Mamaw's and Cookies

Living right next door to my Mamaw growing up was the next best thing to heaven. Her home was our home, and we treated it as such and were treated as such. I have many good good memories of her house. It was not fancy, far from it. But there was just a feel there that very few places I have ever been have made me feel. It was a warm feel. And when you were there you were the most important thing that was going on. Unless Billy Graham, was on...or the Cowboys were playing football...or it was Saturday night which meant the Lawrence Welk show..You younger ones will not know who Lawrence Welk was but my Mamaw was a devout fan.

We had an hour ride home from school on the big yellow bus and always she had us a snack of some sort. She let us eat it in the living room sprawled out, and we watched Gilligan's Island, or Get Smart, just whatever happened to be the new/old rerun of that season. Then we told her all about school. She especially wanted to know what we had been reading, she loved to read. And she was always interested in what we were learning. She taught school before she married and was always a teacher at heart.

She spent lots of time trying to teach two rowdy girls how to be ladies. Bless her heart. She made us keep our hair combed, our shorts pulled down on our legs..she never did approve of shorts. And how to be mannerly when company came by, especially the preacher. She did not put up with 'ugly' talk. And in her opinion.."darn" was a curse word. She taught us hymns, and how to walk with a book on our head so we would have good posture. She loved maps, and had many old colorful ones. We loved to get them out and look at them and talk about where we would like to go. She has these big old red books called The Book of Knowledge, they were like encyclopedias. They had many stories and poems in them which she would read to us for hours.

Some of the most peaceful memories I have are of my sister and I sitting on her bed in the late evening, while she sat in her "chair" and we would just talk and talk and she would tell us stories of when she was a girl.

She was "ranch" raised. Her beloved Papa and Mama came alive for us in her stories. We learned of cattle drives, funny stories about an Aunt that encountered a rattlesnake and shucked her leather riding skirt while running with said snake attached by his fangs which got stuck in the heavy leather when he struck at her walking by. We heard about the old bulldog that she and her brother loved. About the surrey that they would load up with camping supplies and go for a weekend adventure. We heard sad stories about the great drought and how her Papa lost nearly everything he had. How he and other men had to go from waterhole to waterhole and pull out bogged cattle sometimes having to shoot the ones that were to far gone to save. We never heard the story of the little leather boots that she kept in her bottom drawer. That story was one that was never shared but was never far from her mind. The story of a child lost. And we never heard the story of the gravestone in the cemetery . The little daughter that did not live a week. Another child lost. The story of the husband buried there as well. Loved, but a hard love. Those stories we did not ask for.

My most favorite place in her house was her kitchen. Clean but cluttered. Cookbooks lined up. Recipes cut from newspapers, magazines, handwritten from memory stored haphazardly here and there. A big heavy table with as many chairs as she could get around it graced the middle of the room. That table that I type away on now with my computer, is the one that she wrote letters by the dozen to people far away. The same table that I sit at is the same one that held untold numbers of meals in her house and the same one we gather at in mine. On that table for as long as I can remember was a glass jar, the bottom of an old glass churn long since retired. And in that old jar was where she kept a treasure...cookies. I don't think I can ever remember a time when that jar did not have cookies in it. Mamaw was known for all of her cooking, but when I think of her I think of cookies and homemade bread. Every week without fail until she just could not do it, she made homemade bread and cookies.

There was one cookie that she made the most, because they were my Daddy's favorite. She called them Tea Cakes. I have no idea where the recipe came from. I don't think she remembered. One day when I was newly married I asked her for it, she told me to get a pencil and from memory she dictated it off for me. I have made these things hundreds of times...but they never taste like hers did. Maybe her hands had to be the ones touching the dough.

Today I was thinking of her and how much I wish my children could have know her better and longer and how blessed I was to have had her in my life, and I thought "cookies". So I made cookies, her cookies....









This is the same jar that she used. It is older then I am..amazing that it has survived all these years.





DH came in and grabbed the tea and had himself a couple. He said "these remind me of your Daddy. I can just see him sitting at the end of the table with his old hat on taking a break from the tractor." Memories. Traditions. Legacies of cookies.

I want to be a "cookie" Mamaw. Maybe I have a start. When Tadpole comes over he knows where the cookie jar is, he stands there and points and says "coo ka".. Keeps me motivated to always have a cookie in the jar. And a reminder it isn't what we give materially that really matters in this life, it is what we give from our hearts.
A lot of love goes into keeping a cookie jar full.

God Bless and Happy Trails
RanchWife