Molding mud
There’s no better time and place to make mud pies than spring in the Pacific Northwest. The soil, perpetually wet, is marbled with clay and moss drips like frosting from big leaf maples. Fallen fir needles are like sprinkles on moist layers of decay and seeds spiral from the canopy, helicopters dropping supplies into candy land. Dressed in rain boots and tights and big yellow jackets over our small, bare, bodies, each spring my sister and I would set up shop. She delegated and baked, I was in charge of supplies. Together we dug and plucked and shaped and decorated and built a bakery under the playhouse fit for any fairy or gnome or forest queen we imagined might stop by.
Mudpies only satisfy temporarily and so when we finished baking outside, my sister and I turned to the cupboards. Then, they were a mystery– filled with sugar, maple syrup, chocolates, and things made special by the fact that our parents mostly kept them from us. Whatever my big sister ate I wanted too, so when one day she stole spoonfuls of honey from the bear way up on the tall shelf, I followed suit and it became our shared secret. Thrilled by our mischief, honey melting like gold between our baby teeth, we planned our first heist.
Our kitchen had tall countertops and slippery wooden floors. It was open to the rest of the house so that anyone in the living room had a clear view, even from the loft upstairs one could see and certainly hear down. Back then we were an unbeatable team. We borrowed a cookie sheet, and onto it poured all of our favorite sweets. I kept watch, she took spoons and bowls of powdered sugar, agave syrup and our mom’s baking chocolate, delectable ecstasies that we stored away in the corner of our shared room. Eventually, we were discovered and shared some consequence lost to memory. What I do remember is the thrill of a shared secret. Then, we stuck together like marshmallow cream on a warm day, sugar snap peas, sipping the nectar of our shared mischief from the same straw.
My sister ran two bakeries: one in the old playhouse with me and one wrapped in her imagination. She assured us she sold pastries and pies and breads and cakes and anything your heart could desire to the most illustrious of customers, churning a grand profit for herself. I don’t remember when or where conflict first arose between her and I as business partners and as friends, but my exclusion from this imagined shop could not have been insignificant. Older by only a year, she was eager to distinguish herself and I desperately hoped to catch up.
The kitchen from which we once stole grew with us over the years. It’s airy, with a big window over the sink. Round rocks and dried flowers and hanging bulbs of garlic adorn the tiled windowsill. As eating out was a rare occasion for us the kitchen was well used. There was always a project happening or a meal being made or dishes leftover in the hours in between. One Summer we re-grouted the tiled countertops and couldn’t use the space. We ate takeout burritos and fish tacos for a week and felt like kings but when the countertops dried and my mom made dutch babies in her casteiron the smell of melting butter in the oven was like finally coming home.
The kitchen was where my sister knocked out my last baby tooth with a rock during an argument. I’m vegetarian, and in the kitchen she held me against the cupboard and force fed me turkey at thanksgiving. She can’t stand avocados, I slapped guacamole on her face before her birthday. Gathered around the cutting board, we boasted our personal successes, belittling each other in constant competition for what I do not know. We needed to prove ourselves to one another, I guess we felt that anything shared was a resource running low.
The kitchen became a battleground for our fiercest disagreements. I never grew out of my desire to have what she had too, and constantly borrowed clothes and snacks and friends and hobbies, anything she wanted for herself. In return, she kept a plastic knife in her car that she would wave at me if I breathed too loudly on the drive home from school, and we hurled expletives and soapy water over the dishes after dinner.
The kitchen was also where my sister taught me to like mushrooms, broiling a portabella in a stick and a half of butter and stolen white wine. Every year the day before my birthday I was banned from the kitchen, while my sister made some form of chocolate strawberry or lemon cake, still the baker 18 years beyond crafting mud pies in the backyard. We’d both listen in before dinner, picking up gossip from our mom, letting the other know if something secret had been found out so there would be time to prepare an adequate excuse. We went back to the cupboards in high school and she taught me to pour water into the vodka bottle and where to find the grenadine for a tequila sunrise, a new secret, the same tantalizing thrill.
When she went to college a year before me, she left me her old room and a bulk box of instant mashed potatoes. She left during the covid lockdown, we drove her things down to California and suddenly it was just me. Having spent 10 years fighting, we didn’t speak for months after she left. It was peaceful, and lonely. I ate avocado smeared on toasted sweet potatoes in her old room and savored a combination I knew she would despise from the comfort of her old bed. When I did see her again at Christmas, we wore masks and shared nothing.
I saw my sister once this year, I’ll see her again in another year and a half. We don’t share lives anymore, I don’t steal her clothes or her food or her hobbies and when I visit my parents for Christmas I sing out loud in the car without the threat of plastic cutlery. Neither of us spent last summer at home, although we lead almost parallel lives in outdoor education in different parts of the country.
We only talk for five or ten minutes every couple months or so, but lately when we do, some of our secrets have crept back in. We gossip about our parents, our dads obsession with bird watching and the pictures our mom sends of the tomatoes in her greenhouse and the pinterest recipes she shares online. I still make mushrooms the same way she taught me, on my birthdays I look for baked goods with chocolate, and I think I’ll always delight in the simplicity of a tequila sunrise. We tell each other the details of our lives that are left out of the family thread, still one-upping each other with raunchy stories. More often than not, we find each other on facetime with a bowl or plate of something. What are you eating? I always ask. Instant mashed potatoes, Annie’s mac and cheese, chocolate chips, frozen blueberries.. It’s always something from home, little bits of our kitchen still shared, 3,000 miles apart.
