April 2021

A blue cookie jar helps Elsie get through her days Elsie was obsessed with her cookie jar. It hadn’t started that way. At first, it was practically useless, merely a vehicle for her beloved chocolate chip cookies. But then, even after each cookie had gone, annihilated by the impatient and hungry parents and siblings who shared them, the jar remained. Elsie found it comforting, in a metaphoric sense. In place of a stuffed animal, or something more commonplace to carry around for a girl her age, she even began to bring it around with her, in spite of its excessive weight. She felt that she was sending a clear message to the jar: she appreciated its loyalty, and this was her way of paying it back. Of course, she couldn’t show it to her friends. First of all, they wouldn’t understand. And second of all, even beyond the realm of being unable to comprehend her immense attachment to this jar of porcelain, they would make fun of her for it. It’s not that they were mean-spirited; they just had a tendency to act without regard for the feelings of the owners of said jars of porcelain. So, instead of foolishly carrying it around in broad daylight, Elsie kept her jar in her mint-green duffel bag. So as not to arouse suspicion, she put everyday items in there as well: a generously sized water bottle, a keychain to her old house, a keychain to her current house, and the thick cookbook she used to pore over before realizing that the true gift lay not in the cookie but in its jar. For three years—ages eight to eleven— her system had worked seamlessly. That was, it had worked seamlessly until May 5, 2020. Stuck at home with her careless, lazy siblings during the quarantine, Elsie never quite realized how much school had offered an escape from home just as much as home had offered an escape from school. But it wasn’t all bad. For one thing, she didn’t even have to worry about being separated from her cookie jar, and for another, she didn’t have to worry about her friends reacting negatively to said cookie jar. Until May 5, she hadn’t even bothered to go outside. Well, she had gone outside. She’d gone out for walks, and to ride her bicycle. She just hadn’t gone outside with her family, nor had she gone outside to a place that wasn’t her neighborhood. It would have grated on her much more if it hadn’t meant a surplus of time with her cookie jar. It was peculiar, because she had presumed that the endless amount of time with the jar would cause a rift between them. After all, she’d only gone off M&Ms after her mom had bought her an endless supply, and only seemed to get bored of The Office after she’d seen a whole season in a night (thanks to her cookie-jar-judging friends—they could sometimes be cool). It seemed to Elsie that the more accessible something was, the less enticing it subsequently became. To her luck, though, it never seemed that way with her cookie jar. She found that she contained the capacity to stare at it for hours upon hours, doing nothing other than pondering its unique existence and inherent kindness (in spite of being an inanimate object). Sometimes, she felt herself choking up when she thought about how it just held all kinds of cookies, no matter their size, quality, or type. The cookie jar did not show a preference for the fancily decorated yet tasteless Christmas cookies her brother insisted on making every year, nor the chocolate chip cookies her little sister liked to bake just as the family ran out of chocolate chips (so, really, they were no-chocolate-chip cookies). It regarded them all as the same. The thought made Elsie feel especially grateful for her beautiful, non-judgmental jar. It seemed to Elsie that the more accessible something was, the less enticing it subsequently became. Anyway, on May 5, the family had received masks, two months after they had been ordered. Her parents, delighted they had finally come, decided that they should do something exciting to differentiate the day from others. Elsie’s eighth-grade brother, Tom, who was convinced that the coronavirus was simply a conspiracy theory made up by an army of shapeshifting reptiles led by Bill Gates, suggested they forget the masks altogether and go to SkyZone (its closure, he added, was simply propaganda that the reptilian army had promoted). Elsie herself was in favor of staying home and admiring her cookie jar, though her parents quickly vetoed this idea just as it had begun to get traction from her equally apathetic siblings. Her eight-year-old sister, Marsha, had the winning proposal to go to the beach, stating that she thought seashells would make perfectly tasty replacements for chocolate chips. “Come on now, Elsie. Don’t you think you’ve had enough time with your jar? It’ll still be there when you get back,” her mother insisted. Elsie frowned. “Every moment without it is a moment wasted. I’ll bring it.” Her mother reluctantly agreed. In another family, Elsie’s compulsive cookie-jar watching would have drawn more attention from her parents, but given the state of her siblings, she was by far the easiest child. The beach was beautiful, in spite of the lack of people. It struck Elsie as abnormal, even in such an abnormal time, that there should be nobody else at the beach. She supposed she should consider herself lucky, as her parents hadn’t really thought to avoid the crowd; it had just happened that way. But it still felt odd. Beaches weren’t meant to be empty, at least not on gorgeous spring days. They were meant to be full of grumbling parents and their wayward children, who begged them to swim with them in the ocean. They were meant to be full of unthoughtful adults who willingly got sunburnt in hopes of a tan, and lifeguards scanning the water