When sorting through and packing up my mother’s home to help her move to a smaller house, I came across a few odd treasures that I knew I needed to keep.  One of those treasures was my grandma’s cookie jar.

Grandma’s cookie jar always sat atop the refrigerator in the old farmhouse kitchen, and I remember looking up at it as a child and imagining it contained the same kinds of cookies that decorated it, ones cut in heart and flower shapes and decorated in sugary pink and green icing.  When my grandmother reached up, took down the cookie jar and opened it for me, I was disappointed to find only Fig Newtons or Hydrox which, although they looked like Oreos, I considered a much cheaper, inferior cookie.  At the time, it never occurred to me that having cookies on hand for the grandchildren was a luxury my hardworking farming grandparents could barely afford.

We gathered in the kitchen at the farm each Sunday—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—some still wearing Sunday clothes after attending morning church.  Grandpa, however, always changed into his overalls before sitting down at the table for lunch.  The cousins sat together on an old farm bench next to the window, trapped in place by the adults sitting about the table talking about who-knows-what, usually something having to do with Richard Nixon.  We waited for Grandpa to finish his coffee which he stirred and stirred and stirred, his spoon held by a hand missing the tip of one finger.  Grandpa stirred until coffee spilled out of his cup, overflowing into a saucer which he would then carefully tip, pouring liquid back into his cup before continuing his slow ritual.  Sometimes when we just couldn’t stand waiting any longer for Grandpa to finish, we cousins would climb under the table, through the mass and tangle of grown-up legs, and make our escape to barns and woods and freedom.

For many years there was no television at the farm, but it didn’t matter; there was plenty to do and explore.  We took turns on an old rope swing which hung from a tree branch next to the farmhouse.  A hemlock tree next to the swing invited us to climb high into its branches, and each of us claimed a particular limb which we referred to as our apartment.  The barns held chickens and cats and horses and cows—cows given names like T-Bone and Spiro Agnew.  We jumped from the loft and tumbled in hay until our hair and clothing were filled with the stuff and our skin itched.  Sometimes Grandpa would saddle up one of his old work horses and lead us around the yard, or he would hitch one up to a wagon and take us for a hayride.

We were certain that the woods surrounding the barns were still home to Indians, wild dangerous ones who had yet to be civilized, and so we called this place the Indian Woods.   We gave ourselves Indian names, the eldest cousin claiming Sacajawea for herself, and we imagined ourselves living as they did.  We dared one another to walk barefooted and silent across rocks and stick and leaves, and we built fire rings which we supposed to be authentic, historically accurate imitations of those which early Americans used to roast their game.  It never occurred to us that lighting fires on the hot, dry, autumn ground littered with sticks and leaves would put my grandfather’s barns and house and livelihood in danger.  At least it didn’t until one of the uncles saw smoke rising from the Indian Woods and ran down from the farmhouse to give us holy what-for.

At the farm, there were berries to pick, hickory nuts and butternuts to gather, and fields to wander and explore.  Ferns grew so tall in one lane that they seemed to swallow us whole as we wandered through them; at least that’s how it seemed to me as a child.  When the weather was hot and we grew thirsty, we knew where to find an old tin cup hanging by the spring which fed the tub where Grandpa watered his cows.   As a child, I didn’t know that everyone else my age didn’t spend Sunday afternoon like this.

As we got older, my cousins and I began spending less time outside.  One of my cousins started bringing her portable record player to the farm.  We snuck upstairs in the farmhouse to listen to Osmond Brothers, Bobby Sherman, and Sonny and Cher records, feeling the tiniest bit rebellious and pleased with ourselves that we were listening to rock-and-roll–the devil’s music–upstairs in the home of our God-fearing grandparents.

During my teen years, my visits to the farm became less frequent.  I had jobs.  I had homework.  I imagined myself t having a social life.  Leukemia took my grandma one summer when I was in high school.  I left for college, but tried to make a point of getting up to the farm to see Grandpa when I was home on break.  Word of my his death reached me one summer as I was living and working away from home at an amusement park, a place where people had to pay money for their adventures.

Years later when I was cleaning things out of my mother’s house and came across the cookie jar, I knew I wanted to have it, to hold onto it.  As it turns out, it wasn’t my grandma’s cookie jar; hers is long gone, having been broken years ago.  My mom found an identical one at the yard sale of my former kindergarten teacher, which makes the story of this simple ceramic jar even more interesting to me.

A cousin told me recently that she, too, had come across a cookie jar just like Grandma’s and bought it for herself.  She then went online and found another one for one of our cousins.  Our cookie jars hold no Fig Newtons or imitation Oreo cookies or even the promise of heart and flower-shaped cookies coated in sugary pink and green icing.  Instead they hold memories of a time and place when life seemed simpler, and good.