Late morning, most any Saturday. My colleagues are rebuilding the hog pen, plotting a compost bin reconstruction, getting gear and athletes together for an away game or match, assessing homework and labs, meeting one-on-one with a student in the dining room to line out the essay due next week, setting up sound equipment for the dance/lecture/concert, running a jazz band or dance rehearsal, prepping Strat Plan sub-committee meetings. Or they’re taking their own children to AYSO or cross country practice, piano lessons or Tae Kwon Do. (Summer vacation? Too distant to access.)

I’ve put down a stack of papers–weekly submissions from my thirty senior writers–to do something more mindless. The three pounds of butter have softened in the fall heat, so I can rev up the Kitchenaid and start making the cookie dough for tonight’s Open House. By now, I could do it blindfolded and one-handed. I could also ask Robin Riley, our locally famous baker, to take my secret recipe and whip it up in the kitchen for Bon Appetit’s Roberto Robles and Hector Gomez to deliver on Saturday, along with the cambro of lemonade and carrot sticks. Michael reminds me of this fact with some regularity.

“Why do you do this yourself? It’s one thing you could offload, you know.” I appreciate this, really–he’s trying to curb my enthusiasm for the Y-word and keep me fit for the long haul that is a school year in a place like Thacher.

Why? I do know. And it’s not because this is part of my job description: I don’t technically need to make the dough to bring home the bacon.

1. Big batches run in my family. My parents launched a restaurant the year I was born. As kids growing up amid huge Hobart mixers and work sinks the size of bathtubs, my sisters and I built forts out of Number 10 cans. Three pounds of butter? Chump change.

2. I like the change of pace. My brain shuts off from all things academic, school and School. I can let it drift where it will, which is sometimes to Nowhere, in Particular.

3. Making the cookie dough might, in fact, be an example of what a friend of mine calls “best and highest use”–not in any immediately obvious way, but because tonight, when the first wave of Toads has wiped out the cookies baked in advance and stockpiled on cooling racks, and the second wave’s stacked three bodies deep at the kitchen counter, someone will yell over the din, “Thanks, Ms. Mully!”, which will set off a chain reaction. If homemade cookies can prompt that kind of gratitude, heartfelt and belly-felt, it’s a sort of co-curricular “best and highest.”

I’ll take it.

Got milk?