Sometimes inspirations strike at the oddest times. Or perhaps when it's absolutely the best time, even though it certainly doesn't seem like it. Sometimes it leads to personal healing, even though you get dragged in kicking and screaming and it all appears to be a huge pain the ass.

"Hey. Quit getting all pissed off at the coffee pot and look at this."

Loki had tried to make coffee. The coffee maker was a shitty one, and sometimes it wouldn't drip into the pot but build up in the filter basket and either overflow on the counter, or eventually drip into the pot along with almost all the grounds. Then, we'd get grounds in our coffee, and we'd be unhappy fuckers. Like now.

"Why can we not get a French Press? I tire of this...cheap contraption..." Loki grumbled as he tried to get the overflowed filter out and not make a mess everywhere. Then he looked up. "What IS it?" He said attempting (poorly) to sound less annoyed. He tried sometimes, the sweet little bastard.

"I found my mom's recipe box." I pulled an innocuous red plastic box out of the cabinet and set it on the counter. I knew I still had it. I'd taken it with me on every move ever since my parents died and their estate was auctioned. I just forget about it sometimes, or maybe file it away in the back of my mind until such time as it's needed. Like now maybe.

"Your...what?" He stepped up next to me, the errant coffee pot temporarily forgotten.

"Recipe box. Instructions to make all the different dishes mom used to serve us back in the day. It's like...my childhood in here, babe." As I spoke, his finger ran curiously across the top of the cards in it. The damn thing was stuffed to the gills with cards.

"So this is like...food spells. In a box. On small scraps of paper that may be lost at any time." He said in his most grating 'this is dumb mortal shit' tone, and picked out one. "Heavenly Hash." He read, then looked at me with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

"Don't be an asshole! This is an important part of my personal history here!" Did I laugh at all his weird rituals? No!

He was reading the card by this time, and his brow furrowed. He turned it over, ran a finger over it and turned it back to the front again. He put that one down and much more carefully dug out another one and repeated the same process. Then went back for a third.

"What? Are you finding some good recipes in there? You were bitching about eating 'boxed food' out of the microwave and wanted to try something better. THEN you were bitching at me that all that shit isn't healthy and how I should eat better…" he was totally ignoring me, engrossed in the 'Christmas Coconut Peanut Butter Balls' card. I decided to go for a little piss-off factor. "You know, you bitch A LOT. You're a real Harpy sometimes…" Still nothing. He was now on to 'Rhubarb Pudding', and handling these cards like they were the Holy Documents of All Mankind. This was getting weird. "Loki?" I touched his arm and his attention snapped over to me.

"No wonder these are becoming so worn, getting them in and out of this overcrowded box almost destroys them! Can you not find a better way to store them? Do you not realize what they are?" He sounded positively scandalized, like I was doing something terrible and sacrilegious by keeping my mother's recipe cards in a recipe card box. Oh NOES!

"I guess I could get a bigger box?" I shrugged and noticed his pissy, disappointed expression. "What, Loki? I haven't cooked in years! I've been by myself until you barged in here."

He waved all this off and hissed, "These are potent SPELLS! How did you not know this?"

His reaction left me a little dazed. "They're RECIPES. As in 'Mom threw some stuff in a pot and wrote it all down because it tasted good.' Some of them are probably copied out of a magazine, and I bet some she never even tried…" he was becoming rather agitated as I spoke and interrupted me.

"THIS one was written when your mother was 35." He held up the 'Rhubarb Pudding' card he had been fondling and practically shoved it in my face. "It was a fine summer and the Rhubarb crop was overabundant. I see beautiful sunlight and feel the warm temperature of the air that she loved, as it was mostly cold in the land where you were raised."

I stood there with my mouth slightly open and had nothing to say. The atmosphere in the room was becoming a little heavy. I wanted to break the tension with one of my normal goofy comments, but he wasn't finished yet.

"And this one…" he picked the 'Christmas Coconut Peanut Butter Balls' card up and shoved it at me "...was written when you were ten years old. It was a harsh winter, and a blizzard came during the time of Yule. All of you were housebound and unable to leave to gather the food needed for your yearly feast. Your mother made these with what she had on hand because she could not make the treats you were accustomed to." He glanced at the front again. "She also did not have 'crunchy' as this is calling for and used 'smooth'. However she believed the taste of either to be satisfactory, though would have preferred 'crunchy', and wrote it thus."

"How the hell do you know this?" Now that he was talking about it, I remembered that. I also remembered we'd found more strange things in an old magazine and we tried making…

"I believe this spell also went with these…" his long, delicate fingers picked two other cards out of the box. 'Snow Ice Cream' and 'Beer Bread'. "You helped make this bread. You also used rather aged ale from the ah...'back porch fridge'."

I stood there staring at him. I was used to strange things when he came along for me, but this was past the point. He was now looking into some odd doorway straight into my childhood. Into the past I often didn't even think about anymore.

His voice became low and soft, and his eyes half-closed. He smiled as he said, "Your mother had hair the color of salt and pepper ever since you could remember." He now seemed to be utterly absorbed into the things these cards were telling him. Seeing things that so far only lived in my own memory.

"OK, stop." I choked, almost in tears. "Not trying to be ugly, honey, but this is a little much for me." I stepped away from him and over to the coffee pot and set to remaking the pot he started. "I need some coffee."

"This was your MOTHER." He said, gravely. "Her magic is in this box, and has been ever since she wove these spells!"

