The shipping companies are looking for workers this month because an increase in internet orders means an increase in deliveries.  For wives and mothers the seasonal work of this time has another dimension.  A set of extra tasks are added to an already full schedule.   Shopping to do, packages to wrap and mail, cards to prepare, all this has to be fitted in.

For me, the most important seasonal task is baking.  The other tasks will get done, but cookies mark the progress of advent..  I stock special ingredients to make certain special cookies, the recipes all handed down from somewhere.  For a time, when our boys were young, I was baking three different kinds of cookies; the recipes came from my family, my husband’s family, and their favorite babysitter.  These days I only do one or two – all the recipes are so large there aren’t enough people around to eat all I can make.

While setting out molasses, flour, spices and so on for the German cookies from my mother’s family today, I remembered how baking works as a metaphor for other kinds of creativity.  The combination of elements becomes something more than the sum of the ingredients.  The following poem uses the image of a pie rather than cookies.  I don’t make many pies during December, but I must not forget the Christmas breakfast coffee cake!

Baking

The fingers that curl
around my pencil
knead butter in a bowl:
flour sprays onto the counter.

Butter’s a better
conductor than graphite.
Words slide down
the greased slope.  Rolling pin
presses them in.  I crimp
the edge in even meter.

When I give you a slice
of this pie, you will be
eating my words.

“Baking” was first published in Rockhurst Review # 23, Spring 2010.

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