I never knew my maternal grandmother Elizabeth. She died in childbirth, giving birth to my Uncle Charles, when my mother was five years old. So it is logical that I have no real memories of her, only those stories passed on by my mother, memories that are filled with the sweetness of a young child. Grandma Elizabeth will always be sepia-toned to me, trapped forever in the aging photos I have gleaned from boxes that my mother has saved. Her small frame clothed in the drab colors of the ’20’s, she wears an apron over her clothes, her long hair(so I am told) pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck. She stands in the yard of their home in a hollow near Hitchens, Kentucky, a row house built by the coal mines to house the worker’s families.

I think of Grandma Elizabeth at this time of year because the one thing I have that belonged to her was her rolling pin. Last night as I was getting ready to bake the Thanksgiving pies, I pulled it from a drawer. It is glass and was meant to have a stopper at one end where you could fill the cylinder with cold water so it wouldn’t stick to the dough as you rolled it out. Pies aren’t baked as often in our house as they were when I was growing up so the rolling pin only comes out once or twice a year. This probably adds to the visceral experience I have when I begin rolling….my hands, my Mother’s hands, my Grandmother’s hands…..who can tell the difference?

As I roll the dough using my Mother’s recipe, I think of my Grandmother’s life. She was poor, very poor, but she loved her children passionately and worked to create the best life possible for them. She loved music and taught her children to sing when they were very little. This rolling pin was used to create food to nourish her family, to hopefully provide them with a much needed treat now and then.

Today as I bake pies to be enjoyed by my family, I give thanks for a rolling pin. I give thanks that it is a tangible thing that connects me through time with this woman I never knew but whose blood courses through my veins. It is a simple,ordinary item, used to make simple, ordinary food. But to me, it is so very much more.

"Finding myself in the end is finding you & if you are lost in the folds of your silence then I find only to lose with you those years…..There’s no love so pure it can thrive without its incarnations. I would like to know you once again over your chipped cups brimming with tea. (from Poem to My Grandmother in Her Death by Michele Murray)