When I was in elementary school at Englewood Elementary in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, school mornings went pretty much like this: “Kristi, this is the final time I’m coming to get you up. Now. Get. Up.” I would snuggle into my favorite Minnie Mouse doll and promptly return to sleep.

So, inevitably the door would fling open again to my mother singing, “It’s time to get up./It’s time to get up; It’s time to get up this MORN-ing./It’s time to get up./It’s time to get up./It’s time to get up to-DAY.” My mother is not very good at singing. She plied her ragged, former-head-cheerleader voice like a crowbar, forcing us out of bed. There was also clapping.

So, I would roll out of bed, Minnie in tow, and land on the sofa where she had already hauled my little sister, Kacie. We’d watch "Inspector Gadget" or "Scooby Doo" while Mom headed for the kitchen. Mom isn’t very good at cooking breakfast.

She would emerge from the kitchen, her brown hair frizzing, after approximately one minute with two warmed Pop-Tarts for our consumption. Invariably, they were either brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts or cherry Pop-Tarts, and the pair always matched. If it was a brown sugar cinnamon day, our Pop-Tarts would be broken in half, on the pretense that they were easier to eat – like you might slice a sandwich. However, the jagged fault line was also a clever disguise for nibble marks.

The green and white wallpaper of our old kitchen curled at the edges. The yellowing linoleum mimicked a tile pattern unsuccessfully. The cabinets were dark brown like squares of a chocolate candy bar. Given my mother’s absent knack for cooking, the kitchen felt surprisingly lived in.

Approaching my middle school years, I started to feel more independent. If I wanted to shave my fuzzy legs, I would. If I was hungry, I would not wait on my mother to fix me something. That is how I found myself -- like lots of girls -- asking my mother to hand down her prized recipe.

“Mom, how long do I put the Pop-Tart in the microwave?”

“For ten,” she said as she kept folding our tee-ball jerseys and picking up our troops of Barbie dolls.

I skipped across the linoleum, and with the upper body strength my short stature mandated, hauled myself up onto the countertop. I sat alongside our microwave with its faux wood sides and mint green numbers aglow. Tearing open the spacey silver twinset, I found two brown sugar Pop-Tarts. I swaddled one in a paper towel, as I had observed my mother do, and set the oven to radiate for ten.

Having the time to, I sealed the severed twin in a Ziploc and nested him carefully in the Pop-Tarts box. I tucked the cardboard flaps back down and shut the cabinet door. I hopped down from the counter and tiptoed back into the living room to secretly watch Mom’s soap opera.

But there again, was Mom’s craggy voice, yelling, “What’s burning?” Her question was soon swallowed by the deafening bleat of the smoke alarm.

She ran into the kitchen. “Kristi, what did you do?”

“I set it for ten minutes, just like you said!” I protested.

She waved her way through the acrid smoke. Yanking open the door of the microwave to stop the timer, she stooped into a ball of laughter, punctuated by heavy coughs. “I meant ten seconds!” she exclaimed. She was doubled over the countertop now.

She rescued the singed raft of a Pop-Tart from the microwave, and I grabbed her Redbook magazine, giggling my way onto a chair to wave it in front of the smoke alarm until the air had cleared.

A few years later, I had safely learned how to make bologna and cheese sandwiches and sworn off Pop-Tarts entirely. Kacie had started school. It was mid-May, and I drifted into our kitchen (always immaculate from disuse) after softball practice to grab a Gatorade when I noticed it, a gem of elementary school crafting. A single index card was wedged in the tines of a plastic fork, which was held upright in a small canister by plaster of Paris.

The Crayola blue in my sister’s stilted young handwriting read “Pop-Tart: 1. Open the Pop-Tart package. 2. Put the Pop-Tart in the toaster thing. 3. Eat.”

My mom materialized behind me, a grin spreading her across freckled cheeks. “For Mother’s Day, they told the second graders to write down their mom’s favorite recipe.”