Close call - nearly followed in my mother's footsteps

I'm not being cruel with this headline, it really was a close call.  I made those ginger cookies last night, tucked them away and had drifted off to sleep.  Toward the end of that sleep I had a dream...

There was a crowd of about 1,000 on a flat field at night.  The front row had some familiar faces from high school, young childhood and relatives - although they were foggy and dark. They were all tossing around the beach ball, as crowds do when they are happy or bored.  They were cheering me on to "toss the lantern."  The lantern being a large version of the last of the Christmas decorations to be put away.  They just don't fit in the box.  Any way, I was cheered and cheered to toss out a large, red, paper lantern with snowmen on it and a wire structure inside.  I collapsed it to give it the most distance and flung it out.  It landed on some poor bicyclist, the sister of my senior prom date, in the back of the neck and knocked her out.  The entire field gasped in unison and I shot up straight in bed.

I suddenly remembered that those cookies were not made with the fund raiser dough from our son's preschool.  The fund raiser dough has no dairy, is kosher, etc.  No, this dough was made from scratch with fresh eggs -- at least they were fresh during the baking frenzy over two weeks ago.  I recalled the stiffness and sheen to the dough as I tore it apart to plop it onto the cookie sheet.  My husband thought I was nuts as I alighted for the kitchen without a word.  He's ready, at this point, to take away my glue guns and Sharpies.  The fumes have settled in.

I found my cookie stash and immediately tossed them into the trash and went back to bed with the satisfaction that I had saved my family from doom.

You may wonder the tie-in to this revelation and my mother's footsteps.

My mother was a lot of fun and many other positive things, but a culinary goddess was not one of them.  She bordered on the edge of scary with some of the things she would serve us.  We spent many day-after-Thanksgivings in bed with "stomach flu" when indeed it was food poisoning.  She had a habit of putting mayo in the cabinet, rather than the fridge and wouldn't tell anyone.  This was close. I'm grateful for the lantern dream.