Nostalgia

Lists & Sugar Cookies & Wanderlust

I looked at the calendar. School was less than a month away, but I was more excited than nervous. After all, what girl wouldn't be excited to go into tenth grade? Sure, there were stuck up fakes, the stress of due dates, and having to be more than a little social, but it was tenth grade. My first year of high school. 

Still, I had a a little more than three weeks to enjoy my summer. My mom and I had composed a list of things we had to do before the summer met its end. We had already gotten through the first bit of the list, which was now erased off of the white board to make room for other things. The rest of the list consisted of: 

1. Go through the box

2. Go to Living Planet Aquarium

3. Make quiche

4. Make sugar cookies

5. Spend a day at the lake

6. Make dream catchers

7. Take a ceramics class

8. Paint some blocks

9. Go to a rodeo

I looked at the list, drumming my fingers against my chin. It wasn't getting done, and we only had three weeks left. There had to be something we could do tonight...

My eyes stopped on sugar cookies. They were simple enough, and I knew that we had all the ingredients to make them. I grinned and got everything out, wiping off the table so we had room to roll the batter out. Then I got the cookie cutters from the top of the cupboard and set them on the table. 

Charger, my Chow mix Pitbull dog, started barking and I heard someone pull into the driveway. I smiled as I realized that Mom was home, finally, and she would be cooking dinner as well. Not that I couldn't do it, but she always seemed to do everything ten times better than I could. I guess it was just a mom thing. 

The door opened and in came a gust of wind that carried Mom with it. She brought with her an energy that seemed to fill the entire house and I couldn't help but smile. 

"Hey," I told her, plugging our Kitchen Aid in to start making the cookies. 

"Hey," she replied, setting her bag on the table, then glanced over to what I was making. "Cookies?" 

"Sugar cookies."

I liked how I could just be doing something really strange and out of the ordinary, for no apparent reason, and Mom would just go with it. It was one of the things I loved about her. Especially when I just get random feelings to do random things, and I can't function until I do those things. 

Like one night, when I was feeling particularly trapped, even though I wasn't in the slightest. I just wanted to get out, to go somewhere that wasn't my house. She had watched me with a smile on her face as I restlessly moved from couch to couch, upstairs and downstairs, eventually leading me to laying on the ground with my feet propped up on the couch. 

"Come on," she had told me. "Let's go for a ride." 

Wanting to get away, I slipped on my slippers and got into our truck. It was nighttime, so all of the stars were out and shining. Already, I was feeling better. 

Mom had backed out of the driveway and drove down our street. Then, when we had reached a fork in the road, she asked me which way. "Left," I told her. 

I didn't know where we were going; I had no sense for direction or where things were besides a few houses in particular, my school, and the shopping center of the city. So I was really just saying random directions, left, right, right, left, straight, left. It went like that for the whole evening until we had found ourselves on a deserted road out in the country. My wanderlust was quenched...for now. 

We had gone back home and I was able to go to sleep, thinking about our tiny little adventure. 

Shaking my head, I poured the sugar into the bowl. Mom had started making dinner; it would be sauteed vegetables and chicken tonight, which we had a lot. I didn't mind, though, because Mom always made it taste delicious, especially since they were garden fresh ingredients. Well, besides the chicken, of course. 

After we ate dinner, we got working on rolling out and shaping our sugar cookies, eating a lot of dough in the process. Flour was spread across shirts and hands, even thrown at each other a couple of times. I smiled, picking out another cookie cutter. 

"What about a dog?" Mom asked. 

I nodded, then went to pick out my own. "What's this one?" I asked Mom, raising a particularly misshapen cookie cutter in my hand to examine it. 

She turned to look at it as well and turned it around. "A blob." 

"A blob?" 

"A blob." 

Laughing, I threw the odd cookie cutter back in the bag and pulled out another, going to put it in the dough. It would be fun decorating these tomorrow morning. 

"Whoops," Mom laughed, looking down at the table. "It appears I have cut the dogs head off." 

"Hmm.." I said, smiling down at the beheaded dog. "Well, if you go like this..." I squished some dough together at the top of the dogs head. "There we go!" 

"Now it looks like an elephant." 

"Well, what can you do?" I asked, shoving another piece of dough into my mouth. 

She shrugged, smiling and licking her fingers off. Making sugar cookies was fun, a good little summer thing to do with my mom. Not to mention, they would taste great in the morning.