Just Enough is Just Right

As a memory gift, I was given a dear friend’s cookie recipe burned into a wooden paddle to hang on a wall. Last Saturday I set aside the morning to make a six cup of flour batch of chocolate chip cookies. The process was interesting. One always has enough staples…maybe. I took down the flour container. Amazingly, just 6 cups with a teaspoon to spare. The same for 1 1/2 cups white sugar. Whew! Then this large recipe called for 4 cups chocolate chips. Kroger had doubled my order for some reason, so that need was solved. After creaming with a mixer, stirring in the flour with a wooden spoon, and squishing chocolate chips and nuts with fingers, I baked four pans in sequence to have 95 cookies. ” ‘Just right,’ said Amelia Bedelia.” (Hold that thought.)

Millie was the source of the recipe. She was a friend and almost sister because our husbands did projects together. From being young marrieds, to managing six children between us, to uncountable phone calls to cover various problems and solutions, we moved through life as a team. She was more adventurous in planning activities, and I was the one who kept count of the children and encouraged the stragglers. She made the cookies for family, little boys on the block who sometimes walked the dog and fed the cat, and for the elderly widow she visited.

Completing the cookies and calling up memories was just enough to make a just right morning. I packed a container for a daughter and a ziplock bag for one son. One more bag went to the children two houses down because they had brought the mis-delivered recipe package from their house to mine. A friend will share some after a lunch visit. Amelia Bedelia is a scatter -brained maid in children’s books who avoids being fired because on the last page she dashes in to pull a hot offering from the oven with the comment, “Just right.” What we prepare to give opens the way to the blessing we receive.

Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Luke 6:38