Thursday and Friday this last week, we were at a hotel that served a cook to order breakfast which also included all manner of breakfast foods; fresh fruit, bacon!, potatoes, gravy, bacon! all sort of breads and cereals, bacon!, donuts. I absolutely love bacon! so I kind of over indulged. All this gluttony with the bacon! reminded me of a cookie bin back in the day.
When I was a little girl, every Sunday or every other Sunday, we gathered at my mom's house or one of her three sister's houses for dinner (the noon meal to Oklahoma country people was dinner, not lunch). Those dinners are a whole other blog post for the future, but I want to share this one today.
We were at Aunt Geneva's house this particular Sunday. She is 96 years old and still a lively, lovely woman and is mom's older sister. Back in the day, the kids were always fed at the same time as the men only in another room. They fed us first to get us out of the way so that their meals could be enjoyed without whining hungry kids clamoring to eat. Have you noticed that when kids are hungry, they are whiny and gripe a lot? That is the reason grandmas continually fed grand kids. And you thought it was to spoil them. No, it was to keep them from whining.
We children were expected to play outside if weather permitted so we were out wandering around. My aunt and uncle had really nice, neat barns and some had concrete floors. They even had a dairy herd for a while and if you know about dairy barns, they are really clean and cool. They also had hogs. In our area of the country, almost everyone had a pig or two...not so much anymore. We ended up poking around in the barns and what to our wandering eyes should appear, but a huge, huge barrel of cookies. This barrel was the 50 gallon drum kind of barrel. There was a glorious light shining down on this barrel, like gold at the end of the rainbow, but then again, that may have been exaggeration, but the part about a 50 gallon drum of cookies was true! Cookies, you ask? Yes! We could not believe our good fortune. Oh my gosh, cookies with bits of coconut, cookies with chocolate bits, shortbread cookies, cookies with fruit, cookies with nuts, strawberry cookies, lemon cookies, chocolate cookies............ Oh my....... enough to delight any child. Never mind that they were broken. COOKIES!!! Eat we did! and we kept eating until we were stuffed. There were 7 of us eating cookies until we were almost sick, but we never made a dent in that barrel.
After we were satiated, all we could do was ask for forgiveness since we had not asked for permission to eat a pound of cookies each. We went to the house to share our good fortune with the family. After all, they must partake of this glorious find, too. Cookies for everybody. We were all bouncing from foot to foot, excited as only kids can be to tell them all the varieties of cookies in the BARN. They surely didn't know about this or they would have been there, too.
Wait. Why are they laughing at us? "Those are for the hogs", my aunt said. We found out that the cookies were broken cookies that my uncle had gotten from a bakery to fatten his hogs. If the cookies were broken or malformed, they couldn't be sold to the public; however, they could be sold to farmers for their hogs. There is no telling how old, how dirty, or if they were varmint infested, but having 50 years to think about this, my reality says they probably were. All I can say is that none of us got sick and having all the cookies we could eat is a priceless memory. Cookies are not just for pigs!
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