My name is Evelyn Lindgren. I’m seventy-seven years old. I live alone in the house my husband Arvid and I bought in 1971, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, about two and a half hours northwest of the Twin Cities.
Arvid passed four years ago. His heart.
I drive down to Maple Grove to visit my son and his family four or five times a year. Thanksgiving. Easter. My grandson Owen’s birthday. And always one weekend in October, when the leaves are turning.
And every single time, I bring my skillet.
It’s a ten-inch cast iron pan. Black as night. Heavy enough that I use two hands to lift it now. The handle is worn smooth from a hundred years of palms.
I make biscuits in it. I make fried potatoes and eggs. I make a Dutch baby pancake that Owen used to call “the puffy thing” when he was little.
Ashley never liked it.
The first time I brought it, the Christmas after she and Greg got married, she picked it up off the counter with two fingers like it was a dead mouse.
“Do you really need to bring your own pan, Evelyn? We have pans.”
“It’s just the one I’m used to, dear.”
She rolled her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking.
Over the years, it got worse.
She’d move it off the stove and set it out on the back porch. She’d make little jokes at dinner. “Grandma brought her antique again.” She told Greg it was unsanitary. She told her sister on the phone, right in front of me, that her mother-in-law “carries a frying pan around like a purse.”
I never said anything.
Ashley is a good mother. She works hard. She’s a regional manager for a home décor company, and she keeps that house looking like a magazine. She and I just come from different worlds.
That’s what I always told myself.
But standing in that kitchen that Sunday morning, looking at the empty back burner on her eleven-thousand-dollar stove, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I felt like I’d lost my mother all over again.
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