My Mother Left Me

A recipe for scones and how to love your grandchildren

My mother left me when I was thirty to join her mother and father in that place we aren’t sure about. She left me her scone recipe on a piece of paper. It was hard to get her to write it down. So she didn’t. She had made it by feel for over five decades. I don’t think she had ever thought about what she put in it.

When I asked for the recipe she seemed puzzled. Or was that the brain tumour talking? So she made a batch while I watched and I wrote down what she put in the bowl. Although even then she wasn’t sure. Was that five cups of flour or five and a half? She didn’t seem to think it mattered. And I wasn’t watching closely enough. But I wrote down the vague content amounts. Usually they work out. Especially good warm spread with butter and jam. Very heavy; containing both butter and shortening. I think raisins are essential; some of my family think not. The recipe calls for a “handful”.

I suspect that’s where I get my problems with recipes from. I hardly ever follow them even when I have all the ingredients. Someone will ask me about how I made something and I might not know. Worse is when I make something amazing and don’t really have a clue about how much of anything I put into it.

Before she left me I watched her be a grandmother. And she was a good one. I have tried to be as wonderful as she was. Only some of my kids got to experience her love and for that I am sorry.

I didn’t get to watch her be a mother much. That sounds strange but sometimes I think youngest children whose siblings have all left home have a different kind of upbringing. A lot like onlys. She worked full time. I don’t remember much of her. But I know she was there.

I had a baby brother but he died of SIDS when he was a few months old. A few times I got up in the night and saw her feeding and changing him. It was a different nurturing than I experienced because I was seven then. Practically a grown up. Or so I felt. Watching her with him made me think she might have loved me the same when I was a baby.

I think she lost something more when he left us. I believe she got it back when the grandchildren arrived. But she only had a few years with them before she was gone.

I miss what I don’t remember. What she left me that I am carrying forward not knowing where it came from. Memory is a strange thing and there is no one left who was there then, when I was a child to tell me. It is that getting old means you are left with more questions than answers because those who came before you are gone. Sometimes even the ones who were with you.

But I still can make my mother’s scones.

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