Mama's Date Bread

I'm making Mama's Date Bread as I've done every Thanksgiving eve since childhood when she let me cut the sticky dates and break the walnuts for those loaves her own mother once taught her to make. She lingers around my edges and in the movements of my fingers as I carry on the tasks that once were hers. The batter turns a deep caramel color when I pour in the water off the cut-up dates.

            I made the date bread for her in those later years when her own fingers lost the knack and Alzheimer's disease erased the recipe from her mind. I glance now at the page in the back of her Household Searchlight cookbook on which she wrote that recipe fifty years ago in her own hand. The page has grown thin and smeared with oil; its edges are flaky as pie crust. I wonder if it will survive another generation. I know the recipe by heart, as did she, but I open the book to gaze upon her written words as on an icon, to sense her presence within them. She makes me grin, almost chuckle right out loud! No one but her daughter could follow this. She's included no instructions, just ingredients, and those are as jumbled as her cupboards always were. I need to mentally re-arrange the recipe every time to keep the wet and dry together; mix the wet first; add the dry, and after all of that, the dates and nuts. What went through her head as she wrote these things down? I wonder every year about her method of organization. She organized her cupboards by color. Beans and molasses next to each other because both were brown. 

            Again this year I oil the pans and dust them with flour. I pour the batter, put the pans in the oven and set the timer. Then I make myself a cup of tea and sit for a while, staring out the window at the sunlight slanting off the remaining bronze leaves of my white oaks. We are linked by such as this, I muse, not even needing to reach out for her, because she's here. She's in my fingers and she's in my mind. The scent of dates drifts through the house.