One Woman's Treasure

Imagine my surprise when my son brought this little beauty in his last haul of things from home. I had made this for my gramma in the '70's... when my gifts nearly all included decoupage of some sort. Gramma loved red, so I decided to create her a recipe box with favorite things "stuck" all over.

The really awesome part is that she absolutely stuffed it with her favorite recipes. The cards are in her careful, pointed script and in my mother's beautiful penmanship. And the food is what you might call a blast from the past.

Here and there a neighbor or friend chimes in with her version of a dish. It makes me smile because just reading through a few of these takes me right back to my gramma's red, pink, and green kitchen where her windows billowed with white, airy curtains... windows propped open by various heights of sticks due to the window weights all being broken...  Remember window weights at all? I don't actually recall having any that worked!

The honor among home cooks is fierce in my family. No matter how many times my family prepared a dish, it never lost its true origin. I have often wondered if the donor of the recipe actually prepared it half as many times as we did. I just know we never stole a recipe and called it ours. That was serious stuff.



My kitchen has a lot of red so this will fit right in...  I will probably lose a few of the newspaper clippings. I don't think we ever made many of those "dreams in a box" for our family dinners. Food is the love language in my family, especially the preparation of it for special events. I am blessed to have the opportunity to cook for those I love. I recognize with tears how desperately sad my mother became when she no longer could cook for us. It was, however, never too bad for her to sit at the table and help me cook something. Until that last year, and even then she made it her business to choreograph what we were cooking for this and that.

Sometimes a recipe such as my Aunt Hazel's apple butter transports me to another home, one filled with dolls and antique pine and cedar paneling... and cinnamon air.

And then... I remember the note I cut up to make this....  My mom had written a little Mother's Day thank you note to me on this, so I saved the front for immortalizing.  Now I probably know the interior of the note held more value.

And another glimpse into my mother's cards, testimony to her foreverlove of all things doll...

Rain continues and grey skies... perfect weather for cleaning, for cooking, for remembering...