A story is woven from the threads of your life. Or at least mine are.

I stumbled across the recipe for Children’s Delight cookies in my recipe binder. It had been there forever, but I don’t make as many cookies now as when my children were small, so I haven’t noticed it for years. It brought back a rush of memories. First, it is definitely in my mother’s handwriting. Seeing it on the page is like seeing her face. It makes me long for the days when we used to get letters and just seeing the handwriting would bring the person home. But that’s another story. The recipe card was stained and had comments written in after the fact (more butter!). And up in the corner, in brackets it says “Raylene Ewing”

Raylene was my good friend, maybe my best friend, for a while in about grades seven and eight, when I was living in Toronto. She lived just up the street and was not one of the popular kids, but then neither was I. I don’t connect her to the cookies per se, but just seeing her name was an emotional blast from the past – in a nice way. Needless to say, I made the cookies, an old fashioned drop cookie that makes the kitchen smell like cinnamon and cloves.

I didn’t plan to put the recipe in the book I was working on, Summer of Fortune, but a week or so later, there it was. (You writers out there know what I mean.)

“On the top shelf rested a wooden box. Stretching to her full height she carefully brought it down, wiping the dust from the top. She held it in one hand, studying the scenes of the lake carved into the lid. Inside, yellowing recipe cards were written in a spidery hand: Sunday Blackberry Cake, October Relish, Children’s Delight Cookies.”

The recipes themselves were not the important part at that point, but are rather an introduction to Maddie’s backstory.

“Maddie didn’t have any hand-me-down recipes. Most of hers came from magazines. These recipe names conjured up visions of a woman in an apron with streaks of flour on her face, like a character in an old movie. Her own mother had never cooked and Maddie was sure she didn’t own an apron. She had spent most of her time on the couch, watching her soaps with a beer in her hand. Maddie inhaled deeply the unfamiliar scent of cinnamon and cloves that lingered in the box, and then, closing the lid, she placed the box on the windowsill over the sink where she could admire the carving.”

And didn’t she make them, again and again, a sensory lure her handsome landlord couldn’t resist.

And the box? Well that’s a whole other post.

Here’s the recipe. Enjoy – if you can read my Mother’s handwriting! (Are you out there Raylene?)

My question to you is – what mundane everyday things have inspired you, to the point that they later turned up in your writing?

Until next time, Judy Hudson