nana’s seadoodles
My big brother, Chip, and I were blessed to spend many precious days at our grandparents’ home by the ocean in Southern California. While Grandpa immersed himself in his beloved sport, golf, Chip and I spent time with Nana.
Nana loved to have us help her in her colorful gardens. We’d go on nature walks and have picnics high on the rocks. Listening to the waves crashing into the tidepools, we would munch on a meal of deviled ham and mustard on gushy white bread with lemonade and homemade cookies.
Baking these cookies was Nana’s favorite way to share our time.
With lilting canary serenades cheering us on, happy hours flew by as we spent time in the kitchen. We measured, mixed, rolled, cut, baked and decorated parades of sweet, bitesized menageries... Snickerdoodles being a perennial favorite (and not in name alone, although a friend once told me ending words in “doodle� to instantly make you smile).
Exhausted from all the fun, we three would climb high into Nana’s tall, creaky, antique bed and snuggle under the dotted, chenille bedspread for a silly short story and then a serious long nap. Always the “big sleeper,” I’d awaken alone to the room softly “pinkening” with the final beams of the luminous coastal sunset. Through the billowing sheers, the morning doves’ languid announcement of the evening’s arrival wafted in on the heady fragrance of Peace and Tropicana roses. This blithely intermingled with the heavenly scents of L’air Du Temps, Dutch Masters cigars, warm buttery cookies, and the welcome, faint remnant of my Father’s Old Spice, as his longday-at-the-office stubble scrubbed me back to full consciousness.
Sparing me the harrowing trip down, Daddy ferried me off the bed to the kitchen where we would collect our treasures of the day. To golden lifetime memories, we added a sparkly cut glass case frothing with redolent, watercolord Sweetpeas, shards of frothy seaglass, shiny keyholed limpets and rainbow abalones, carefully tucked into a cigar box.
After proudly presenting our delectable creations to Daddy, Nana would gently layer them in a See’s Candy box in between precisely cut sheets of waxed paper.
“Save some cookies for Mommy,” Nana reminded us as she smiled and waved us out the door. A consummate gentleman through and through, Daddy always had to do a “quality check” (or two) on the joyous ride home...
Amazing how one little bite of cookie can fill up a whole heart. Love ya, Daddydoodle.
Relating thru Food