To Have and to Eat

On one day each year, I have my cake and eat it too. 

At sixteen it was based on a scene from “Anne with an E.” 

My mother and I, we’d marvel at the show’s simplicity, so she

decorated her signature chocolate cake

with flowers and white cream. 

Beside us is the picnic basket she prepared

full of sweets and fruit. We finished the leftover sweet sixteen cake. 

Grape stems poked me, and a dampness advanced 

through a cross-hatched jute blanket and onto my skirt.

But, in hindsight, I would call the dampness dew 

because I had my cake and ate it too, so

the world became imbued with a simple magic. 

My 11th was magical. Harry Potter themed, the cake

left me totally stupefied for it was a 

recreation of all of Hogwarts.

My mother balanced homemade gingerbread on the sides of 

a castle-shaped cake and topped the cake towers with ice-cream cones

turned upside down. I heard her groan as the gingerbread 

kept falling. She spent the afternoon holed up in

the bottom floor guest room with intermittent AC. 

When she came out, she had a castle-cake.

and a blue jelly lake, and a quidditch field and a

pumpkin patch, and Hagrid’s hut and a 

forbidden forest of dyed-green

rice-crispies stuck to grape stems.

I marvelled at how she baked life into grape waste,

and remembered when she first picked me up to whisper

“Mama can do anything.” I realize now 

just how truthful she was being.

My mother folded wonder into the mundane, 

spotting winx club fairies for me on the long walk to the bus.

She whisked together eternity and ephemera when 

we defied the rain and danced in its downpour. 

She dusted icing sugar like pixie dust, so her 

stories would come alive in the dark of the bedtime night. 

My mother taught me to love 

cake, which I don’t even like that much,

but still look forward to having and eating each year.