Winter and Molasses Cookies

This collage was made a few winters back, and sold on ebay, so somebody out there has the original. (It actually has a mermaid tail.) I tried to make a one of a kind mermaid paper doll every day for a year, and post, auction it off on ebay. It went on for about 10 months all together, so there are many of them out there, but I just got too busy with other things and couldn't keep it up. Fortunately I had to scan them all in to post them, so still have most of the images.

We've got a couple of wood stoves in our big old house and they are very good at keeping us warm, at least in the rooms that they are in. I like to sit RIGHT in front of the stove, pulling a chair as close as possible, open the doors and just about put my feet inside.

Some people apparently identify our family, in the winter, a mile away by the smoke smell in our clothes.

Today I was out in Lancaster PA, roaming the lush farmlands of the beautiful Amish people. There was a wood stove store along side the road, so I stopped in and bought my husband (chopper of the wood and tender of the flames) a gigantic Paul Bunyan sized speckled blue cast iron teapot to rest on top of the main stove we use, to keep the air moist. It weighs a TON.

When I was in high school in California our family had a really big wood stove in our kitchen that had burners on it. It served dual purposes of warming our house, and my mother actually cooked all our meals on it. The oven worked too! Big sticky cinnamon buns, and bread from loving hands that I can smell/taste right now. We lived in a house that was built up on sticks in the middle of a redwood forest.

My father and a family friend Alan went out chopping wood daily for about a week to create enough wood to fuel our fire for a month or so.

I had made some cookies, dark brown molasses cookies dipped in sugar, that were apparently left too long in the oven. I sent some cookies along with my Dad and Alan's lunch. When they came home, Alan told me that one of the cookies fell into the chain saw and broke the chain.

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