Memories

It’s been a trying couple of days in adoptionland on twitter and now someone else is trying to stir the pot. Oh Yay! I’m ignoring the sheer nonsense of the kept assuming they know more than the ones adopted on whether adoption is good.

Instead, I want to talk about memories. Memories that pop into your mind unbidden, that have nothing to do with anything happening in this century. I’ve found it happens more, not sure if it is part of growing older, the pandemic that never ends, or just a need to fill your soul with warmth and push back on the coldness you find in so many souls.

Anyway about favorite memories – here’s one of my most precious memories that I can visually see and smell play out in my head, with a bit of backstory first so it makes sense and because I want to.

Grandma would come over every morning to wish us a good day, then she’d go back to her home, she repeated the ritual every evening, most days I’d go over after school to say hi and watch the price is right with her for a bit. Grandma was Dad’s mom and she lived next door in an old two-story, two-bedroom house, the staircase going up to the second floor had a couple of the steps in it designed to be pulled out that revealed secret cubbies to hide valuables in. The basement had both a washer/dryer and a washer wringer machine or a washer mangle, I don’t know which. Upstairs in the kitchen she had both a modern stove and a two-burner wood burning stove that she used on a fairly regular basis, despite there being a furnace in the basement. Her kitchen also had two or three tip-out drawers designed to hold bulk products, hers held flour and sugar, it also had a big over-stuffed rocking chair that she used all the time when she was cooking. Now that you know what her house was like (no idea why I felt that was necessary to the story, but whatever), her kitchen also had a small wooden kitchen table and a couple of wooden chairs in a small nook next to the wood stove.

And that small kitchen table is where one of my favorite visual memory comes from (yes, I always take the long road to every story). Me helping Grandma make gingersnap cookie dough, then watching Grandma rolling out ginger snap cookie dough super thin, and me, using her cookie cutters to cut out the cookies, carefully putting them on cookie sheets and popping them in the oven to bake. Repeating the process over and over until the last sheet of cookies were cooling on the racks, because you didn’t make just one small batch, you made a big batch because it wasn’t a quick process. Writing this out I can almost smell the gingersnaps, and that memory is one of the most precious memories I have from growing up.

I just looked in both mom’s recipe box and mine, neither has Grandma’s ginger snap recipe, but in my recipe box I found my old Blockbusters membership card. Do you have a favorite memory from childhood? Feel free to share one, or talk about anything happening in your world right now. And yes, I know the cookies in the picture below aren’t gingersnaps, use your imagination and pretend they are.

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