The Flour of Our Youth

I'm in the kitchen. Phelan, my 4-year-old daughter, is in the dining room. I'm mixing dough. Phelan has opened a bag of flour the size of a ham. I don't know this. I should.

I hear her yell, "Snow, snow, snow!"

I hear, "It's winter!"

I hear, "Snowball!"

I've been looking out the kitchen window as the mixer whirs away.

Whenever I bake, I think about my mother. The day is sunny, snowflake-free. There's a space between the time I hear something and the moment I figure out what it means.

"Slippy," my daughter, fluent in Pittsburghese, says. "Cold."

Flour is everywhere -- in her hair, in the stereo, in her shoes. Later I'll find flour in her underwear and flour in her socks. But right now, she smiles up at me, flour stuck like snowflakes in her eyelashes, smudged on her pink cheeks, caught in the blonde pigtails that stick out like antennae.

"Look at me," she says. "I'm baking."

Every year around the holidays, my husband, who hates chaos, flees, and the kids and I make a lovely mess. For my daughter, it's flour. My son, Locklin, 7, has moved on to dough. Dough makes great quicksand for his toy soldiers. Dough makes a good mustache. Dough sticks to his sister's butt.

The kids have their own rolling pins. They help measure sugar and cinnamon. Phelan gets distracted and gets a bowl, pours herself a nice cinnamon-sugar mix and eats it with a spoon.

When I was growing up, I didn't get to bake with my mother much. It made her nervous. "I don't like people in my kitchen," she'd say as she anchored a childproof gate between the kitchen and dining room. She said the gate was "to keep the dog out."