At the moment our house is in a bit of upheaval.
Paige, our fourteen year old, is fostering-to-adopt a second rabbit.
The story of how Luna, the rabbit in question, got here is a tale for another day, but in the meantime, our living room has been taken over as the rabbit bonding area. There’s a playpen set up with a divider for Mousse, Paige’s first rabbit, and Luna to get used to each other’s presence and scent. Paige has been sleeping in the living room to make sure everything stays on the up and up, and our downstairs now smells of hay and lettuce, and the term dust bunny now has a whole new meaning.
Yesterday I decided some normalcy was in order, and it would come by way of oatmeal raisin cookies. It’s no secret that Paige is our resident baker, we normally put our orders in and she happily whips up anything we could ask for. But seeing how she was otherwise occupied with the bunnies, I wanted to get in the kitchen and dig out the mixing bowls and measuring cups, I wanted to do a bit of baking myself.
At one point Paige wandered in and said, “I’m curious to see how this goes,” and I had to hold myself back from saying how I taught her everything she knows… mostly because it’s not true. Paige surpassed my knowledge of baking years ago, and I might have called her in to look at the dough at one point… even though I’ve made these cookies from my mother’s recipe countless times over the years. It’s funny how the tides sometimes turn, and then roll back once more.
In no time the kitchen smelled like my childhood, like molten brown sugar and oats, like the wood-paneled living room on Pine Street, like the blue plaid couch, like curling up with a favorite book and a blanket, like Poirot and The Cat Who and Anne of Green Gables.
Paige grabbed a cookie fresh out of the oven and went to sit in the living room, overseeing Luna and Mousse. “They’re really good,” she called out.
I smiled and put two on a plate for myself. I carried it into our sitting room, with the thought to sit for a few minutes before moving onto the next thing. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a stack of books, a handful of Thrift Books orders that I keep meaning to get to. Reaching over I picked up the first in a series, The Vanishing Thief by Kate Parker {shout out to Lindsey of @thehallowsthree on Instagram for sharing her book haul months ago!} and settled in with a cup of tea, my plate of cookies, and the dog on one side of me, the bonding bunnies a world away on the other end of the house… the real mystery of who I made for cookies for solved…