Tuesday, August 17, 2010


Kitchen Mercies: Remembering the Maker

Today is soap-making day. The kitchen smells bittery and sweet, a mix of the lime and the sugar (I'm making Lime Rickey Goats Milk Soaps) and, smelling that sweet lime fragrance all day, I just want to eat the refrigerator empty again. Something that smells this good ought to be edible. I'm sure something about this fragrance will be deadly for my waistline if I'm not careful.

Today, while I stir soap, I am remembering my grandmother, Fleecy Lavinia Caston, and am grateful for how she passed the old ways down to me when I was a girl: about soap-making, about tatting and sewing, and especially how to take threadbare scraps and bits of fabric and put them together with cotton thread and a silver needle so tiny you could barely see it, all in hopes of making something beautiful and functional as a quilt. One winter afternoon when I was four, she showed me how to make a doll from a cotton diaper, embroidering the face by hand, using yarn for hair, wrapping it all into a blanket remnant so I had a baby doll which, at that age, I wanted very much. I thought it was a miracle. I hope I thanked her for it.

My grandmother never had much, not in the years I knew her anyway, but she certainly knew how to be grateful for the things she did have: for good friends, for a simple home-cooked meal like turnip greens, and for a piece of sweet cornbread crumbled into a cold glass of buttermilk. She saved her pennies and, once a month or so, we'd put on our "walking shoes" and walk to the Woolworth's where she'd buy herself a spool of tatting thread and treat me to rock candy on a stick. She knew the value of a clean conscience and a good night's sleep and a peaceful heart and I think she may have passed a longing for those things along to me, though I admit here to you today that those lessons were slow in coming to me.

Today, I'm recalling that, as much as she taught me how to piece and quilt, how to make soap and "make do," she also taught me about being kind to others, about minding my manners, about being thankful, and about how mercy is sometimes better than justice. It isn't that she talked to me about any of these things directly; rather, I watched her live these things out in front of me as I grew from being a small girl into young womanhood. She was kind to everyone we encountered in our walks and in the stores or at the post office, even kind to people who weren't always so kind to her. She delighted in people, with ALL their quirks. She never forgot to thank the people who held the door for her or bagged her groceries, those who complimented her, or those neighbors who brought her a potted geranium or slice of pie. And she always liberally dished out mercy for me when she might have just as easily judged me. I appreciated that about her most of all, I think. I was awkward, shy, prone to blushing and stammering, easily flustered and frustrated, and she acted as if I were the smartest, most clever, best thing she'd ever had come into her life. Everyone needs someone like that in a childhood, and I was fortunate to have her. I know that now; I knew it then.

It's only natural that I think of her today, here in my old farmhouse kitchen in central Pennsylvania, bare-footed, measuring (haphazardly) the goats milk and the fragrance oils, stirring the hot soap mix in a warped aluminum pan until the soap is smooth and milky and setting up, then pouring it into molds. Even when I am the only one home, I am never alone on days when I make soap: I imagine her back to me as I stir and pour, imagine hearing again her gravelly voice as she leans over the cookstove muttering, Umm-umm. Now THAT'S something to write home about.

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