Here Today, Gone Tomorrow (and Crunchy Millet Cookies for the journey)

For weeks now I’ve thought it might be a good idea to share this version of my classic oatmeal millet raisin cookies, but I haven’t been able to make myself write the post. Instead I’ve been stuck at a quirky road block: I’m stymied by a perverse tendency on my part to stop making whatever it is I post on the blog. Since I really like these cookies and have been eating them for a lot of the winter, I didn’t want to take the chance that if I posted the recipe I wouldn’t want to eat them anymore. When I notice behavior like this in myself, it tends to send me into bouts of silliness. In an attempt to cajole myself into sharing the recipe, I thought of naming these cookies after a quirky time travel movie from the turn into the 21st century called Happy Accidents, if only because the idea of them would have seemed preposterous, even impossible until I impulsively decided to try it, and the seemingly impossible became the actual, even the new standard, for how to make a cookie in my kitchen.

In the end, though, it wasn’t the silly connection with the movie that tipped the scales. It was the trees in bloom all over the neighborhood with their sudden riot of white, pink, crimson, orange, fuschia, lavender, and all the shades in between. How freely they burst into such amazing color to awaken the gray days from sleep, and how willingly they spill that color, when the blooms are done, to adorn the dark wet sidewalks on our morning and evening walks. So generous, no worries about what will come next. Just abandon in the beauty of the moment, the turning toward the sun and more light, and the promise of shade when at last they all leaf out.

Thanks to these trees, if you have a food processor, and you’d like to travel back a couple of months with me to when I first discovered the crunchy versatility of millet in cookies, you are in for a future happy accident of your own. The food processor, powerful though it may be, barely nicks any of the tiny millet grains at all–just like petals fall from the tree miraculously intact, they, too, retain their tiny integrity. But whirring the millet around with everything else gives them a slightly soft, still crunchy very flavorful character that’s nut-like but not nut-like. A paradox in a cookie, if you will. Like petals that carpet the mundane ground with splendor, the addition of millet turns these run-of-the mill oatmeal cookies into a unique delight.  I hope you’ll give these slightly off-beat cookies a try, even if they didn’t come from 471 years in the future, and they probably won’t last more than 48 hours, if you’re lucky enough to have some self control.

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If I fear loss, it’s hard to change. If I’d finally like to get “it” right, whatever that may be, it’s also hard to change. But getting stuck in such reality frameworks can look pretty hysterical from the outside, as this scene from Happy Accidents reminds me. I turn to it for a heart-rending laugh. But I turn to the trees in bloom for inspiration about how to open up and give in the moment in spite of myself, pass along something sweet, whatever it is, for however long it lasts. That none of what is sweet may last forever is often the reason for its sweetness, its fleetingly delicious beauty.