Since the oven in my four-year-old Samsung isn't working, I can't make cookies. Yesterday I was thinking about casseroles I make and realized I can't do many of those, either. Maybe I could use a crock pot, but I'm thinking those recipes would come out of a slow cooker more wet than I would like. I know I will eventually get another stove, I've just been putting it off as long as I can.
We have bought cookies when we're shopping, but that isn't the same. The grandson comes over, goes in the kitchen, sees store-bought cookies, and is disappointed. He forgets my oven doesn't work.
A few days ago I remembered something my mother gave me when she had baked a cake and made too much icing: It's a simple thing that even a small child could do. You take two graham crackers and make them a sandwich cookie by putting cake icing between them; you can eat them right then, but I seal them in a baggy or a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid for a few hours. The graham crackers won't be as hard, which I think makes them better. They are better than store cookies, but I doubt the grandson would eat them.
Mentioning cookies makes me think about my grandmother. Sometimes Cliff and I talk about our childhoods, and wonder if this generation could even stand to live the way we did as children. No running water, and the only hot water we got was in the teakettle. Going outside if you had to go to the toilet after dark, hoping there wasn't a snake or spiders in there.
Sometimes if I'm lying in bed sleepless, I think about my grandma's little house in the country and, in my mind, I walk through her house like I did as a child: Through the front door to an enclosed porch with her African Violets sitting in the window in spring and summer; then two steps up into her kitchen. I can see everything just as it was then: The stove, the cabinets, everything in it. I notice the gallon jar topped with a lid, in a window by the refrigerator. It's full of sugar cookies, and I always ate several of them.
From the kitchen I go to the living room. In winter there was a big stove taking up a lot of room; my uncles took it out in summer. When I stayed at Grandma's house, I slept in a feather bed in one of the two downstairs bedrooms; Grandma Stevens slept in the other bedroom. In my early years, she didn't have an indoor bathroom, but later on my uncles put a flush toilet in the bedroom I always slept in. It was just there in a corner... no actual bathroom. They did it for Grandma so she wouldn't have to go outside to the toilet any more. Upstairs was where she quilted, and there was always a quilt in the frame being created.
I cherished that house. My parents moved often, I can't even count the times; but my grandmother lived in the same house all of her married life. Most of those years she was alone, because my grandfather died in 1938, I believe it was. So I never knew him. My mother and aunt thought he was a saint, but one of my cousins told me the three brothers had a different story.
Well, this may all be boring to others, but every time I "go to Grandma's house", it settles me down. I could write a book about it, but it wouldn't be very exciting... just peaceful.
I wish all of you had that happy kind of childhood, because many people didn't. If you did, try going back to your favorite place at a time when you had no worries and re-live just a little of it. Remember the cousins you played with and the holidays when the whole family gathered.
You will be surprised how much you recall.
It's the best meditation I know of.
