01.10.10: Candy From My Memory

So I was in K-Mart yesterday and came across 

the Christmas sale isle and see this candy.

It struck such a chord in my memory bank (and at 75% off) I had to get it. The memory I thought I had was so brief, but so sweet. I only found this candy one place - at Grandmas house...in Kentucky...at Christmas time. It was gold I tell you - GOLD to a kid! 

I got home and took it out of the canister and looked at all the shiny candy...I almost felt like I was back at her house with the squeeky floors, one bizarrely loud chiming clock, and this candy. I couldn’t wait to taste it!! It looked a little different than what I remember but...

Well, I sorted it and picked some good pieces to photograph (as you can tell I didn’t succeed).

While I loaded the pics to my computer I started tasting them.

Purple - easy, grape. Not a real "Christmasy" memory but still. 

Red was of course cinnamon but nothing too overpowering.

I was surprised at the yellow one. My expectation was for it to be lemon flavored but the best way to describe it was that it tasted yellow. Happy and yellow. That was my Helen Keller moment. 

It went downhill fast from there.

Anything orange colored was not orange flavored it was clove flavored. What sick nut job makes clove flavored candy? That’s just mean.

Green and white - spearmint. I have a physical reaction to spearmint. Spearmint anything gives me a headache and I’m not making that up. I could have won a seed-spitting contest with how fast that crap went flying across the kitchen. Reason 832 that I'm single - no one to witness that. 

Green and yellow - licorice. Personally I think this flavor should be outlawed in every way, but to put it in candy form...sick. Plain and simple.

I think I lost all hope of holding onto a happy childhood memory with the last one - green, yellow and white. Clove AND licorice. Again I ask - who does that???

I guess I was delusional as a child. As my trauma subsided I looked at the canister again with anger. Half of the candy styles ON the canister weren’t IN my canister! Does anyone know where to find the canister of original hard candy with my good memories in it?

Writing this out, what I can preserve as one very happy and peaceful memory is the smell of her house. We always visited at the holidays and she always "had an Army to feed"so there was a turkey (or 12) in the oven. That’s the memory I’m hanging on to! 

Oh and Butter Kuchen pies from Heitzman’s bakery...her rose patterned china...homemade wine that she always added a heaping teaspoon of sugar into...the ducks that made their home in the bushes along side her driveway...making actual mud pies in her back yard...the drafty, scary basement that use to have the steepest stairs in home building history...a wobbly ping pong table...and I think a pool table at one time...not to mention all the old bar paraphernalia (they use to be "in the bar business")... and the trip to Aunt Mary's smoke filled bar where we got to play pool, drink sodas, root around in the store room to our hearts content and run around like fools while the adults sat around talking - a jukebox, I think there was one of those too.

Pooh on that candy - those memories are better!!