I moved into Senior Citizen housing last December and have slowly been filling up my apartment with the thrift store detritus from other people's abandoned lives. I thought I was past feeling any sympathetic vibrations from the cheap junk I brought home, but some nights as I gaze at the weary throw rug in the living room or settle into my anemic recliner that groans like a metal viaduct about to collapse I sense the sadness of defeat and demise in these items. It chills me.
So today I decided I would make my last trip to the thrift store, to pick up a glass candy dish for one of the shabby end tables I have next to my swayback couch. Then never go back to one of those places again. I've got enough knick-knacks to last me until I'm pushing up daisies. If I need something else I'll get it on Amazon.com.
As I passed the chipped enamel dishes and glassware I saw my mother's cookie jar. The exact same ceramic jar with different kinds of cookies molded on it, with a walnut knob to lift the top off. But it couldn't be my mother's cookie jar; for it would have to be over sixty years old, plus it was here in Utah and my mother's jar was located in Minnesota. And I had broken hers, and caught hell for it.
As I stared at it, gaping like a carp, the aromas of my mother's cookies winkled my nose . . .
She, of course, made all her own cookies -- as did everyone else who considered themselves a bona fide housewife. Store bought cookies were for orphans. I never got to taste an Oreo until I was in high school.
Her oatmeal raisin cookies were the texture of velvet. And nothing this side of heaven will ever match the joy of biting into a chocolate chip cookie when the chips were still slightly molten. I dunked them in a glass of milk, and if they started to disintegrate, so what? The sludge in the glass was just about as good as the cookies!
At Christmas she went wild with spritz cookies. She had a dozen vials of sprinkles; a slew of food colors in little teardrop shaped plastic bottles; and several different kinds of icing that would bring a smile to an icicle. And she gave all of them away to the neighbors or kept them hidden for when company came. I fought my cousins like a rabid honey badger just to get a hand full of spritz crumbs!
One winter afternoon, long after the Christmas holidays, when the snow was a sodden lump of gray crystals and cabin fever had made me heedless of peril, I took my mother's cookie jar down from the top of the refrigerator to see if there was anything leftover from the Holidays in it. As I brought it down I fumbled -- it slipped and crashed onto the linoleum floor.
The panic and tears, the recriminations and hairbrush applied to a tender young derriere, need not concern us here. It all happened long years ago, in a time and place that no longer exists -- except in my brittle memory.
The price they wanted for that cookie jar was outrageous. But when I asked, they gave me a Senior Citizen discount so it wasn't so outrageous after all. Now it sits on that shabby end table next to the swayback couch. I don't know what I'll fill it with. Probably store bought cookies.
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