My mother was not a sentimental person.
She would tell you this herself, in the same direct way she told you most things, without apology and without the softening that some people offer before blunt truths. She kept no jewelry from her own mother, had given away her wedding china within two years of my father’s death because she said it had been his choice and she had never liked the pattern, and when my sister and I helped her downsize into the apartment in 2018, she gave away furniture and photographs and accumulated objects with the systematic efficiency of someone who understood that things were not people and that the distinction mattered.
The mixer she kept.
This requires some explanation because it runs against her general philosophy. She had bought it in 1989 with money she had saved from teaching summer school, which she had done every summer for six years specifically to build up the fund for the kitchen equipment she wanted. She had not wanted many things in her life, not in the material sense, but she had wanted a real stand mixer and a real set of cast iron pans and the cast iron she had acquired in the 1970s and the mixer she had waited for until she could pay cash.
She used it every Sunday.
I mean this literally. Every Sunday morning for the years I was growing up and the years after I left home and for as long as she was physically able to stand at the counter, which was longer than most people gave her credit for because she was stubborn about it in the specific way she was stubborn about most things, which was quietly and without announcement and past the point that other people would have stopped.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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