Happy Mother's Day!

For Mother's Day, I wish I had a big bread story to tell you about my mom but I don't, not really. She loved bread, yes, especially the crusty ones, but she wasn't overly picky about it. Her favorite was the baguette, which she liked bien cuite (baked to a deep gold brown) and the part she liked best of all was le quignon (the heel). Towards the end of her life, when we took her out to lunch to her favorite restaurant near her nursing home in Paris, the owner always brought a basketful of quignons to the table together with the menus. Since most people didn't care for them, they usually didn't serve them but when they saw my mom coming, they sliced off the ends of a bunch of baguettes just for her.
During her last few months, quignons and dessert were pretty much what she lived on: she had lost her appetite for everything else. But from the way her eyes lit up when the basket was set in front of her, we could see that the very frail person sitting among us was the same mother who, in her youth, had presided over the dinner table, slicing up the baguette on the same board and with the same knife I now use myself, distributing slices to children and keeping the heels for herself and for my Dad (also a huge fan of crunchiness). Of course as we grew up, some of us developed a taste for quignons as well (probably, a genetic trait!) and the mathematics of baguette dividing became a little more complex...
This Mother's Day, I wish I could bake her a bouquet of baguettes and make her a dark chocolate mousse (her mousses au chocolat were the stuff of legend). But she passed away four years ago in March. For the life of me I couldn't tell you the exact date. I go back to the calendar to be reminded but the information never sticks as if part of me didn't want to acknowledge the fact that on a specific day, she indeed ceased to be.
It could be because, in fact, she never did. Not for me. I can't bake for her, that's true, but she is still very much alive. She can still make me laugh, albeit sometimes unwittingly (as she used to), and I can still see her shaking her head at me and wondering how on earth she could have had such a daughter...
Moms are forever. Happy Mother's Day!