Precious Brithday Memories

New Year’s Eve was my Mom’s 78 birthday. Like many who have birthdays right around the holidays, her birthday can get lost in the holiday shuffle. This year everyone went above and beyond to make sure it was a birthday to remember. My Aunts and Uncle and Cousin from Allen, came for a little visit and a pizza party. The plan was to party like it was 1999, but none of them knew what that meant, so we partied like it was 2013 and pretended orthopedic shoes were in style.  I got off work just in time to take a walk, pick up a birthday cake and order some pizzas. When I went to the store to get a cake, my choices were limited to say the least. They had two cakes that were not frozen; one was a Happy New Year’s cake and the other a Duck Dynasty cake. I just couldn’t see Mom with a Duck 

Red Aunt

Dynasty cake complete with three bearded men on it. I selected a blank cake that was frozen and had them write… “Happy Birthday Beautiful”.  When I got home, I was hurrying around trying to get everything together (including myself), I needed a quick way to thaw the frozen cake without melting it.  I knew the oven would melt the icing so the only thing I could think of was…. The dryer.  I ran to the basement, put the shoe shelf in the dryer and placed the cake on it. I thought about the plastic cover for about 2.5 seconds before deciding to leave it one because wanted to thaw it, not dry it out even more than a store bought cake tends to be anyway. I turned the dryer on, ran upstairs to change. When I was ready, I went to the dryer and looked inside. The cake was intact, but the cover was not. The cover had shriveled up like a shrinky dink (way back in the day), taking some of the pretty border with it. I took the cake upstairs and pondered over how to fix it. The border that had stuck to the cover was in pretty good shape, so I got a knife and

carefully scraped the border off and put it back on the cake. The cake looked like a finger or two had gotten a good taste of the icing, but that’s totally normal for any cake has been in my hands, so nothing would seem amiss.  We feasted on pizza (like it was a roast beasta) and dryer cake. My “Red Aunt”, a name she earned many moons ago when she could still float like a butterfly and sting like a red aunt if you sprayed flocking all over the upstairs bedroom, was ready to get the show on the road because she didn’t want to be out past dark. I asked her if she turned into a pumpkin at dark and she just laughed at me the way she always has (except when her upstairs bedroom got sprayed with a can of flocking).  Before everyone left, I got a family photo of this precious birthday memory.