cookies

They come in pairs, as if to be transported by ark instead of cardboard box, each partnership within zipped plastic baggy inked with permanent marker to confirm the contents. Chocolate chip with Kit Kat. Chocolate with Reese’s. It’s a parade of permutations, a dozen couplets I arrange in a bowl in the kitchen.

My mom mails boxes to my kids like foreign aid to some camp, which I think is basically how she views the lives of her grandchildren in college dormitories. She adds cash but doesn’t tell me, smuggling contraband of kindness. Once in a while, as seasons change, she’ll think that a kid needs a long sleeved shirt; so she sends three after long deliberations about size, color, and style.

These boxes are rarely sent to me, for good reason. The last thing I need in middle age is a giant supply of cookies from my mother. But on this special occasion, I eat them, one peanut butter cup embedded into a foundation of chocolate brownie at a time until I can’t possibly ingest another or until they eventually go stale in spite of the airtight container. I eat them because my mom’s love has this conduit, the routing and mechanism she knows, hand assembled and baked and packed and shipped not because I want them but because she needs to send them.

Maybe out of obligation or maybe out of hunger but mostly out of love, I eat them, one at a time, a communion offering I don’t deserve but am gifted anyway.