“We are cleaning up our stuff,” Meschack, the tile layer who now more or less permanently resides in our home, informed me. “We are giving you more space.”

“More space!” I said in mock amazement. “Why would I need more space? I see at least three square feet over there by the closet and another four feet behind the dining room table!”

Meshack squinted his eyes and looked at me seriously, as he does. He was again accompanied by his assistant, Yusefu, a recent immigrant from Kenya.

“Well, that is good,” Meshack said. “Because we have invited Yusefu’s cousins here to live.”

Yusefu’s eyes opened wide before he realized he was being teased. Then Yusefu smiled. “They are not large!” he insisted, gesturing with his arms. “I am the fattest one!”

This is now a running joke in our home -- discussing how many of Yusefu’s cousins would fit in our living room at any given time.

Last weekend we spent time with a dozen of my husband Peter’s cousins at the funeral for Peter’s sister, and I thought of how enduring these ties to cousins are -- even if they are not sleeping on our floor. Peter was the youngest cousin on his father’s side, so he remembers these cousins as the much older kids he grew up with. The older cousins were all cool or bossy and the younger cousins were all brats, to hear them tell it. It’s funny to realize that these people in their 70s still think of one another as the children they once were, but I feel the same way about my cousins.

I have dozens of cousins on my mother’s side and, like Peter, most of them are older than me. My cousin Jill will always be the super-cool girl with the dyed black hair ironing her peasant dress at the farmhouse. Her musician boyfriend would arrive in a VW Bug and I was awestruck. It doesn’t matter that Jill is now a Lutheran minister with grandchildren. To me, she will always be that elegant young woman flipping back her jet-black hair as she toiled over the iron. I knew I would never be as cool as Jill. I never was.

My cousins and I formed bonds that survive today. Last week, my cousin Dane took me to look at audio equipment, as we needed amplification for the funeral service. Dane told me I’d be better off borrowing what I needed from him. And so I did. Dane has always been quiet. He’ll wait for everyone to finish talking, then offer up an idea that begins with, “You know what you might do ... ” and it will be the most sensible thing said. It has always been this way.

Cousins are the friends I was given as a gift from my family. They are as different from me as they can possibly be, yet I will always keep a space for them in my life.

Meshack is pleased with the work he has done, and I don’t think either of us is eager to say goodbye. I can tell his work is nearly concluded because we could stash at least a dozen cousins in the available space -- assuming they are as small as Yusefu claims.

But Peter and I are looking forward to having our home back, to finally putting books on the shelves and inviting people over for dinner.

“I know what we should do when everything is finally finished,” I told Peter.

“What’s that?”

“We should invite your cousins over!”

I think we will. There’s plenty of room.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon's memoir is called "Blue Yarn." Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION FOR UFS

We were supposed to get the tile backsplash installed in our kitchen yesterday, but my husband, Peter, said he needed to use the kitchen so he could bake ginger cookies.

“Can you work in the bathroom today instead?” I asked Meshach, the talented tiler from Kenya, who has been here so long by now that he feels like part of the family. “Peter wants to bake ginger cookies.”

Meshach has now been joined by a second Kenyan, who is assisting him, named Yusefu. Yusefu and Meshach looked at me seriously for a long moment.

“Yes,” Meshach finally said. “We can work in the bathroom today as long as we each get a cookie.”

This seemed like a reasonable accommodation.

Peter is using his mother’s ginger cookie recipe that he has perfected through trial and error. He wears a chef’s hat when he bakes, and he is very efficient. He made the cookies at Christmas in 2019 (which seems like such a long time ago now) when his sister, Lori, was so ill we weren’t sure she would make it through the Christmas holidays. She lived through Christmas -- and well beyond -- and I like to think, in a small way, the ginger cookies helped.

Ginger cookies are good for your stomach when it is upset. They are not too sweet. They are easy to eat. They are wonderful with a glass of milk or a cup of tea. I don’t think there is much in life that isn’t made better by a ginger cookie, especially one fresh from the oven, small and dark and crisp, the way Peter’s mother made them.

