Empty Cookies

Why am I thinking about Grandma today?

My husband thinks something should be contained in the sandbakkels. Whipped cream, berries, chocolate, something. He is wrong, but that’s okay. He doesn’t know that the sandbakkels are meant to be empty because deprivation is the point.

I bake random stuff my Grandmother baked and, for a reason nobody explained to me, her family disliked. I don’t know why I do this. People don’t like the things my Grandmother baked, and they certainly don’t like my knock-offs, but I still bake stuff.

I like baking, and I particularly like baking Grandma’s things. Sandbakkels are not objectively good, but they are my favorite. They are empty, open, void of purpose, and that is comforting to me. I think they are also my father’s favorite thing, probably for the same reasons.

When O. E. Rølvåg’s Giants in the Earth protagonist Beret, a Norwegian pioneer figuring out how to live in the precise environment where I currently own a functional house, climbs into her family chest to feel her ancestors, she is entering a vessel that does not have prescribed contents. It is designed to hold history. It is functionally empty, even when something is in it. It can contain what is needed at the moment. Nothing else.

When I get upset with my bad sandbakkels, people say they taste good to make me feel better. They missed the point. My sandbakkels are not in the shape of my Grandmother’s sandbakkels. They might not hold what hers held.