Cookie Bakers

by Lois Parker Edstrom

It’s not the memory of the 1940’s kitchen,
radio tuned to Queen for a Day,

or the Betty Crocker Cookbook splayed
beside the Sunbeam mixer.

Not even the fragrance of snickerdoodles
hot from the oven that summons

me, the child, yearning to lay my head,
one more time, on my mother’s lap.

It’s a husk of oatmeal that I find
between the pages of her cookbook

long after she’s gone.




Lois Parker Edstrom has authored two nonfiction books for children, published in the 1980s. Her poetry appears in the Washington Poets Association anthology Tattoos on Cedar, and in literary journals including the Birmingham Arts Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, and Cascade. In 2007 she was awarded the Hackney National Literary Award for poetry, third place, and in 2006 received the Benefactor's Award from the Whidbey Island Writer's Conference. She is a mother, a grandmother, and retired nurse who lives on an island in Puget Sound.