Within the past month or so, a certain memory of my mom has been particularly vivid and refreshingly poignant. Mom loved to bake. She would spend a whole Saturday making coffee cakes and rolls and then freeze them for the months to come. I had our family brownie recipe memorized by the time I was 11 or 12, because we had made it together so often. Some of my mom's signature baked goods were gooey butter cake (a St. Louis specialty), miniature cheesecakes, and caramel rolls.
Making caramel rolls (which are like the big pecan rolls from Panera, only smaller) was a fairly involved process. And as a little girl, I would really enjoy helping my mom do the baking, in preparation for the holidays or for special family dinners. We had to make a dough with yeast and let it rise. While the dough was rising, we would fill the cups of a muffin tin with brown sugar and pecans. I remembered carefully counting out the number of pecans as I slowly dropped them onto their brown sugar bed inside a muffin cup.
Then, on the countertop next to the sink, mom would roll out the risen dough with an old rolling pin. She had strong arms and large hands and would probably have done well working on a farm. It wasn't tough dough, but she would lean her whole body into it. Sometimes, she would let me roll out the dough, standing behind me with her hands over mine. I liked to make a big sweeping roll that would end with a flourish, leaving the rolling pin going around and around on its spindle up in the air. I can hear the click of the rolling pin as it made contact with the dough on the counter. One sweep to the left and one to the right, so it would spread out evenly into a large, thin oval. What came next was my absolute favorite part.
We would melt butter, then spread the warm butter over the rolled-out dough.
With our bare hands.
The warmth of the butter oozing between my little fingers next to my mom's big fingers. The permission and freedom to get messy (which was typically not allowed). The intimacy of the closeness of our bodies and our voices speaking softly, sharing smiles and laughter. This memory is so powerfully and poignantly maternal. And it simultaneously quenches and arouses a profound hunger within me for that mothering presence. The care. The creativity. The protection. The play.
There's something about the transmission of family traditions from mother to daughter that strikes me as epic and ancient. I'm not really one to appreciate, much less propagate, traditions. But whether it's age or loss or something else I can't pinpoint, I want to pass on this tradition of dough-rolling and butter spreading and cinnamon-sugar sprinkling, whether to actual future generations of my family or to the people I call family. It just feels right to do so. As a way to multiply the mothering I received.
The resurgence of this memory has also led me to want that section of countertop next to the sink where we would roll out the dough and spread the butter. Or at least ask that the new owners, whenever they appear and most likely remodel the 1970's kitchen, to save it for me. I don't quite know what someone does with a diagonal section of 1970's countertop, but I'm creative and have creative friends, so I'm sure we can think of something. Perhaps the countertop will become a canvas to portray a picture of a little girl with red pigtails leaning over a countertop with her mother, making caramel rolls.
