My sister and I would affectionately call them rocks as they came out of the oven, having not yet cooled. They would sit on the baking rack in neat little circles, looking for all the world like award-winning cookies that we would see in the Pathmark down the road when we went shopping. And the smell was intoxicating, no matter the type of cookie represented. Be they oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip — Momma made only the two types — they smelled like little pieces of heaven.
But try as she might, Momma couldn’t stop them from being solid as rocks in the end of the process. And because she was my Momma, I would always try one first. The trick was to eat it from the side, to nibble off a small piece of the corner and hope it didn’t chip my tooth. Then my sister would get empowered and try the same technique to often mixed results, but her teeth remained intact too. Score one for us.
It was key, though, not to let Momma know she was baking rocks, while at the same time not encouraging her to make them either. We walked a fine line between keeping Momma happy doing what she loved — baking — and doing what made us happy — not baking. And Momma never did things halfway either, so when she decided to bake cookies she made several batches at a time. We had an industrial sized cookie tub jar that she felt duty-bound to fill to capacity and beyond every single time.
And it wasn’t like Momma couldn’t cook. She made some mean green bean casseroles, some wicked macaroni and cheese, and some dynamic corn bread — with which we would make delicious corn bread cereal. So, it would figure she knew her way around a kitchen sufficiently enough to make good cookies. That wasn’t the case, however, but we didn’t really care. We just adjusted to them, nibbled at the edges, and made Momma smile. It was always great to make Momma smile, no matter what we had to endure to accomplish that feat.
Looking back on it, I know it was really our fault that she kept making rocks. You see, she didn’t eat cookies, so she never knew how they tasted. If we had just mentioned once how they really tasted, she would have just bought cookies for us instead. But it would have hurt her feelings, and I think we did enough of that in other aspects of life. It was our pleasure to at least spare her that. She hadn’t had the easiest of lives, and by pretending, we made her world that much brighter, I think.
And I miss Momma’s cookies.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 
This is such a sweet (and funny) story. It reminds me of my grandma’s cookies. She tried to make them with less sugar (or no sugar) because my grandpa was a diabetic. They ended up tasting like dirt. So we would take them outside and crumble them up into the dirt, and then come back in and pretend that we had eaten them.
Yeah, dirt would have probably tasted better than my Momma’s cookies. Just kidding. Seriously, though, I was always worried about chipping a tooth! Thanks for the lovely comment. Dirt to dirt, eh? 🙂