Let the blackmail begin: This is the first of many. It is where children find that "Heaven can be found in a cookie" and that "It is our simple acts that make us heroes"

"When I was a kids I was always amazed at the immense talent and unfathomable beauty of my mother. She was a seamstress and a bread baker, a cookie maker and a pianist. She painted the house, made the drapes, and-odd as this may sound-saved hundreds of pounds of wool rags that she eventually traded in on a deep green wool carpet four our living room.
She was a virtuoso with a pressure canner. We had column upon column – each column 10 deep, of peaches, pears, apricots, green beans, tomatoes, and a variety of pickles. We had meals – real meals – every single night of my life. It was all made from scratch. The woman can just kick the britches off of anyone when it comes to a really wonderful heartwarming, food-old-farm-food cooking. She’s pretty sharp on the fancy stuff too.
She was the first person I ever saw with a two tone kitchen. She painted the upper kitchen cabinets a different color than the lower ones. It was absolutely the height of fashion in our little logging town. Why, you’d have thought she lived in New York City, or Eugene or something.
She had hair the color of cinnamon taffy and teeth whiter than the shirts in the Whisk detergent ads. Somehow all she ever needed to do was put on lipstick and straighten her hair, and she would walk into the room looking like a movie star. He name is Dixie. When I was very young I heard the phrase “you’re not just whistling Dixie” and I thought they were talking about someone whistling at my beautiful mother. For all I knew, there were.
I recall sitting in the classroom and feeling so sorry for the kids with mothers who were not as wonderful and beautiful as mine. We lived in a tough little logging town in western Oregon, and some of those room mothers at the grade school looked as rough as the leather boots they wore. There were a few of the mothers that worked at the Mill and wore their work clothes to the school to drop off the cookies on the week they were responsible for bringing treats. (In those days the kids got cookies once a week, with each mother taking their turn at bringing them.) Their cookies were like little nuggets the size of walnuts, and just as hard. And, to top it off, were burnt on the bottom. Worse yet, those silly kids actually ate them. “What fools,” I would think. “They don’t seem to know that a real cookie has a ton chocolate chips and wonderful little hunks of walnut in it. It’s soft in the middle and somehow it all magically melts and makes you feel like the sun is shining right inside your mouth.” I couldn’t wait for the day to come when my mother would ring her cookies.
It is a day frozen in my mind forever. I knew she wouldn’t wear slacks or trousers as they were referred to then. But I had no idea that she would come into my classroom like Betty Davis – if Betty had been playing my mother. She had on a light colored skirt, a beautiful pink blouse, dainty dark flats and nylons with the seams so straight and sharp they’d cut you if you touched them. She carried a huge box with a hand-embroidered dishtowel over it. She set the box on the table and went to fetch the classroom cookie jar. As she reached in and pulled out the first cookie my heart was pounding as if I’d run a marathon – and then I nearly wept with pride. My mother pulled out a cookie the size of a small saucer. The jaw of every kid in the classroom dropped an inch and their eyes were nearly as big as the cookie. She continued to unload her box, one cookie at a time, and in very short order it was clear that not even half the cookies were going to fit into the cookie jar. She left the box with the teacher and the dishtowel in my charge. (I’m pretty sure I lost it.) Within a very few minutes everyone in my class found out that Heaven can be found in a cookie.
That day, my mother became a divine goddess in my eyes. She intrinsically knew that I wanted desperately to be proud of her. I needed that moment of pride and sheer ecstasy at the tollhouse perfection she provided to my classmates and me. And as I grew up and eventually grew old the lesson has stayed with me – it is our simple acts that make us heroes. Our true beauty is in the weight of our effort, not the grandness of our plan."