Kooky cookies

I can never remember learning to count, but I know that I have one soul, two irises, three grandparents, and four cookie recipes worth mentioning. My father and I would made shortbread cookies in the winter time. They were my great-grandmother's recipe, and we had the same name. The kitchen would smell like almonds for days afterward, and I remember when I was eight and Dad convinced me to lick the excess extract from the spoon. My tongue burned for a week, but I will never forget that taste. After dinner, we would sit at the kitchen table. Mom would have coffee. Dad would have tea. Christine and I would have milk, cold and warm respectively. Taylor would be sleeping by then, the baby monitor interrupting our thoughts with creaking breaths between static. We would all dip our cookies, wait for them to soften, and think about the snow outside. In the spring, Mom and I would make sugar cookies shaped like I-love-you hand shapes. She had enough cookie cutters for all of us; the Deaf school gave them away at the end of every year. We'd roll the dough on a piece of granite countertop Dad had cut down after tearing it out of someone else's kitchen. He didn't understand why someone would want to get rid of it, so it found a place between the cabinet and the refrigerator. It was always dusty when we brought it out, and Dad would wipe away the spiderwebs until we were ready to pour out the dough in floury lumps. We rolled it thin and pressed it with handprints, the same message stamped on every cookie. We would eat them outside amongst the daffodils. I remember how they crumbled on my tongue, sugar breaking apart like it was dissolving into me. In the summer, we made blueberry cookies. The recipe was one for blueberry muffins Mom found in the Joy of Cooking Cook Book up on the greasy cookbook shelf. Instead of using a muffin tin, we splattered the batter in messy lumps across the cookie sheets and were amazed when everything turned out all right. We ate them on the back porch next to the blueberry bush, sun tea steeping in its pitcher on the porch rail, watching bumblebees hum idly around our feet. In the autumn, our cookies were chocolate chip, the recipe on the back of the bag the chip's came in. Mom would add vanilla and sometimes oatmeal. We ate them while they were so hot they burned the roofs of our mouths. Christine would sneak into the kitchen at night to steal more after we were supposed to be in bed. She always brought me two and three for herself because she was older. We thought we were getting away with something, but really the linoleum in the kitchen squeaked so loudly with every step I know now that Mom and Dad could hear us from the basement and laughed to each other, sharing a cigarette and calling us their daughters and nothing else.