Cookie Cutters

My mother was not what some would call a great cook. She fixed things like "Joe Mazotti," a meat/potatoes/onion casserole, and "veal birds" from recipes in the Fannie Farmer cookbook. On occasion, she also made delicious sweets -- homemade lemon meringue pie and coconut cake (from real coconuts), chess pie and heavenly chocolate icebox pie (my request for my birthday), warm gingerbread and lemon curd, even cream puffs.

My favorite sweet, though, was the simplest: sugar cookies. Some years after her death when I was a teenager, I salvaged many of her cookie cutters from my father's kitchen. There are about fifteen or twenty metal cutters, some clearly older than others, and another twenty of so red plastic cutters.

I love them, not because I make cookies, which I seldom do, but because Mother's hands and mine touched them when I was a child, and because I used them with my niece and nephew when they were children, and because I am going to use them with my three grandnieces and one grandnephew.

I love them because they're beautiful in the way only mundane, inherited objects can be loved.