Mama’s Pie Hands | Teen Ink

Mama’s Pie Hands MAG

December 30, 2014
By writeandreid SILVER, Salt Lake City, Utah
writeandreid SILVER, Salt Lake City, Utah
6 articles 2 photos 4 comments

Motherhood has rendered her hands rough but gentle, toughened by vinegar water and softened with baby’s cries and sick-kid nights. Today those hands are tackling the art of pie making. Eight a.m. Thanksgiving 2006, she’s getting an early start, plucking butter and flour from their places with nimble fingers. I prop myself up on the counter.

“Can I help? Can I make the pie this year?”

She pushes four cubes of butter across the counter.

“You can cut the butter, hun.”

She demonstrates, pushing her palms on the top of the shimmering chef’s knife, letting it sink into the cube like my feet in last month’s mud. I never touch the knife.

Her hands flit about the kitchen, speed matching her smile as she heaps in flour, drizzles water, pinches salt, sprinkles sugar.

I look down at my seven-calendar hands. Sausage fingers and round palms could never make that magic in the kitchen. I beg to learn to wrestle the dough into a masterpiece. Her eyes say I love you but I’m getting a little impatient as her long-fingered hands, supple as young branches, guide mine on the rolling pin.

Up and over and out and over and up and back and out.

Too hard.

I let her San Francisco wind hands finish, the fog rolling in with my jealousy.

Eight a.m. on Thanksgiving 2013.

“Can I help? Can I make the pie this year?”

Her experienced, thousand-pie hands gesture at the butter and flour standing at attention on the counter.

“Yours are better than mine.”



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This article has 5 comments.


on May. 19 2015 at 7:36 pm
writeandreid SILVER, Salt Lake City, Utah
6 articles 2 photos 4 comments
Thank you!! :) @Hodgeya

Hodgeya BRONZE said...
on May. 19 2015 at 5:03 pm
Hodgeya BRONZE, PARK CITY, Utah
1 article 0 photos 1 comment
Beautiful!

on Apr. 16 2015 at 9:03 pm
writeandreid SILVER, Salt Lake City, Utah
6 articles 2 photos 4 comments
Thank you both so much! I really appreciate your comments :) @Armadeus_Zoolitzer @kennedyshine

on Jan. 2 2015 at 10:10 am
Armadeus_Zoolitzer GOLD, Ratter Corner, Other
15 articles 11 photos 14 comments

Favorite Quote:
"Arose by any other name is still the past tense of arise." Steve Patterson on CBC's The Debators "The devil's greatest trick was chopping the water into separate bathtubs. Then attaching claws to those bathtubs." Bob Schofield's The Inevitable June

There's just something profoundly human about this poem. I like how you write by your own rules and I especially like the time-jump. The last line is heartbreaking but also deeply moving. There's a real full-circle feeling, and that's something that I particularly enjoy as a reader and writer.

on Jan. 1 2015 at 4:42 pm
kennedyshine PLATINUM, Corte Madera, California
44 articles 0 photos 23 comments

Favorite Quote:
The perpetual pursuit for an unattainable freedom

Beautiful. Just beautiful.