September the 9th

For the past several years on Oma's birthday, I've made a recipe of hers that I love. It's my favorite way to remember her. Who knows how many hours she spent with me (not to mention her other grandchildren) at her kitchen counter, letting me spread butter over sweet dough or mix up streusel with my fingers. Decades later, doing those same things in my own kitchen bring me into a sort of sensory nostalgia, and bring her right back.

Knowing that I had a P.E.O. meeting that fell right on Sept. 9, and being that this was a women's organization to which Oma belonged for years and held close to her heart, I knew that bringing a few plates of Kuchen - in this case, Streusel, Apfel and Pflaum Kuchen- would be the most appropriate things share with the women there on what would have been Oma's 106th birthday.


When I arrived at the meeting, a woman I hardly recognized walked up to me and said, "I'm Barbara! Remember me? From Chicago? Wheaton?" Suddenly I remembered this woman, whom I had met 3 years ago at one of our Christmas parties. At the time she had just moved to Spokane from Wheaton, Illionois, and I happened to be planning my own trip to nearby Chicago and was even considering the prospect of moving there. She had given me a list of recommendations of places to visit, even the name of a friend should I need a place to stay. Since my family lived in the area shortly before she moved to Wheaton in the 1970s, we had much to discuss. So here she was again, visiting our chapter for the first time since that party, and she said she had finally started settling in after a couple years of traveling with her husband on business.

Part of the reason I've loved making Kaffee Kuchen so much is because it reminds me, as I've even mentioned before on this blog, of how Oma used it to get out of her slump and get out to meet her neighbors in the first weeks after moving from Chicago to Boise. As I continued talking to Barbara that evening at the meeting, she specifically told the difficulty it is to meet her neighbors here. "They all keep to themselves," she said. "It was so different - and so much easier - in Wheaton."

It was as though Barbara was specifically planted at that meeting so that I could share a great story about Oma, who was once in nearly the exact same situation. Before leaving that evening, we exchanged e-mails, and I promised to send her the recipes to use for her own neighborhood meet and greet.

Nice to know that Oma's Kaffee Kuchen are still bringing people together, isn't it?