Birthday celebrations in the teacher’s lounge always mean an overload of calories for the day with coffee cakes, breakfast casseroles and doughnuts, but today was a unique treat with homemade cinnamon rolls as well. I can’t even remember the last time I ate a cinnamon roll and despite putting back on all the pounds I had worked hard to lose over the summer, I helped myself to half of one.

With just a few minutes until the students arrived for the day, I sat in my dimly-lit classroom enjoying my special treat for breakfast while gathering some last-minute materials I needed for the day. With conferences a week away, my To-Do list is a mile long, but I found myself actually sitting still for a brief moment and really savoring the warm gooey roll.

It was then that it came to me – how my mom used to eat the heart, the gooey center, out of the rolls and leave the rest. It may have actually only been one time, as I know we gave her a hard time about it, but it sticks in my head as something Mom did – one of those fuzzy blurred lines of memories.

Licking icing off my fingers I thought about Mom for a moment or two longer than usual. Piled on top of the cinnamon roll memory was the fact that it would have been her birthday today. I smiled, but also fought back tears.

This woman had all the chemo and radiation you can have in a lifetime. She had two surgeries for her brain tumor and still the damn cancer killed her. If anyone had a right to eat the middle right out of a cinnamon roll, it was her. Life was preciously short for her after all, why waste any time eating the drier, less flavorful outside edges of a breakfast splurge? I felt a pang of guilt for ever having given her a hard time about any such splurge.

As I heard the kids start lining up outside my classroom, I took an extra moment to savor the last bite of gooey, sticky, sweet cinnamony center in honor of Mom.

It may have been brought in for someone else’s birthday, but today I was blessed with a sweet memory of Mom and I feel so blessed to have breakfast remind me of the sweetest heart I’ve ever known.