Kitchen Magic

For Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Irritable. That’s what I was today. Thankfully I am not this way very often. It may have been any number of things that triggered it, but by the time I got home I was ugly. Driving home alone in my car I ranted to myself. I tried to shake the annoyance I felt over several issues that were bothering me. I took deep breaths and tried to relax.

Coming into the house I knew I had only a couple of hours before I’d have to leave again to take my son to basketball practice. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. Having received a sweet note from my best friend earlier in the day, one in which she reminded me of my Mom’s cookie baking, I went straight to my recipe box. I pulled out Mom’s recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and started throwing the ingredients together in the mixer’s bowl.

As I prepared the cookie dough I focused only on the recipe. I threw a batch of cookies in the oven and fed the puppy. I unloaded the dishwasher too. Before the timer went off I had cleaned the kitchen. The cookies came off the cookie sheet as another batch went into the oven. I found myself breathing calmly and then noticed I was humming.

My Mom always hummed as she baked and cleaned house. Here I was doing the same thing now and feeling less stressed and less agitated. Domesticity is not only in my blood, it is what relaxes me most. Eating four cookies straight from the oven probably helped too.

There’s a magic that exists in my kitchen. I feel it often on Sunday afternoons as I prepare a batch of soup. I feel it anytime I make dinner for my family. And the magic returned on a Tuesday afternoon when it seemed nothing was working right. Five dozen cookies were packaged up, all perfectly baked and sought after by my husband and kids once they discovered what I’d been doing after my arrival home. My irritability subsided. There came a true feeling of accomplishment for whipping up a batch of delicious cookies, supplying my family with dessert for the next several days. If only the rest of life were that easy.