Pimentos for Mothers' Day

This is the seventh Mothers' Day since the death of my own mother, and it is still a mourning day as much as a celebrating day for me. I don't feel like I'm still actively grieving, but every now and then something will sneak up on me--usually something trivial--that reminds me of her, and I'm blindsided by a sense of loss.

Without thinking much about it, I selected a pasta salad recipe that includes pimentos for today's Mothers' Day picnic. It wasn't until I was spooning them out of the jar that I remembered my mother's story of the pimentos. When I was about five years old, The Dallas Morning News wrote a homemaker-cook-of-the-week profile about her. She didn't have much to say about cooking. Although she spent a lot of time in the kitchen, her passion was music, not cooking. She had exactly one "family recipe" to share; every other one came out of a book or magazine. The only thought she had about cooking that she considered halfway interesting was that she tried to use color to brighten up her servings, and she specifically mentioned putting pimentos on asparagus spears.

The image of my mother arranging pimentos on aparagus stuck with me because my eye for color must have come from her--no one taught me about color, so it must have come either through her genes or her example. It's also a perfect example of how she always tried to elevate the mundane with art, or at least with beauty.

So even though no one else in my family cares much for pimentos, they will be eating them in their pasta salad (or picking them out) later today. Thus are the watchwords passed from generation to generation.