Mom & Blueberries
Replanting My Roots through the Senses
Four years ago, I lost my mother to the most deadly form of skin cancer. She was 49; I had just turned nineteen. She was sick for a very long time and we had switched roles; I became the one to take care of her. For the first part of life, though, it was she who cared for me, who fed me, who taught me to be strong, and taught me how to take care of myself. She was my mom.
After she died, I felt uprooted. As in a landslide, I lost my bearings. I lost my roots and had to begin to plant down again and re-establish who I was. We think of our roots as beginning at home. We grow and branch out, but there is a sense that we can always go home. For some, we are never able to go home again, but we realize that our true home is in the pieces we carry with us.
For those of us who have lost our mothers, it is as if we have come through a hurricane and were uprooted in the process. Our task now is to rebuild and replant, and to reconnect with those who are gone in a whole new way.
When one is uprooted, the task of replanting is difficult and overwhelming. We are raw from where we've been torn up. Sometimes it feels like we will never find our grounding again. A tree without planted roots is unable to survive. We must sort through the debris and begin to a) re-establish ourselves, and b) reintegrate the loss, heal from it, adapt and begin to grow again. Our memories leave us with a firm foundation of knowledge upon which to begin again, upon which many of our roots can be replanted.
Memories are the strongest connections to our past. Remembering is an act of honoring our roots, compartmentalizing our experiences and arranging them like in a cookbook or a photo album. Remembering happens through sensory experience. We feel memories and use them to bring our past with us as an important key to our growth. Our memories connect us to our past, and to the people in our past, and it is through our senses that our memories are most strongly evoked.
These are my memories, vivid and strong: I remember sunny afternoons when I was little, eating honey sandwiches and bowls of cottage cheese with grapes while watching soap operas; I remember the chocolate chip cookies she made every year on the first day of school, the late night trips to fifties style diners for dessert; I remember her in the car with a can of Diet 7UP; I remember the birthday cakes she spent days creating. These are my memories, and they make it possible for me to find home again. They make my roots strong.
So many memories of my mother relate to food. Whenever I smell certain things and taste certain foods, I am pulled back to my roots. I have dozens of food-related memories, but is blueberries that create my most vivid memories of my mother.
For years, she picked the blueberries herself. My brother and I used to go with her, as forced labour. In June, we picked strawberries and made jam, but it was always July, when the blueberries came, that I looked forward to.
I remember the hot sun and the taste of tart berries from the bush. I remember having stained fingers and getting sick from eating too many berries. Sometimes, if we were really lucky, we were able to pick wild blueberries from the shore of a lake. The blueberries left over were always for pancakes or eating with sugar and milk.
Of most importance, though, is a certain coffee cake she would make. We ate it straight from the pan with coffee and tea, and it never lasted 24 hours after coming out of the oven. To this day, I've found nothing that evokes my mother as much as the scent of blueberries and cinnamon.
I kept my mother's cookbooks after she died. I looked through them often, remembering the meals she made, but was never able to bring myself to cook those things that I associated solely with her presence. These recipes were too much of a painful reminder for me, too strong an indicator of her absence.
Last summer, three years after she died, was the first time I opened her cookbook with the intention of making her special coffee cake. I bought blueberries. I went through a very emotional process of taking the steps my mother had taken, inhaling the smell as it baked and being able to revisit my mother, after all this time. I felt something familiar, a feeling I had not had in too long.
Now, I'd like to share this recipe and I hope that in making something so simple, you will create your own memories to share with someone you love. Our roots are the people who were there at the beginning and though they leave us and we become uprooted, through something as simple as food, we may connect with them again.
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Check out the recipe for Valerie's BlueBarry Coffee Cake.