"They're just recipes, Loki. Almost everyone has a box full of Mom's Recipes stashed away somewhere. This ain't a thing. My mom didn't know magic, she was just a housewife and kept the books for my dad's TV repair business." I didn't like thinking about my mom. I really didn't. There was a lot of conflicting feelings there. In my current household, talking about family-past had been a taboo subject that we avoided like the plague. All of a sudden, the other half of the household was violating the boundary.

"You speak of both these spells and your mother as if they were mundane objects." I looked up at him with a warning in my eyes. He kept right on a-going like a freight train. " 'JUST recipes. JUST a housekeeper'. These spells offered you both comfort and sustenance. The woman that created and wove them felt the deepest of affection for you."

Now I set the coffee pot down very hard. "Are we really going here? Really? It's cool to dig at me about the past, but I recall having my head bitten off when we talked about your family."

Usually, Loki is ready to fuss at me when I tell him to back off, but this time he wasn't changing his track at all. He was going at this full-throttle, off the rails.

"I am not 'digging' at you. I am simply making you aware of something you do not seem to understand." He put the card he was holding down on the counter and moved to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. "Do you miss her?"

I wasn't quite ready to play this with him, HE certainly wouldn't have appreciated me poking at this with him. "Do you miss your mom?" I ventured, bracing myself for a flurry of anger, and perhaps a change of subject, even if it would end up in a bit of an argument. But, of course, he proved me wrong there too.

"Yes." He said solemnly, staring directly into my eyes.

He doubled and trebled in my vision as the tears began to fall. I didn't want to stand here like a little bitch and cry but shit! He knew how to hit all the right buttons sometimes, damn him anyway! Why did I keep him around?

I leaned forward and hugged on to him in spite of myself. "You suck." I said, wiping my eyes on the shoulder of his stylish boho shirt. Weak revenge, but revenge all the same.

"You suck as well." He intoned, and that made me laugh.

I gave his lean frame a firm squeeze and sighed, "All right. So. What is the proper way to deal with all these food spells of old?"

"They need to be transcribed into a proper Grimoire. Did you not tell me this was an important part of your personal history?"

I shakily went back to finishing up the coffee, wiping my eyes, "Yeah, but wouldn't that like...fuck up all the magic mom put into them when she wrote them?" Like I knew anything about magic. He was definitely the expert there.

"On the contrary, dear." He said, reaching for our two favorite coffee cups from the rack under the cupboard. "It would strengthen them, as it adds your own magic to it."

"I don't have magic!" I exclaimed.

He gave one of his long-suffering martyr sighs and told me, "You have no idea. You need so much guidance. What would you do without me?"

"Probably spend less on groceries...and laundry detergent. I'd also have more space on the bathroom vanity…"

It was decided, as we sat out on the patio enjoying our coffee, that I was going to transcribe all of my mother's recipes into a 'Grimoire' and Loki was going to supervise this undertaking to make sure it was done right. Gods help me.

"So, I get one of those blank journal things and write all of it in there…" I began, thinking 'Yeah, this'll be OK...' and Loki promptly burst my bubble.

"It has to be a special book, not just any blank pages stuck together, and also, it must be written properly. Pen and ink." He took a sip of his coffee, thoughtfully. "You have nothing here that would suffice. We must find something hand-made."

"Yeah, I got pens, and they have ink in them." I nodded at him and lit a smoke. Being facetious was one my favorite pastimes.

Loki frowned at me, and I knew this was going to turn into A Thing. "No. A quill and ink. That is the most personal method of magical inscription."

"Come on, man. I have no idea how to use that stuff. I got those fountain pens you wanted, isn't that good enough?" The 'fountain pens' I got were the disposable kind. They had nibs like real fountain pens, but other than that they might as well just be a good old Bic stick-pen.

Loki was vigorously shaking his head already. "That will not do. Quill and ink. Leather bound parchment. Hand made."

I pouted over this. He wasn't going to let me get away with cheaping-up on this little home-project. "You're really serious." I stated, hoping he'd let me off the hook.

"That I am. I understand Midgard does not have the interest in such things as it did at one time, but there certainly must be some way to get what we need."

We sat there in silence for a couple minutes, him sipping, me smoking. He seemed to be absolutely certain I'd figure something out. Where the hell would we find stuff like that...the internet? Well, sure. But remembering how he'd reacted to things like that in the past, he'd want to touch whatever it was we were buying, and get a feel for it so the absolute most perfect item would be selected, because things were a drama like that with Loki. Drama, drama, drama...and then something struck me.

"I think we're in luck. I think I know where we could look at and pick up the stuff we needed to do this."

His eyebrows raised, and he said, "Where?"

"The Renaissance Fest. You remember going there? You said you liked the way it felt, even though the food was nothing like it should be." I had taken him to the Renfest last year and he loved it. He told me at the time I ran through it too fast though. Which was probably true. When I go there it's such an overwhelming amount of input I don't know what to do first and end up wandering all over the place never really getting to look at anything in depth.

He nodded slowly, "There was much magic about the place. However everyone was in such a hurry." He gave me a pointed glance. "They sell these types of things there?"

"They sell everything there." I said, lightly adding, "Or we could always just pick something out online…"

"Sight unseen? Out of the question." Just like I thought.

"Alright then! The Renfest it is! This weekend, you and me, hunting down quill pens and ink and a big 'ole book. I'll feel just like Indiana Jones." I remarked dryly.

"What is Indiana Jones?" He asked.

Our movie on the laptop that night was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Loki very much enjoyed Indiana Jones.