Sweetie
Pig has been around for decades. As the story goes, Sweetie Pig was
my great grandmother's wedding gift to Grammy. ‘Sweetie’
was a heavy and rather large ceramic pig, a Shawnee Pottery Smiley
Pig, who graced the top of my grandmother's countertop. ‘Sweetie’s’
commodious belly provided my brothers and me with unique cookies not
typically found in our own home. "Just one cookie," Grammy
would always tell us, never allowing us to overindulge.
Whenever
I spent weekends with her, I always sneaked into her kitchen hoping
to snag just one of her cookies without her noticing. I stood on
ballet toes reaching as far
as I could, hoping to quietly lift the lid. Alas, the lid was so
heavy and cumbersome that Grammy could hear me attempting to heist
one of her cookies without permission. She showed up like black
lightning scolding me for my attempted theft.
I
loved lifting off Sweetie Pig’s head and taking a whiff of the
sweetness lurking inside—generous, soft and moist sugar cookies
with sparkly sprinkles of sugar on top, precious gifts that didn’t
even have a handwritten recipe. They were made straight from her
heart. Grammy was much the same way, no printed directions with her.
What you saw was what you got, but with special touches similar to
those sweet, sugary sprinkles. Grammy added sparkles and sweetness
to everything from family gatherings to her fresh homemade bread with
melty butter and cinnamon sugar on top to her teaching me how to
appreciate classical music and to admire Monet paintings. Those
sweet memories are inside that cookie jar today sitting in a safe
spot in my home.
Nowadays,
it seems indulgent and impractical to give over precious countertop
space to a chubby, heavy piece of crockery when a sealable plastic
bag will do the job. But I can’t imagine my adulthood without
the promise of the mist-shrouded ‘cookies of yesteryear.’
When I get a hankering, I lift Sweetie-Pig’s faded and aged lid
taking in all the wonderful memories of long ago, those sweet smiles
of my Grammy and her homemade sugar cookies.
