Dafaddah's Box of Chocolates

by Dafaddah

Molasses Cookies

I still make my mother's molasses cookies every once in a while - usually around holidays. After she passed on I would make a batch before every family get together. My dad in particular loved them until he passed on as well. The smell of those molasses cookies are pretty much the closest I'll ever to that feeling of being in my childhood home. It's good to still have something that can do such magic for me, and to have a way for me to share the experience of who my parents were with others, even though they're gone.

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

What does Molasses Cookies have to do with My Little Pony?

[Chatoyance]

8041876

It's okay, Dafaddah. I've got your back.

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Molasses Cookies

A C o n v e r s i o n B u r e a u S t o r y
By Dafaddah and Chatoyance

I still make my mother's molasses cookies every once in a while - usually around holidays. After she passed on I would make a batch before every family get together. My dad in particular loved them until he passed on as well. The smell of those molasses cookies are pretty much the closest I'll ever to that feeling of being in my childhood home. It's good to still have something that can do such magic for me, and to have a way for me to share the experience of who my parents were with others, even though they're gone.

The way I make those cookies is very different now, only to be expected considering that I ended up a unicorn. I still use a spoon, a wooden one no less, just as my mother did, long ago on earth - but mostly I do so out of nostalgia. It just feels more... real... somehow, to use a spoon. I could just lift the batter up in my telekinetic field and mush the ingredients with my mind. I tried that only once. The cookies that resulted just didn't taste right. Somehow, mixing with a spoon adds some secret ingredient. Rationally, I know it is my own attention and memory at work, but in my heart, it feels like love.

For all I know it is love. I live now in a cosmos where friendship is a basic law of physics. Maybe love is a fundamental force, transmissible through a spoon made from wood. What I do know is that when I make those cookies, when I bake them, when the smell fills my little cottage, my mother is there. I mean it. I close my eyes, and she is right there, behind me. Everything in my heart says she stands to my left and about six hooves to my flank. Sometimes, I swear I can sense her smile, and nod her head.

When I feel her there, she is a pony, like me. I can't really remember her clearly as a human anymore. Her face, her human face, is just a blur in my memory. But the pony face - in my mind she is a pegasus - is clear to my thoughts. I could almost paint her picture, if I could paint at all. It's that clear. Of course, it's been just over a century since the last day of old earth. I shouldn't expect to remember any human face clearly after this much time. I still wish I could, though.

Sometimes, in those moments, when I am stirring with a spoon in my mouth, feeling the tug of the batter, I wonder if... if maybe she really is there, somehow.

I've been told it isn't possible, of course. No souls in Mundus. Our old universe was a magic-free zone, a dead and mechanical universe. No gods, no afterlife, no ghosts. Maybe. I don't know such things.

But I've always heard that people live on as long as you remember them. And I remember my mother. I remember her laugh, how she scolded me when I was bad, how she comforted me when I was frightened or sad. I remember her filling my world, being my Celestia long before that bubble appeared on my old, long vanished world. And my ponified version of her is just the same, only the shape is changed - the soul remains the same.

And sometimes I think to myself that maybe some part of her did survive through me. They say that ponification gave us Newfoals souls, real souls. And, since the Centennial Event, I guess that has been proven true... nopony dies anymore. We just respawn.

Perhaps some part of what made my mother herself rode along inside me, back when I went to the Bureau, some intangible part that even the magic of Equestria cannot account for, and when I gained my soul, that part of her, inside me, did too. Maybe my remembering her really did let her live on, in some fashion, in some way.

I would never admit it to anypony, but I like to believe that.

Ah, the cookies are ready. I love that smell. I like to close my eyes and just become a nose - my fabulous, amazing pony nose - and live in a private universe of freshly baked wonder and joy. And there, to my left, six hooves to my flank...

I know, with all that makes me myself, that my mother, invisible, ethereal, is sniffing that delicious smell too - and she is smiling.

[Dafaddah]

8042447

Thanks Chat for expanding my little paragraph of nostalgia into a full fledged story! It's amazing how you've captured so much of what I'm feeling when I make these cookies. The bit about the wooden spoon is scary accurate. I even sprained a wrist one Christmas making way too much batter manually, rather than using our food processor because "it just doesn't taste the same"! When I'm making these cookies, I'm back in her kitchen, sitting at the table and doing homework or reading Asimov, or Clarke, or Pohl, or Heinlein, as I wait for the cookies to be done and getting that first taste right from the oven. Wow!

And thanks!

[Chatoyance]

8042626
You inspire me, Dafaddah.