PHOTOS:Mary van Balen
I live in the house where she and dad raised my four silblings and me. I sit on their couch, launder clothes in the washer she’d used for years and gaze out the dining room window, watching squirrels scamper up and down the grand pin oak in the front yard. Just like mom did, and her mother before her. Over the past two years since she died, many things remind me of her and I miss her face, her hugs, her love.
Thanksgiving preparations put an ache in my heart, a deep-down “missing mom” that lingered over dinner and remained as I fell into bed.
I used her rolling pin to make pie crusts.
“There’s nothing to making a pie crust,” she always said. Her mother, Becky, who lived with us, had said the same thing. I believed them and have made my own pastry since I could reach the counter. With every handful of flour, every pass of the rolling pin over the dough, I thought of her and tried to put as much love as she had done into each pie.
“Mom,” I said, “I could use one of your smiles, or comments that everything will be fine. 
Not that I doubt that it will or that I haven’t had Thanksgivings without the entire family gathered around the table, but this year is different. The separation is finally legal. A good thing.”
I put the pie crusts in the freezer to chill and moved on to pin wheels. They were a favorite and disappeared almost as quickly as they came out of the oven. The old cake pans, black with decades of patina, were still in the oven drawer were they always were. The pin wheels baked while I mixed pumpkin, eggs, and spices and filled the crusts. As sweet pungent smells filled the house, I sat at the kitchen table and continued my conversation with Mom.
She was pleased to see her daughter carrying on traditions she had passed along and reminded me that chilling the crusts and crimping their edges was an improvement. I could almost feel her arm around me and knew it was her whisper that reassured me: “Everything will be good in the end.”
©2010 Mary van Balen
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