I make cookies for the kids fairly regularly. It was their snack when they got home, came upstairs just long enough to tell me something about their day and then disappear downstairs to watch television. Now they still have cookies as a snack and still go downstairs to watch television, but no bus drops them off beforehand.

When I was in grade three, my friend would come to school with chocolate chip cookies. Since we were best friends, she would occasionally share a piece with me. They had large chips and more of a mounded shape than a flattened one. I've tried finding a recipe to match the memory of those homemade cookies, but I've never been successful. I get annoyed with recipes that promise to be the final stop in the land of chocolate-chip cookie quests. I haven't been able to settle on one specific recipe since the kids seem to accept any iteration of chocolate-chip with indifference. Two stand out to me though because they're just different enough to throw me off from disappointing the memory. One is a vegan version, and the other is made with whole wheat and bittersweet chopped chocolate.

It’s not good going after a memory... Our minds play tricks on us. Once, on a date, I saw a man at another table who looked so familiar I left my shyness behind and asked him if he recognized me. He didn’t. Neither did his wife. We named organizations we belonged to, jobs we'd worked at and neighbourhoods we came from, and still, there was nothing that could have connected us. I had to decide to stop looking at him, even after going back to my seat with an unresolved feeling. There was no fix. The person he looked like never came to mind.

There won't ever be a cookie that tastes of that grade three friendship. But my children will have a stack of chocolate chip cookie recipes to choose their memories from.