Ginger cookies were about all Lori could eat when the chemo made her nauseous, so Peter kept baking ginger cookies after the holidays were over. When the pandemic hit, he kept baking. I don’t know how many cookies Peter brought to Lori. She couldn’t eat many. There were days when she didn’t eat much at all. But she kept eating ginger cookies when she was able to eat anything.

Peter kept baking them until shortly before she died, earlier this year.

This Sunday, we will have a memorial for Lori. Her cousins and remaining siblings and nieces and nephews and co-workers from past jobs and old friends from school will all be there. It will be outdoors in a park near where Peter’s family settled when they came over from Norway. The weather is supposed to be fine. There will be a few stories told and a few tears shed. There will be a picnic and an interment of ashes in the graveyard where generations of Peter’s family have been laid to rest. And there will be ginger cookies because Peter made a giant batch.

These cookies were comfort food for Lori, and perhaps they will help comfort us now that she is gone. They remind us of childhood and happy times and holidays spent with friends and family. They remind us that our lives are sweet and small, but that they can make a difference. This Sunday, we will all remember the ways in which Lori’s life made a difference.

“Do you think there’s enough?” Peter asked me, still in his chef’s hat, looking at the enormous pile of tiny cookies.

“Yes,” I told him. “I think there are enough.” But I might not have been telling the truth.

The truth is that I’m not sure there can ever be enough ginger cookies. The truth is, we could all stand to have a few ginger cookies stashed away for when they are needed.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon's memoir is called "Blue Yarn." Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION FOR UFS

My husband, Peter, and I are at my parents' cabin in the woods. The weather was perfect for a bike ride so we took a long one. We had not all been riding together in almost two years and I am not an experienced rider. So, in order to prevent my butt from getting sore, I have a big, soft seat on my bicycle. My mother, an avid cyclist, does not approve.

"You wouldn't need that big tractor seat if you had padded shorts!" she always tells me.

"I'm thinking this whole idea of padded seats might catch on," I quip. "Maybe we'll start putting the padding right in the upholstery of couches so we don't need to wear padded pants. Maybe if we put padding in our mattresses, we could stop wearing padded pajamas!"

My mother snorts. "You are being ridiculous."

I am. My mother will never give up her skinny bicycle seat. She zoomed ahead while I followed, a little slower on my tractor seat, getting used to being on a bicycle again.

Last night I was awakened by a strange noise right outside our second-story bedroom window. "It sounds like a pigeon," I thought. But there were no pigeons in the woods and, if there were, they would not be flying around in the middle of the night. I went back to sleep. Later, Peter was awakened by a loud "thump." He thought a branch had landed on the roof. Then he went back to sleep. (I don't recommend hiring either one of us as security guards.)

When we awoke, we discovered a large hawk lying dead on the sidewalk just a few feet from the front door. My parents' cat, Katie, was mesmerized by the large dead bird lying just outside the glass front door. I know she fantasizes about killing birds, but the bird lying near the welcome mat exceeded her wildest ambitions.

Peter figured the "thump" he heard must have been when the hawk broke its neck. Why did it hit the roof? Was it chasing whatever was making the strange sounds I heard? I imitated the calls I heard for my father.

"Tree frogs," my father said.

"Tree frogs outside my second-story window?" I asked.

"They climb the house," he said.

We tried to imagine a hawk attempting to grab tree frogs off the side of the house and breaking its neck in the attempt. We agreed it sounded a little implausible.

If this were a mystery, some sharp-eyed sleuth would show up to explain things; before the end of the book, we'd learn what happened -- what sort of "fowl play" had occurred to result in this tragic ending. But in real life, a lot of tragic things happen without warning or proper explanation.

"What are you going to do with him?" my mother asked my father. "Put him in the compost pile?"

That didn't sound like a very dignified end to me.

"He's too big," my dad said. "I'll bury him in the woods."

So my dad disappeared into the woods with a shovel in one hand and a large bird in the other.

We'll never know why that hawk hit the house at that velocity. And I thought of how the world is filled with these inexplicable occurrences. Things happen in the dark, things I will never fully understand.

But today the sun is shining again and I am going bike riding with my parents. My mother is racing ahead, while my dad and I follow, happy to all be riding together.

Till next time,

Carrie

Carrie Classon's memoir is called "Blue Yarn." Learn more at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION FOR UFS