The other day I burned pumpkin bread.

My mother never burned anything she baked.

My pumpkin bread was made from a mix. I virtuously added the eggs.

My mother made her bread by hand, rhythmically kneading it, letting it rise, kneading again.

My kitchen smelled like smoke, black clouds swirling around and about.

My mother’s kitchen smelled like the best bread in the world, like nothing I have ever tasted or will taste again.

My mother was a full time English teacher and had four kids. She cooked our dinners, from scratch, every night. Cauliflower marinara. Chicken cacciatore. Enchilada pie. Vegetarian Lasagna.

She made breakfast every morning. Oatmeal. Scrambled eggs. Toast.  Homemade plum jam. No jam has ever matched my mother’s plum jam.

I’m an author and spend a lot of time writing and editing, daydreaming, drinking coffee,  and taking care of kids. Our dinners are often from a bag, and I heat them up on the stove, or they come in a silver tin and it cooks on high at 350 degrees.

I do not make breakfast. As a writer, even when my kids were young, I was  up until two in the morning working, and from a very young age, my kids were scrambling on top of the counter and pulling down bowls and cereals themselves.

Call me a bad mother, I’ll live with it.

My mother ate healthily, I like chocolate.

She ate fruit and yogurt for lunch every day. Hand me a burrito with guac and salsa and I’m good to go.

She had a southern belle type personality, gentle and polite, with steel beneath the softness. My personality is more like a hurricane, with a temper on the side.

The southern belle and the hurricane got along great. We believed in laughing and chatting. We believed in her delicious cooking.

When my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, though she’d never smoked a day in her life, it had already crept into her spine, brain, and lung.

We were at a natural foods store when the descent began.  Everything she bought was organic and delicious.  She picked up a small bag of groceries, fruits and vegetables, and a vertebrae in her spine snapped.

That’s how we knew. That’s how it started.

The southern belle never faltered.

She did quit her beloved job teaching English to high schoolers, as the chemo and radiation would take too much time and energy, but she continued on with her life. Family. Friends. Reading. Travel. Cooking.

Marinated pasta salad. Carrot cake with extra cream cheese frosting. Pies. Thrice stuffed potatoes.

In fact, she made Christmas dinner for all of us, her insistence, two weeks before she died. The turkey was perfect.

When the smoke billowed through my house after I burned the pumpkin bread, I had to laugh as I thought of my sweet, steely mother.

She never burned anything, but I swear I could hear that southern belle laughing, right along with me.