Cookies with Granddad

I was seven when I went to stay with my grandparents for the summer. It was all I had ever dreamed – I was a star! Little Jerome, Idaho had a brief paragraph in its small town weekly paper, all about ME. “Welcome little Jeanie Rice, age 7, granddaughter of Floyd and Marvel Rice, who is visiting for the summer, , , ,”

My granddad was the postmaster of Jerome, Idaho. I could send letters to him, and they'd always get to the right address even if I only put “Granddad, Jerome, Idaho” on the envelope.

Granddad and I spent the days of that summer delivering mail in the countryside. Every farmer's wife came to the mail truck to greet me and hand me cookies! We had dozens of cookies. Every day we would leave the house with carefully packed lunches so we wouldn't starve to death and every day we would wind our way through town and the rural farmland, and find our way to a little fishing hole, with an old worn dock, and we'd sit on the edge of the dock, dangling our feet in the water, and take our lunches and all our cookies and eat until we had ate every single cookie.

When we got back home and Grandmom asked what we wanted for dinner, we'd both sigh and say, oh, you know – a little fruit, a little cereal – we're just not that hungry. And grin at each other with our little secret. I'm sure she never caught on.

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