Letters I have not sent

"One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts." — Psalm 145:4

Dear Mama,

The peonies are in. The big pink ones along the side of the house that you told me to cut back every year and I did not cut back and now they are enormous, and you were right, and I should have listened, and I am still not going to cut them back. They are yours. You planted them the spring after Becca was born, and they have outlived you by eleven years, and they are too big, and I do not care.

I was at your grave on Monday. Memorial Day. I brought some of the peonies in a mason jar. The stone looks good. The grass around it is kept up. I stood there and did not say anything, which is not like me, but it has been a while now and I am running low on the things I think of to say at the grave. The things I want to tell you are not grave things. They are kitchen things. They are the things I would tell you on a Tuesday afternoon if you were still in the kitchen, which is where you always were.

The biscuit recipe is still working. I have not changed it. I make them on Saturday mornings when I have the time, which I do this morning, and the kitchen smells the way it smelled when I was eight, which is flour and butter and the particular warm smell of the oven doing what it was built for. I am using your bowl. The yellow one with the crack on the lip that you would not throw away. I am not going to throw it away either.

The grandchildren are growing up faster than I thought they would. Caleb is seven now, which means you have been gone longer than he has been alive, which is a fact I do not like to sit with but sit with anyway. You would have loved him. You would have loved all of them, but Caleb especially, because he is the kind of child who notices things, the way you noticed things, and I see you in him sometimes when he is not looking and it catches me off guard.

I am doing all right. The house is in one piece. The garden is in. I am making biscuits on a Saturday morning in your bowl, and the peonies are too big, and I am a woman in my seventies writing a letter to her mother in a journal that nobody will read, because the writing is the thing, not the sending.

I miss you in the kitchen. I miss you in the specific way a daughter misses her mother, which is different from every other kind of missing, and which I did not understand until you were the one who was gone.

With love,
Ruby

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.