As I get older, and older, and older, the more I realize just how much I miss my mom. And just how much she gave to me that I didn’t know I had. Her birthday is tomorrow, May 12th. She entered this world in 1917. She left us in 1993. She would have been 95 years old this year. Her name was Mary Veronica Gregor. She was born and raised in Gary, Indiana. She went to Emerson High School and lived on 4th and Carolina for most of her young life.

I recently have been thinking a lot about her. May was her month. Mother’s day, her birthday…sometimes the two coincided. Looking back, every day should have been mother’s day.

Most of my memories of my mother were kitchen, garden and canning-related. My kitchen is full of relics of her.

I took a tour of my kitchen today and found that everywhere I looked, there she was. In things I use every day, in things that just adorn the shelf, in things that are packed away for safe-keeping.

Just a few days ago, I used this recipe to make a pie crust. I had never used this recipe before. I had never made a decent pie crust before. But I succeeded this time.

{Printable: Mom’s Never Fail Pie Crust}

This is her flour sifter. She baked a lot. And now, so do I. And I still use this sifter.

This is her ancient coffee mill. She never used it for coffee. She ground poppy seeds in it for poppy seed roll at Christmas. I also still have her old Foley food mill. She milled endless bushels of tomatoes to make sauce and soup that she canned.

And I have all her old aluminum cookie cutters with the wooden handles. I used them to make sugar cookies from the recipes in these old cookbooks.

These are her roosters. Roosters adorned every surface in her bright yellow kitchen with the golden knotty pine cabinets.. I get my longing for chickens honestly. She collected roosters of all sorts…ceramic roosters, rooster salt and pepper shakers, rooster figurines, rooster cookie jars…

… and this rooster trivet. I inherited all of her wrought iron trivets. She needed them all because of the vast amount of cooking she did each and every day. She needed them to hold all the hot dishes she prepared.

This is the crock she stored our sauerkraut in. The crock now contains a plant that I’ve kept going for almost 20 years. After my mother died, I took her things with me, and this plant that adorned the table in the front room. It was the last living thing in the house that my mother had cared for. Besides me. And I’ve managed to keep it alive.

My mom was brilliant. She had wanted to be a writer. When she was in high school, she published poetry in the Gary Post-Tribune under the pen name of Greg of Yore. When she was in high school, she was offered a full scholarship to the University of Chicago to pursue her studies. Girls didn’t go to college and my grandparents refused to let her go. Instead, she married the carpenter from West Virginia that had helped build my grandparents’ new house. And that’s why I’m here today, writing about her…

I just wanted to honor my Mom today, and share a little of her with you. She is why I cook, and write and garden and do everything I do.

The last words she said to me before she died were “You’re great.” I may not agree with her, but I do know one thing. She certainly was.

murphala blogs at FlourWaterYeast&Salt.

Do you have a recipe post or kitchen-related story to share on the Farm Bell blog?
See Farm Bell Blog Submissions for information, the latest blog contributor giveaway, and to submit a post.

Want to subscribe to the Farm Bell blog? Go here.