This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote two years ago. I am republishing it now in memory of my mother who passed away just a few weeks ago. She is missed.
I see the cheesecake that my mother could talk the baker in Pelton Shopping Center into selling to her for half price when it was a day old. It was so delicious. Apricot and peach halves were baked into the top. She would buy an entire jelly roll pan full. And we would go home and feast on cheesecake. As a child of the Depression it was always about quantity for her. Quality mattered but quantity was the key. She would never have gone into the bakery and purchased just two pieces of cheesecake for the regular price. Just as she would rather have a closet full of clothes that she had purchased on sale than just a few pieces of better quality. No, she did not wear most of the clothes she bought on sale. They just hang with their tags marked up to show the drastic reductions. Having it was the most important thing. A talisman against poverty, lack, hunger??? I come now to appreciate her thrift. But I have learned that there is such a thing as too much cheesecake...