What We Keep

     Christmas cookie time.  I'm measuring and sifting, mixing and  pouring. And for one batch of cookies I need to roll out with a rolling pin. As I've written of before, I use my mother's rolling pin. I think we can safely  call it old.

     My mother was a very good cook. A maker of beautiful pies. But she was not a cookie baker. I have only one  memory of her making cutout Christmas cookies when I was about 7..She made them. No one ate them.  They were burned and broken. We wouldn't make cookies again until I was in college and came  home with an idea and a recipe.  But I have that rolling pin.

     The pin, wears a sleeve to better roll out pie crust or cookies. And when I was using it the other day I noticed that the sleeve is showing its age and has a few small holes in it. It also has one really old hole which it appears, my mother darned close with green thread. (Darning; another word and skill lost in the years, perhaps a blog for a different day.)
  
     All of this goes to saying that it is Christmas time and that I miss my mother. Her Birthday is fast approaching and I will think of her and how we always put up our Christmas tree on her birthday.  These days, I put my tree up soon after Thanksgiving. She preferred a late tree trimming and remembered  fondly shopping on Christmas Eve.

     Our  Christmas'  may not be picture perfect. The cookies may have been burned, or never attempted. But the season, the calendar, the sounds, the snow that falls softly from a gray sky. These all bring that essential sense of Christmas.  The feeling that even with our imperfections we are tied to one another deeply and often quite happily. Despite less than perfect cookies.  The rolling pin sleeve is worn, it is darned.  It may not last too much longer. But in those stitches made by my mother, are reminders that sometimes what we keep is something more than what we could touch.