Coming home is a quiet kind of reckoning.
The road curves the same way, but the view is different.
My mother — just shy of ninety — still makes pies with the same steady hands,
rolling dough like she always has,
as if the years haven’t touched her apron strings.
We used to pick blackberries bags full,
pulling over where the canals rans along,
our fingers stained with summer.
She’d make jam, pies, and tuck the rest into the freezer —
sweetness saved for winter.
This year, the bushes were gone.
Sprayed. Uprooted.
The ground, just dirt.
Still, the pie tasted the same.
Gina, my niece — now grown and living in Texas -stood at the counter beside my mother,
learning how to pinch the crust just right.
Three generations,
bound not by time, but by touch and flour and berries.
Things change.
The land, the faces, the pace of footsteps.
But some things —
the flake of a good crust,
-The way love smells when it’s baking —
sweetness stays.
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