk and faith walk in my life.  Heck, I still do.  I miss my mother and her wise perspectives on life.

My mother was a quiet, pensive spirit.  She chose her words carefully and always delivered herself and her voice with grace and poise.  She gave me balance and direction.  There was security for me in her consistency.  I trusted her voice because I knew that her practiced simplicity would not permit a masking of the clear and poignant messages I needed to hear like a person adorned in layers of foundation and powder in a color not suited for their complexion.  When it came to baring real and simple facts, opinions and insights, Mama was flawless.  There have been many days since her illness that I have labored to channel my inner Lola in order to bring calm and clarity to situations.  Flavoring my realistic views on life with Lola’s optimism, independent of her, became my new process.  Quite frankly, I have had many days that it just sucked to go at the new process without her.  It is in those days and moments that the challenge of living out her lessons from her kitchen frustrate me and cause me to miss her more.  In my deepest most pitiful moments of sadness related to her physical absence, I transport myself to her kitchen and inhale the calmness of her humming “Amazing Grace” or singing “How Great Thou Art.”  I recreate the aura of her warm, welcoming “Good morning. How did you sleep?”  As only a good southern girl could do, I receive comfort from the salted bubbling water awaiting the shower of grits soon to come and the smell of bacon frying in the cast iron skillet on her stove.

Mama was a lefty and I always watched her turn and readjust the bacon to ensure it cooked evenly and completely.  For some reason, her left-handed trait was more prominent to me those mornings in the kitchen than at any other time.  I never really considered why I enjoyed time in the kitchen with Mama until I had no more opportunities spend time in her kitchen with her.  Separation from Mama and valued experiences produced a harvest of simple truths:

• Mama created a safe place for herself and me in her kitchen.
• Mama’s mother, Mama Love, used her kitchen to feed the souls of her family.
• Mama saw the value in spending time in a space rich in resources to teach.  There were spices, produce, poultry, dry goods and anecdotal life stories.
• Mama lived out a cooking show before we knew people would have television shows dedicated to the idea.
• Mama taught me to busy myself making delicacies out of the ingredients available to me.
• Mama taught me to apply the lessons from her kitchen to my life outside my home.
• Mama taught me that the time spent with her in the kitchen gave us a commonality of interests that overcame deficits due to age and customs.
• Mama provided me a feeling memory like the muscle memory of a one who works out.
• Mama’s gift of a feeling memory repeatedly provides the safety of her kitchen where I can sort out and sort through life.
• Mama’s kitchen established a standard and practice in my life of determination to prepare and present an amazingly nutritious and flavorful feast from whatever ingredients exist in my space.

I am forever thankful to her and for her.  I love the memories of her gentle, yet commanding presence.  I am thankful for her legacy of compassion and excellent stewardship over the people who entered her literal and figurative kitchens.  I hope that I can create such a place for my biological children and others to enter where the norm is relaxing into their truths and clearly viewing their assets, liabilities, and opportunities such that they enhance their lives in ways not even I can imagine.