This holiday season is different than any other I've ever had. My mother passed away in February and it's the first time I won't be bringing her apple pie, or at least talking to her about the pies I made for my friends while I was somewhere else. Her recipe has been passed down and is, hands down, the best apple pie in the world. It's also the first time I won't be hearing "Rackeye, rackeye, rackeye", her words that replaced everything else in her vocabulary after her stroke. My mother dabbled in writing herself. Somewhere on a hard drive I have pages and pages of blog posts from her Wordpress blog she maintained through the early 2000s, tucked into boxes I have the journals she wrote in intermittently, not a single one full until the end. In my storage unit I have an entire giant rubbermaid bin of unfinished quilting projects she was in progress on before she suffered her stroke in 2010. She left a lot of things unfinished and I feel a pressure to fini...