I told myself a new oven might lift the fog. That its polished steel and humming heat would turn frustration into something lighter—something with the weight of a few grams of sadness rather than a full pound of despair. I imagined that, with enough patience and sugar, I might bake my way back to joy, or at least to the remembered spark of taste.

Cookies had always been part of my landscape. I baked them for years—not out of habit but devotion. Even after radiation scorched my taste buds and left me navigating the strange topography of recovery, I kept baking. Something in the ritual—the quiet alchemy of flour, butter, sugar—kept me grounded. I kept waiting for the moment when a cookie, just one, might strike the lost chord and bring flavor rushing back.

Now, nearly two years into recovery, there is movement. Subtle but sure. Where once everything tasted like damp cardboard, now I can distinguish edges, feel the slight warmth of rosemary, the clean strike of lemon. My taste, like an old riverbed after a long drought, has begun to carry water again.

Through it all, I baked. Not always well, and not always with hope, but I baked. Franny, patient and loyal, has served as my flavor-tester, my witness to each attempt. I read recipes with a magnification machine that speaks them aloud, a strange partnership between stubbornness and technology. I stage my ingredients before I begin, gathering each one like a settler preparing for winter. I check, double-check. Then I let go. Let my hands remember the mixing, the folding, the way dough should feel between fingers.

Low vision has made the process slower, sometimes maddening. But when the batch comes out right—golden, whole—it validates the part of me that refuses to be undone.

This week I prepared dough for a couple hundred cookies: Ricciarelli, those soft Italian almond clouds, and a Lemon Rosemary Butter cookie, sharp-edged and fragrant. I stretched the work across several days to ration my energy, still precious after treatment. One day for mixing. Another for shaping and freezing. Today, under my wife’s watchful eye, I will bake them. And if all goes well, I will not burn them.

So it goes. Careers collapse into avocations. Sadness finds expression in new disciplines. And sometimes, against the odds, an old passion flickers back to life—not as it was, perhaps, but alive all the same.