Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take

My mom had to have been one of the very best kolache bakers ever! Once she got to baking them, she’d be at it almost all day long, making dozens at one time. There were pineapple, prune, peach, pear, cheese, sauerkraut and just about any other filling she could make.

I guess I was about four or five years old on one particular baking day. As Mom baked, she opened all the windows in the kitchen and placed the pans full of fresh-baked kolaches on the windowsills to cool. I would run in and out of the kitchen on either my stick horse or pushing or pulling a Donald Duck toy.

Every time I passed one window or another, I would grab a still-warm fresh baked kolache. Boy, I can still smell that aroma coming out of the room! I, for one, had a bottomless pit for a small stomach and I happened to run through that kitchen many, many times that day.

Well, lo and behold, towards evening I started getting this pain in my stomach which grew more prominent as each hour went by. Finally, the stomach pain got bad enough for me to cry out. My dad, fearing I might have appendicitis, told me to lie down and bring my right knee towards my chest. He said this was one sure way of checking for appendicitis. Of course it hurt, but I also had pain when I brought my left knee up to my chest. Dad decided to take me to town to see a doctor.

This was my first visit to a doctor in my young life and I was pretty scared lying on the exam table with no clothes on! After some poking around on me and finding nothing abnormal, the doc asked if it might have been something I had eaten.

Mom mentioned to him that I had access to freshbaked kolaches that day, asking me how many I ate. I guess I held up all 10 fingers. After prescribing a lot of castor oil, I guess we could say that the case was closed.