Olive Geiss and her daughter Sally Ann continued to live in the house next to us as long as we lived on the hill on West Main Street in Richland.

In 1964 we moved to South Race Street and eventually the word came to us that Olive and Sally Ann had moved to Reading, PA.

After that we didn’t hear much more.

But at some point there was an article in one of the Reading papers about Olive.

It gave a brief biography of her life in Richland including the tragic death of her husband, and then it mentioned that she had found a new life being a “second mother” to the children in the neighborhood. We got a bit of a laugh at that line, although I guess it was sorta true.

In any case, she was now working as a cook at a local eatery in Reading and had apparently found success at that endeavor. Enough to warrant a feature article in a Reading newspaper. Good for her!

And after that we pretty much lost track of her.

Or at least I did. I don’t know if my mother kept in touch somehow.

A little research reveals that she died in 1997 and she’s buried in the Richland Cemetery next to husband Roy, so she presumably never lost touch with her Richland roots.

Sally Ann had a short-lived marriage to Raymond Reichart beginning in 1969 that was cut short by his death in 1976; she died in 2016 in Berks county.

Meanwhile, the recipe for Olive’s sugar cookies that she had given my mother way back in the early 60s continued to be a big hit whenever my mother baked a batch, usually around Christmastime. They were always referred to, even after all those years, as Olive’s cookies.

Eventually my mother stopped baking, and she came to live in the Watermark here in Philadelphia, and while her memory for a lot of things  disappeared with the onset of dementia, she retained her memories for cooking. If someone asked her a cooking question, her memory seemed to be as sharp as ever. Once a cook, always a cook, I guess.

And one of the things that she kept with her was her file of recipes.

One day my sister asked me if I had the recipe for Olive’s cookies. I didn’t, but I was sure that Mom had it in her recipe file. And it reminded me that I was interested in that recipe as well, and some of the other recipes that I remembered from way back when. 

So I went to the Watermark to check out her recipe file.

But when I got there, all her recipes were gone!

Had someone stolen them?

I knew that asking her would be useless because by this time her short term memory was pretty much gone.

What I think may have happened is that she might have been talking to someone about cooking and decided to give the recipes away, realizing that she no longer had any use for them.

But that meant that not only was the recipe for Olive’s cookies gone, but so were all the other ones that I remembered.

I reported as much to my sister. It seemed we might never be able to taste Olive’s cookies again.

To be concluded