Transcript
A couple of days ago, I found myself down in my basement waiting for my washing machine to stop so I could put the clothes into the dryer. Now I’ve got a large basement and there’s a lot of stuff down in there. A fair amount of the stuff down there came from my parents’ farmhouse. When they passed away and we sold the farm, some of the stuff from that farmhouse and my parents’ lives came up here to be in my basement.
And sometimes when I found myself with some minutes just being idle, and I don’t like being idle, I would wander over to that line of boxes up against the wall and I’d pull open one of those boxes from my parents’ farm and I’d rummage in it. Well, that’s exactly what I did.
I went over and tugged at one of the big boxes, about three feet by three feet by three feet square. Big, huge old cardboard box. I pulled open the flaps that had been tucked in to keep things safe inside. I found myself looking at a couple of old magazines, an old newspaper, and then a towel. And when I lifted the towel, I stopped. Underneath that towel was an object that tugged at me, tugged at my heart.
I picked up that object, held it in my hands, and suddenly I was back in the kitchen with my mama. And she was making biscuits. One of my daddy’s favorite, favorite, favorite things to eat was Mama’s biscuits. And she made them almost every night.
Well, you see, I now had in my hands my mother’s sifter, her metal sifter.
Suddenly through my mind ran different kitchens, different ages, listening to my mama hum, or sometimes sing as she cooked, as she often did. Sometimes I was standing in the kitchen as a little girl, sometimes as a teenager, a couple of times as an adult returning back home again. My mama standing there with that sifter in her hand.
I have no idea how old that sifter is. I cannot remember a time in my 79 years that I ever saw my mama without it. Come dinnertime, Mama would say to me, “Sister.” They all called me Sister. She said, “Now when you make biscuits, you’ve got to have the flour just as fine as it can be. And don’t forget, Sister, that if you’re going to make cakes, especially angel food cakes, you’ve got to sift everything at least three times. Otherwise, that cake won’t rise.”
I picked the sifter up. It looked to be some kind of tin, maybe over iron or steel. I gently put my left hand into the handle and squeezed. The curved wire scrapped across the bottom of the screen, pushing the flour through. I wrapped my right hand around the other side of the sifter because that’s what my mama always did. That way the flour stayed over the top of the bowl and didn’t go everywhere. Although most people will tell you when my mama started cooking, flour went everywhere. She was always exuberant in her cooking.
I honestly cannot remember a time growing up when I didn’t see that particular sifter in my mama’s hands. I wonder if sifters are still used these days. Flour comes in different grades. And I wonder if today, if I handed a bag of flour to my mama and said, “I want some biscuits,” she would reach for that sifter.
I was seeing birthday cakes, funeral cakes, trays of chocolate chip cookies, my daddy coming home from flying all over the world as a Marine Corps pilot, and my mama handing him a piping hot biscuit. And I could see sitting in the pantry beside the flour bag, the sifter I now had in my hands.
Such an ordinary object, well used, still working. I tried it.
Thank you for coming through the open door with me today.
Take care. Be safe.
