Certain foods feel to me like punctuation in my life, those moments where there is a brief pause, something that makes us take notice. I’m not talking about my childhood nightly family dinners, which followed a pattern but the other times, the weekends or family events when my mother would pull out her trusty stand mixer and create those recipes I remember so vividly.

Cookies were always a part of that, Toll House cookies, spice cookies, peanut butter cookies flattened with the tines of a fork, jam filled thumbprints—the recipes still live on index cards, many stained from use, in her old wooden box with a now faded sunflower painted on the front.

When I would make one of her recipes with my kids, I would tell them about the grandmother that none of them really knew. She died when my oldest was just a year and the pictures I have of her holding him as a baby still fill my eyes with tears. Connecting them with her through baking seemed to me to make her real to them, not just a story that they were told about someone who was gone before they were born.

I never really baked or cooked until I was out of college and newly married. I had no idea how to do anything in the kitchen other than scramble eggs (and even that was a little iffy). The first baking I did was a boxed cake mix that didn’t bake through in our apartment’s old gas oven. I filled the wet center with a can of frosting and, let’s be honest, it was pretty awful.

But, over time, I began to learn and to experiment. I began to collect cookbooks and play with all kinds of baking—breads, cakes, pies, tarts and the like. But cookies always held a special place and I still constantly try out new recipes. In fact, my children have been known to say that “If you like this, enjoy it now because she will probably never make it again.”

That’s not entirely true. I do have some old standbys I make often. And I have learned to be careful with whom I experiment. One of my grandkids has never forgiven me for the time I made chocolate chip cookies “wrong” by mixing white chocolate chips in with the semisweet. Or another of them, who pronounced that chocolate chip cookies with caramel “disgusting!”

This week I was at a conference where there was a “break area” provided and snacks served. I hadn’t had lunch so as I walked by I idly glanced over. The cookies I saw were ones I have not thought about in years. My mother called them “nut balls” and I later made them as Mexican wedding cookies. Ground nuts are a key element of the dough that is rolled in small balls and then rolled in confectioner’s sugar. I stopped and took a cookie, powdered sugar on my fingers in the way I remember.

Those cookies were my dad’s favorite. Mom made them often and I made them after she was gone. He was not a big sweet eater (although Stella Doro packaged anise cookies were a staple in our house) but he loved these cookies. I bit into the cookie and felt as if I could hear him doling out his highest praise for any food, “You can make this for me anytime,” which was always accompanied by a slightly teasing grin.

So today, making cookies I was asked to bake for an upcoming family event, I made Mom’s “nut ball” cookies. I rolled them in confectioner’s sugar before and after baking, just as she did. And I felt the continuity, felt both my parents represented in those simple cookies, felt the strong sense of bringing the past into the present and beyond, into the future. So many ways to fill our full hearts—