Hope and change

Here are the portraits of people involved in the climate march yesterday. Here, while the world is going to absolute hell with the fear of terrorism and the mad notion that meeting violence with violence will end violence...here is a collection of good people doing good work out of love for the earth and all sentient beings. Their faces are kind, caring, full of hope...their faces are an antidote to despair and to the poison being broadcast by those bent on destruction. The Extra is my favorite of the lot from the climate march yesterday. 

And for today's blip: a simple recipe for low-sugar homemade cookies with three flavors of icing and some odd bits for decorations. A rolling pin purchased today. Unfamiliar items on the grocery list: sprinkles, almond extract, food coloring, orange essence, unsweetened coconut “snow”, wax paper, canola oil spray for the cookie sheet. A cookie sheet.

You might think I am assembling these for Bella, but really they are for me. This is my first time to make cookies. I was a single mother and an academic woman, always grading papers during the term and locking myself into an office to do research and write during school breaks, coming out to hug the children or read them a story, but never, never to make cookies myself. I bought boxes of cookies. Once in a while I tried some bizarre cookie “alternative” like rolling balls of peanut butter in sesame seeds. 

This is the first time I have ever made a lump of cookie dough or used a rolling pin on it. The luxury of not having to earn a living, and having Bella for encouragement in finding wonder in what others find mundane, has made it possible for me to experience a piece of life I missed entirely. I have done the preliminaries, as you see. Bella will come visit tomorrow, if the roads aren’t flooded between her house and mine, and my plan is for us to roll out this cookie dough, cut out some cookies with her mother’s cookie cutters, bake them, and then decorate them. I’m as tingly with excitement as if I were five years old myself.