Cookie Physics

Since my undergrad years long ago, I have linked physics and cookies. Cookies present an ideal microcosm of the handful of laws I tried to grasp while earning a C in Physics 101, a class I was taking as a free elective. How that came to be illuminates the laws of the cookie/physics bond.

In my kid years, my dad lived with a woman who had a daughter my age. We became default sisters, though I was not as nice to her as she was to me. I was envious of her only-child status, all the extra Christmas presents she received from her relatives, and how her mom was in her life (ah the enduring mother issue).

When we grew up, or at least got old enough for college, we studied together. I was a math major and she  physics, so we spent many late nights trying to decipher complex differential equations and quantum mechanics. On nights we studied into the witching hours, at some point she would stop scribbling equations, look up and utter the one word I had been waiting all night to hear: "Cookies?"

I'd nod and she'd dash off to the kitchen, me following behind like a dutiful elf. Without recipe, she'd scan the cupboards, pull down whatever caught her eye, toss them together in a big bowl. My job was to stand by, fetching eggs, holding the sifter, only tasks that had no particular skill requirements. She'd drop small mounds of her concoction onto a cookie sheet, tuck them in the oven and ten minutes later we were back at the books nibbling her cookies.

Back then baking cookies from scratch seemed magical.

One semester, fishing around for a fun elective, my cookie-maker suggested physics: "It'll be fun, you'll love it."

She left out the caveat that love for physics is a slow-burn kind of love. It creeps up on you, like a sloth out for a stroll. One minute your stuck in a physics class surround by engineer majors who nod and scribble down everything the professor, just a speck in front of the giant lecture hall, pratttles on about on the subject of friction, coiled springs, how to determine when a ball will land after shooting it in the air, while you scream with your inside-your-head-voice: "who the *&%! gives a flying *&^$!!?."  And then twenty years later you find yourself fondly explaining to your tiny children: "It's physics" -- your pat reply to just about every "how come" question. Boom, you love physics, just like that.

And in that twenty years, I came to understand the magic of making an excellent cookie from scratch. It's physics.

Everything from the careful bonding of butter and sugar or the thermal conductivity of a cookie sheet. It's physics and it tastes awesome. 

my peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

The Pros and Cons of Being a Recluse

On the up side, there is ample time to groom the cat. And there are all those books to be read. And the knitting. Here is my latest project (note the holiday pencil added for scale).

But then there is all that time to think. I know I'm shrinking into my little world of one when I wake up thinking about things that make me feel like pulling the pillow over my head and going back to sleep. Take this morning for instance. It's a lovely winter morning, birds are flittering in the tree in the backyard. The tree I can now see through my new sliding glass door. The polydactyl cat is eying the birds from the end of my bed. It's Wednesday and I don't have to go to work. . .until January. And yet.

And yet, I open up the day with thoughts about my mother. Why did she send me an e-note to" take a look" at her new family tree on Ancestry.com, if I'm not on it? Why, then, send me one of those mass-mailing holiday letters (the kind that tells all the people you don't care about what the people you do care about have been up to all year), again noting the family tree? And why does any of this surprise and bother me?

So I get up, brew coffee, ponder my options. Return to bed and wallow in the sad reminder that my mother seems vested in creating a reality in which I was never born. Or, return to bed and watch, through the new sliding glass door (yes, this is my favorite home improvement), my twelve-year-old border collie sneak about the yard eating poop.

Whatever the choice, going back to bed is the obvious first move. I crawl back under the covers, turn on the laptop and lo! Someone wants to friend me on Facebook. I have an e-vite to a holiday party. And a comment on my blog. And look, the border collie is rolling with blissful abandon on a turd. Life is full of magic after all. So, suck it Mom.

Here's my reality. Being happy in the winter requires me to redirect my thoughts constantly. It's like driving an old car with faulty alignment, the kind that wants to veer off the road into a ditch, so to keep straight you have to fight it. My brain is an old mis-aligned jalopy, especially in winter. And yet. . . I'm still on the road.

Wintering

It's sock weather and time to spend as much time in bed as possible. I try to accomplish one thing each day so I have something to talk about when the family comes home from being productive citizens.

"I cleaned the cat box," I announce by way of hello.

"I pulled a child from a car, birthed a baby, and then figure out how to save the university $100,000," my husband responds.

I don't bother mentioning how the laundry room now smells of vanilla and citrus.