During four months, the especially busy harvesting months of June, July, August, and September for my mother as well as my father, I and four of my siblings, Patt, John, Bill, and Bob, had birthdays.
Years earlier when my sisters Helen and Patt were little, our mother had time to make birthday gifts for them. Perhaps a pair of mittens or a sweater, but as our family grew, she no longer had time to knit. Instead, she began baking an angel food cake to mark each child’s birthday. There was never a party or any ceremonial flourishes, my mother simply brought the dessert to the table at the end of the evening meal. Frosted but without candles.
She made the cake from scratch carefully separating the egg yolks from the whites of thirteen eggs, making sure that not even a spot of yolk sullied the whites, before whipping them into a tower of froth and then adding flour and sugar a little at a time. When the cake was taken from the oven it was re-splendent with a golden crust. If there were enough time for the cake to cool, my mother coated it with frosting.
In those same earlier years my mother served homemade ice cream on the side. I remember for my later birth- days she substituted the incomparable, delectably rich ice cream made at the Ortonville, MN creamery. During berry season a colorful sauce of strawberries or raspberries topped cake and ice cream. The birthday child was always served an especially large first piece.
The cycle of the cakes was interrupted when John was sent to Korea shortly after the armistice was declared. The logistics of finding a box to fit the tall cake and the knowledge that it would no longer be light and fresh by the time he received it kept our mother from maintaining the tradition for John while he was overseas. When he eventually returned to the states she owed him two cakes. She immediately paid off half that debt.
Then, as time went on, child after child wasn’t on the farm for his or her big day. By the time I, the youngest of the six, returned in 1968 from the Peace Corps in Thailand, my mother owed me three cakes, the others for nine for a total of twelve!