What She Never Had to Teach

My grandmother's hands knew things mine have forgotten, how to make bread rise, how to hem a dress so it would last. She saved everything: buttons in mason jars, stories in the space between stirring and serving, love in the way she said my name. This is what we lose when we move too fast, the slow art of remembering, the patient work of passing things down. Her kitchen was a kind of church where recipes were prayers, and every meal a small act of keeping the world together. Now, I try to learn what she never had to teach: how to make something with my hands, how to turn memory into bread, into words, into something that will feed the ones who come after. Each story I tell my daughter is a vote against forgetting, a way of saying: this mattered, we mattered, you matter too.