Happy Mother's Day, Mom...

This is the second Mother's Day that I am experiencing with  my mom  no longer here.  I hope now and pray that she knew how much all of her children loved her...we cherished her...she was funny and lovely and silly and everything you want your mom to be.  Our mom made the best homemade sauce and would laugh as my brothers hunted around in it with immaculately clean forks for the extra meatballs she made for them.  She was the original Queen Of Clean.  My mom never went anywhere without a soapy fresh wet washcloth in a baggie tucked away in her purse.  Her sheets and towels and pillow cases smelled amazing...and whenever she could she hung them outside on a line strung in our big back yard.  I loved coming back home to visit and sleeping in my old room with those sweet smelling sheets.  She baked bread and made homemade pizza and cinnamon rolls but detested making cookies.  When we begged her she would only make oatmeal cookies from the recipe on the back of the Quaker oatmeal box...without raisins because my sister Paula hated raisins.  She would have varying dinners on the table beginning at 4:00 P.M. daily and depending on our tastes and schedules.  If we didn't like what she made for my dad, she would make us something else. We all walked home from school for lunch every day and she had lunches ready for us , too.  If we had to stay at school for something at lunch, she would bring us hot lunches made minutes before her delivery.  Her grandchildren to this day talk about her buttered noodles...nobody can replicate them no matter how hard we try.  Or her sauce or her chicken soup.  Or something we called Apple Pizza...a cookie sheet filled with pie crust dough and fresh apples tossed with sugar and cinnamon and butter and another crust on top.  One of my brother's has been searching for my mom's Apple Cake recipe...and although we have it and  have made her recipe...it just doesn't taste like hers...I think we have to be in her kitchen, sitting in our breakfast nook, talking to her for it to be the way it was.  I used to worry about forgetting her voice, her feel, her look but I think I know now...on the second Mother's Day without her...that my brothers and sister and I will never forget her ever and carry her in our thoughts, our hearts our very being for the rest of our lives.