Joyce Sutphen

So the poetry book that I asked my mother to get for me arrived. It is Joyce Sutphen's 2010 collection, First Words.

I must say that I am really enjoying it. I haven't read it all yet, but it resonates within me on many levels. There are poems recollecting her childhood, poems about her parents, poems about her children. And I just guess that I am in a space where I can look at all of these things. I am now old enough where I can look at my childhood and adolescence without the anger that I felt for a long time. I was adolescent for a very long time. I blamed everything on....whatever there was. I didn't grow up on a farm like Joyce Sutphen did. I didn't have an idyllic childhood, I just had a normal childhood. There were good things and bad things, and I like remembering the good things. Like cookies with coloured sugar on them, playing tennis in the street, making a situpon at Brownies, and feeling that I could go anywhere on my bike.

Being a liberal minded teen in midwest America was crap, but we will save that for another day's recollections.

For today, here is one of the poems, called Krinkletop Cookies

What was nice about that recipe
was that it didn't require eggs
and that it was something my mother's

mother's grandmother made. "Krinkletops,"
we called them, close to what my great-great-
grandmother called them in the Old World.

I always measured the sugar first
(white, scooped from the bin),
then added lard from the crock

and dark molasses poured out
in a mahogany ribbon.  Then flour,
sifted with ginger, cloves,

cinnamon, and soda to make
a sweet and spicy smell, which was
another nice thing about that recipe-

that and the pleasure of rolling
dough into balls (dipped in sugar
and pressed down on the cookie sheet)

and seeing the righteous hills
rise up and collapse into rows
of cracked and krinkle sugar deserts.


When I read this, I remember rolling cookies into dough balls myself, and realizing what it meant to roll them about the size of a  walnut. For some reason, I thought that that  knowledge made me grown up. :-) We had a walnut tree in our back garden, so why I didn't know what walnut sized meant was a mystery. Maybe it was because to me, walnuts were big green things that fell off  of that tree. (The tree had boards nailed it so I could climb, and it also had fuzzy caterpillars every spring.)

I remember making Snickerdoodles, rolling them in sugar and cinnamon.
I remember making sugar cookies and flattening them with a glass that had been dipped in sugar.
I remember flattening out those rolled dough balls with a fork, making a criss cross design, and sprinkling on the green and red coloured sugar for Christmas bake sales. We were always baking for bake sales.

I remember pumpkin cookie cutters for Halloween, Raggedy Ann and Andy cookie cutters for fun, and heart shaped cookie cutters for Valentine's day, and more red sugar crystals on the hearts.

I miss the coloured sugar.