My Mother's Recipes

My Mother’s Recipes

My mother collected recipes
She gathered them for a lifetime or more
Snipping them out of newspapers
Buying books from fundraisers
Copying them down from cooking shows.

Ten thousand little snippets
All stuffed into old books and boxes
Assembled in cabinets and files
Gathering dust in her old apartment now
Forgotten little bits of lore.

I’m not the cook my mother was
Nor can I appreciate
The value these recipes once meant
But she used them to make good dinners
And a home for the five of us kids.

I can’t save the ten thousand crumbling snippets
Or store forever the moldering books and boxes.
But a few I can save as a legacy
A remembrance of part of her recipe
For raising the family that she did.

eyk 9/30/10