I suppose one of the downfalls of a vegan wantabe is learning what all this stuff is. At the beginning of the experiment I enthusiastically roamed a health food grocery store, buying this and that, scooping things into plastic bags, filling out the tags on the twist ties with product numbers so the cashier could ring them up. Odds are the cashiers didn’t need the numbers, but I should have written the names on the tags. For me.

Weeks later I know that the dark one is chia seeds but I don’t remember if those little white things were in there before or if they are…ummm…eggs? And the lighter brown I know is steel cut oatmeal that I keep meaning to try. But the medium brown? I went to my regular grocery store, located much closer to home than the natural store where these were purchased, and I think that brown stuff is ground flax. Maybe.

I visited Aunt Vi this week. She’ll be 101 at the end of September. She was feeling OK but not great. I took her homemade cream of broccoli soup because she loves brocolli. We laughed about how few people like the little green trees, including the first President Bush. I noted as I was leaving that she didn’t have anything sweet to eat. No cookies, no cake. No pie. She likes something sweet at night.

I believe a woman who is almost 101 deserves to have something sweet available. So this morning I got out the bowl and my grandmother’s spoon and made old fashioned molasses cookies, thinking about Aunt Vi and my own grandmother. I’ll take them to her this afternoon on my way down to that natural food store for more healthy stuff.

And while I was making the cookies I reached into the silverware drawer for a smaller spoon, something to scoop a little sugar into a bowl to roll the cookies in before baking. My fingers closed around my mom’s spoon, one of several she had with a distinctive corn motif. They’re split up among all of us ‘kids’ now.

As I looked at the spoon I paused, the loss suddenly so overwhelming that breathing was all I could do. And then it was OK again and I finished rolling the cookies. They’re cooling now, getting ready to make a 101 year young lady smile tonight.

Food and relationships and memories all moving forward into my new world of unidentifiable ingredients. Food. It’s not just for eating. Sometimes it’s for reminiscing.