peanut butter memories

Martin hates peanut butter cookies so, naturally, I don't generally make them. And this is probably a good thing, as I could literally eat an entire batch myself. Not good.

This morning my dad ate the last of the oatmeal raisin cookies. As I was preparing to make a new batch, I realized the butter would need to be thawed before I could mix the new dough and, not wanting to wait that long, I decided to switch to peanut butter dough.

Sometimes the smallest of actions can evoke very powerful memories. With every press of a fork into a criss-cross pattern, I remembered my father's mother and how often she used to make those peanut butter cookies. When I was a little girl, watching her whip up something so extraordinarily delicious seemed like a minor miracle. How could she take peanut butter out of a jar and turn it into cookies? Absolute wizardry!

And how I loved helping my grandmother make those cookies. I can still recall how seriously I took my job of making those fork criss-crosses. With my careful, wanting to please personality, you can bet each one of those crisscrosses were pretty darned close to as perfect as a little girl could produce.

What amazes me about this memory is how sweet it still is to think of being at my grandmother's side, helping her make cookies, smelling them as they cooked and then eating them warm from the oven. I'm 56 years old and one sniff of a peanut better cookie can still put me right back in Gran-Gran's kitchen, in the little house on Kanawha Boulevard.