Goodness Cookies

When I was little and all the world was warm and good and felt like wind with spring on it, fresh muddy puddles,  and forever, I remember sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table eating cookies.  She possessed a fascinatingly forever-full jar of the most perfect sugar cookies a little person could ever want, and would sweep me up on her soft comfy lap and read me the day's comics while I devoured my small bounty of cookies.  All the while crumbling them over the news paper in the proud tradition of cookie-monster. 

After the very last visit to her house, every few years I would ask if I could make sugar cookies, and my mother or cousin or friends and I would pour over the old Betty Crocker cook book diligently folding and cutting flour and milk, and vanilla into dough, letting set, rolling and cutting shapes.  The first few attempts brought back a small amount of the warm and good I had remembered.  But as I got older, the world got bigger and colder and more finite.  Each subsequent attempt held less of the original.  I tried to make them again a couple of days ago, and caught myself swearing over strands of errant hair falling in my eyes and smudges of flour sneaking into corners of the kitchen I hadn't remembered being in.  In frustration, I sat down and glowered over the mess I had made, resenting it for it's lack of inherent goodness and inability to conjure in me the infinite feeling that the world was always new and anything was possible.  Deciding that the cookie experience was ruined for me, I instead finished making them for a friend who had been having a mortally bad and soul crushing year. 

Mixing flour, sugar, and cream, I thought how I hoped the following days would get better for him.  Rolling the dough, I imagined one or two good things that would show him that the world could somehow be a good place and still contain the past few of months of bitterness and anger.  Cutting the dough in ridiculous shapes of exotic animals, I envisioned my friend remembering himself and pushing away the monsters, larger than oceans, that I saw behind his eyes as shadows when he talked.  Waiting for them to bake, I kept thinking about all of the goodness and warmth and strength I knew he possessed but had forgotten in his grief, and hoped he would some day find it again.  I realized that the faith I had that he would come back to the world again as some semblance of the person I remembered was infinite.  The potential of who he would be and the good things he would be capable of, were what I thought about as I put the cookies in a small tupperware box and left to deliver them.   I then realized I felt those things that I had missed for so long.  I had tried to give in the cookies the warmth, goodness, spring, and possibility I once knew, and realized what I felt was love.  That, finally, was the secret of the goodness cookies that I hadn't been able to recapture.  And then it was gone, evaporated into the air like so much steam from too hot tea, and the world was cold and cloudy and I had nothing, but an empty tupperware box that used to hold cookies, an impossibly messy, flour covered kitchen, and more studying to catch up on than I had hours for in the next several decades.