1. Homemade Ice Cream.

Our booth will serve a couple hundred dishes of vanilla this Saturday, May 20,  at the Southern California MCC Festival and Relief Sale. The long row of food booths draws people into queues of people tearing apart their tickets, hugging each other and talking in Spanish, Nigerian, French, Indonesian, Californian and blends of the above. Inside the gym, the silent auction is not silent, it is a place to meet, and in the distance the song of the auctioneer selling quilts and other desirables provides background. We are outside the fence most of the day, adding ice and salt to the four White Mountain freezers and listening for them to slow and signal that they are turning dense.  This, perhaps, is the most unifying conference event.  We find each other over shared pupusas, tacos, plantains, burgers, coffee, strawberry pie. funnel cakes, burritos and Menno-wurst. Did I mention our double vanilla with hot fudge topping?

2. Mother’s Day.

For some, the observance is always bittersweet. There is the sweetness of a special day to remember the parent who mothered us, the spouse who mothered our children, and the children that made us mothers, but for many, it is not an easy day. Who does not have friends for whom this day is a reminder of intense pain? It may dare us to face the tragedies of broken relationships, of missing children, of those taken by death. It may remind us of abusive, of abandoning or of unavailable parents. The day can be lonely and hurtful unless someone remembers and throws an arm around the shoulders, sends a note, or makes a call. Some churches hold a service of remembrance as healing for those who are still letting go (does it ever end?) of the past. It’s not too late to remember what the day may have cost for those you love. They will get it.

“I will do them the French way, with a sugar vinegrette and black pepper to enhance the flavor and the umami,” I announce.

“Oh no, you won’t,” Milton protested. “My bowl will have only sugar.”

So we served two bowls of sliced berries, but upon hearing his wife’s exclamations, he reached over and took a spoonful of hers, and then a second. Then he rose to his 6-feet, 4-inch height and picked up his serving bowl. “Come, show me what you did.” In a few minutes, we were all praising French cuisine. Of the hundred ways Milton lives on in our lives, isn’t it the spring berries that invariably bring him to our table? We do not truly lose those we love; we find a place for them in our souls that nothing can take away.