On the day after my first sleepover as a grandmother, I remembered a memory of visiting one of my grandmothers.  I was on the other side of the equation, the other side of the table in that memory.  I was a small girl with the shiny eyes and a serious, only occasional smile and she was the giver of endless love… and food… I was remembering the hunting cookies.  We all called them hunting cookies, growing up, though I think they had a name in another language.  We called them hunting cookies because Grandma would hide sweets inside for us to find.  Nothing fancy, sometimes a raisin or two, often a chocolate chip, a piece of walnut or a date.  They were made with honey and maybe molasses?  They were brown, like a dachshund, that color.

They were very imperfectly round and thicker in the middle than on the edges.  It was the texture, I think, in retrospect, that made them just so special.  They were never, ever, crisp.  They were also never so soft that you could bend them in half without breaking them and revealing the hidden treat.  They never left crumbs that I recall.  They were just… perfect.

I asked my cousin, who is a baker by trade, if she has my grandmother’s recipe.  She did not.  I was fairly sure neither of my brothers, nor my cousin’s brother, nor her father, my father’s brother and at ninety the last of that great generation had it.  I could ask around but I think the recipe (my grandmother baked from her memory, not from written recipes) was lost when we lost her on a Mothers’ Day afternoon after she had baked a last apple pie.

Sigh…. Deeper sigh. In this present moment, I am the grandmother enjoying the shiny eyes and a less serious smile of a granddaughter. In this day called now I am enjoying the memory of last night’s exhausted sleep of the inexhaustible boy who discovered water could travel through the screens of the screened patio, the sprinkler water coming in and his watergun shooting back.  Today has thoughts of another grandchild, in another country, whose memories of me must be already fading, it’s been about a year since his tender hug at our last visit.

I don’t bake cookies.  Their mothers do.  But I play, and I sing, and I read stories and I let them have leftover pizza for breakfast.  This morning’s pizza is already gone, already just a memory, even for me and maybe for them, perhaps to be carried, or maybe not into future present moments.

Some moments become memories, like cookies carried with every one of our senses into other times.  Most other moments fall through the cracks in our days and are forgotten.  I can imagine a hunting cookie snatched from my grandmother’s table and put in my pocket.  I can imagine that cookie in the pocket of my housedress right now, as if I could reach in and hand it to my cookie loving grandchildren.  She gave me love that I have carried all this way through life and now I give it to them.  I’m thinking of learning to bake.