Sweet and Soft

Illustration: Dov-Ber Cohen

“Have some cookies. I made them for you.”

I was nine years old and this was one of the rare times I was visiting my grandparents. They lived in far-off Miami and their small apartment didn’t have room for our large, boisterous family. So we almost never visited them; they came to us several times a year instead.

Now, though, my parents had taken advantage of midwinter vacation to plan a grand trip to Disney World. Before heading to Orlando, we visited Miami and ate a meal at my grandparents’ home. I don’t remember the meal. But I do remember the cookies that my grandmother had made for her visitors. They were so dry and hard, we could barely bite into them.

But she had made them for us.

My grandmother was brittle, too.

She had grown up during the Depression and in some ways had never fully emerged from it. She went through life like she was edging around the perimeter of a yawning crater: tiptoeing along, always on the cusp of disaster. Tomorrow there might be no food, so you have to save leftover half-bowls of rice or mashed potatoes. Tomorrow there might be no money, so you couldn’t buy anything too pretty or too expensive. She would watch a little baby learning to walk with terror in her eyes, unconsciously clutching at the air as his pudgy legs marched steadily onward, petrified that he might fall.