Baking Cookies

I grabbed my Papa stool when my beautiful young mother slid the ready to bake cookies into the oven, my job was to watch the cookies bake over the next 10 minuets. As a tiny little girl I loved the warmth of the heat from the oven in that trailer house kitchen with yellow designed flooring. Everything in that kitchen revealed a decade before in time dark old wooden cupboards and yellowish appliances. I didn't care anything about style or quality. I was just a kid, a young girl who ran around in her barbie or carebear underwear and t-shirt. In my earliest memories I LOVED baking cookies with my mother. It was as if the outside world didn't even exisit, I needed for nothing but my papa stool. I sat patiently on the stool watching through the oven window to the cookies on the heating sheet. "They are done! MOMMMY DONE!" I would call out to her from where she was doing laundry. She would hurry to get them out to the cool racks and I went back to watching the next cookies get baked. My Mother said years later that I never forgot about them and I was always right when I yelled out to her that they were done. Now as an adult I find I am not so "gifted" with focus and I always burn at least one tray of cookies in the millions I have created. I remember how I watched the dough transform into baked cookies and how I waited until I saw a ting bit of brown around the edges then yelled out for my mother to get them out before they cooked! Those were some of my most favored memories, baking with my mother and sitting high up on the counter to help her roll out biscuits and bread.  She always tossed me a piece of dough to play with then usually I ate it. Fluffy flour on my hands and knees often got all over the house when I moved. When it came to these days in our lives my mother happily put on her records of Keith Green the popular christian singer as she sang along sewing quilts and pillows. She kept a spotless home full of baked goodies and canned goods. She was my most favorite person to be around because she never got impatient or loud. She always had the softer touch when rocking us in her chair while reading children's bible stories to us. I have been thinking about my connection to baking cookies and why is it so important for me to do? Why do I feel like I will go crazy if I don't bake and when I do, why is it a feather in my cap? Does it come from my earliest memories of being home with my loving mother? Does the actual cookie it self transports me with every bite back in time when everything was simple and easier? Perhaps a big part of me wants to stay on that Papa stool forever watching the transformation of the cookies and squeal in excitement "Their DONE!"