Look what I found!

After years of searching the children's section of countless used bookstores, I've finally gotten a copy of one of my most beloved childhood books! Powell's has a feature where you can sign up to be notified if a used (even out-of-print, like this one is) book ever becomes available. As I've written about before, the image of a sand-colored round cookie has haunted me for the past twenty or so years, and with the help of some faithful readers, I was able to remember the title. With shipping, it cost about $10--so, about a 1000 percent inflation from its original price--but once I opened up the pages, the feelings of nostalgia evoked were well worth it.

Isn't it just. Seeing this round, crumbly-looking cookie goes a long way toward explaining my lifelong obsession with cookies. Sometimes I lie in bed and dream about these butter cookies that my grandma would give us. They came in blue tins decorated with little Dutch girls, which I used to make tin can stilts (the cans, not the girls) inspired by Ramona Quimby. But they were shell-shaped, and too buttery to match up to how I imagined the cookie in the book would taste. I'm also on an eternal quest to find these tiny Japanese cookies that I think were called "hitokuchi", which were the size and shape of Japanese coins, with holes in the middle, and tasted like coconut.

Gah, this image kills me! I can feel the lazy afternoon, the boredom mixed with mild contentment of lying curled in a laundry basket (we didn't have any metal tubes like this in our neighborhood, sadly, and if we did, they would've been rusted and scrawled with "Honeygirl wuz hea") while Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue" plays on the record player, eating some sweet or other and contemplating whether to play with my Little People or make a miniature golf course out of toilet paper tubes.


And finally, here's one for my friend and soul sister in book lust (you know who you are):

Off I go to craft a papoose board and bunting so I can recreate this image in a few months! Just kidding.