come together

It started with a egg white and a sore hand.

After deftly breaking my right hand in two places just before Thanksgiving, I didn’t have anywhere near the manual dexterity to make anything cool in the kitchen for Christmas. Instead, I canceled truffle orders, pounded the table in fury with my left hand, etc.

I told myself I would do it up for Valentine’s Day.

The day before the holiday, I baked my trusty butter cookie recipe into three kinds of hearts — dozens of them. Then I remembered that my royal icing recipe calls for two egg whites. Only one was in my fridge, waiting politely in a red Pyrex container. And my right ring finger was (is) still swollen.

But I kept thinking back to a few New Year’s Eves ago, when I changed my mind about giving away a bottle of champagne I’d bought for someone, and decided instead to give it to my local fire department. They didn’t expect it. No one there knows me, either. I literally drove over, saw a guy in uniform messing about outside with one of the trucks, and handed the bottle to him: ‘Here. Happy New Year.’

He blinked at me a few times, then thanked me. Asked if I wanted to leave my name, as the benefactor of their evening. I smiled. ‘Nah. Just enjoy it.’ And I walked off.

Try that sometime, or something like that. You want fun? That’s FUN.

For Valentine’s Day, I had a peripheral idea: Give decorated cookies to people who weren’t friends, exactly, but solid partners to me in some capacity. People who went out of their way for me on a regular basis, just because they felt like it. I picked my tiny mom-and-pop pharmacy, an incredibly attentive pharmacist at a not-tiny pharmacy, my favorite farmer and his family, and the antiques shop where I do most of my prop shopping for shows.

I am a sucker for stories about community dynamics. Not just because strong communities really, really matter right now, but because they always do. They can change people for the better.

In ‘Lars and the Real Girl’ (2007), a close-knit town comes together to support an isolated man, enough that it emboldens him to come out of his shell.

In ‘A Man Called Otto’ (2022), a man bent on suicide keeps being interrupted by a community that’s so full of life that he finally gives up and joins them. It’s funnier than it sounds.

Then there’s ‘Watership Down’ (1972). This is a fight for survival. Everyone relies on each other to live and to live on. What an adventure. And it’s rabbits.

Turns out using one egg white in your royal icing is more than enough to pipe eleventy-hundred butter cookies, thank God. I had my swollen finger punch in its card and doodled flowers, birds, and lace designs all over the place. Then I made deliveries to my community folks, because last year was no hayride for me, and they got it.

And for fellow ‘Watership Down’ fans: That's Fiver and his doe Vilthuril on the cookie at upper left, above the little XO cookie.