My Mother Had Good Days

6/20/2010

 Most of the writing we did at UCLA was started in class and finished at home as part of our homework assignment. Obviously, some of the writing exercises were more difficult than others and much of the difficulty came from trying to decide if you were going to write fact or fiction. Memoir or novel. Some of us created genre we called "faction." In other words a fictionalized account of some truthful event in our lives.

You might try the same approach for the following excerises:  1) write a half a page on the Sounds of Summer 2)write a half a page on the Smells of Childhood 3) write a half a page on What Happened to You at 3 AM on the Night You Couldn't Sleep 4)  write a half a page on The Touch of Forgiveness

Here is my Smells of Childhood

My Mother Had Good Days 

My mother had days, weeks, and months when she was crazy and not in a fun way. 

It was easy to figure out when she was in her in right mind because on her sane days she baked. If you’ve ever walked into a bakery and smelled the aroma of bread as it’s ready to come out of the oven, then you know the fragrance that filled our house on my mother’s good days. All other days were measured against my mother’s baking days. 

I learned that my mother could be kind because she baked. I knew she could smile because of her cinnamon rolls. I knew my mother could dance the Charleston because of her apple pie. The smell of a coffee cake baking or bread dough rising made me feel warm, secure, and comforted. 

I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way about bread because of what I’ve noticed in the restaurants. Restaurants have changed over the years. Before it was simply good service and great food that brought customers back, but lately I’ve noticed some of the restaurants have added a little something extra. Many will place breadbaskets in front you almost as soon as you sit down, and now it’s not only bread that appears. Recently, they’ve added boutique oils for different types of breads, and I have to confess to an odd thought I have when I look at these breadbaskets.

They still make me feel comforted, of course, but that isn’t all. Serve me warm bread in a basket with side boutique oils, and I often find myself wondering, “Oh, I wonder if my mother is having a good day.”