Today my friend Jen is hosting a link up called "Soul Food Friday" where people share whatever feeds their soul...go head over to her blog to read some great stories!
I've never really liked Halloween all that much. Maybe because it steals my birthday thunder. But there is one Halloween memory that always makes me smile.
Each year, Gran would make popcorn balls for Halloween. I remember not really liking them that much because they were hard to chew and they hurt my teeth. But man, was it fun to help with the cooking.
Cooking at Gran's was always an adventure. She never used a recipe. She just sort of eyeballed everything. 95% of the time there would be a timeout taken from cooking in order to play with candles and matches on the table (I think now that Gran may have been somewhat of a Pyro....). And it was never quiet in the house during cooking. If you were cooking in the early afternoon, Paul Harvey was on the radio; late afternoon, MASH was on tv; if later afternoon, Peter Jennings World News Tonight was playing in the background. Oh, and it wasn't a complete stop at Gran's without a Kit-Kat mini out of the drawer in the fridge.
So with that scene set, let's move on to our story.
There we were. Gran, Little Brother, and me, all gathered around the stove. Gran and Little Brother on one side in the kitchen, and me kneeling on the bar on the other side of the stove. First order of business was to pop the popcorn. Gran didn't believe in microwaveable popcorn, so she heated up corn oil in an old silver pot. Once it got hot, she would pour in the kernels and they would pop. She had previously measured out the right amount of kernels and put them into a glass measuring cup sitting next to the stove.
When the grease was good at hot (and MASH was probably on a commercial), Gran reached for the measuring cup of kernels to pour them in. One minor problem. She grabbed her cup full of coffee rather than the cup of popcorn kernels. And proceeded to pour that into the hot grease.
Next thing you know it's like an inferno in there--smoke everywhere, smells like fire, smoke detectors going off. And in the midst of all this, you hear Gran yell, "Damn!" At that cue, I headed out the front door and started screaming for my dad, who had been working at the shop. Did I tell him the house was filled with smoke? Nope. That the smoke detector wouldn't stop going off? Nope. That there may be a fire? Nope? What did I yell? "GRAN SAID A CUSS WORD! GRAN SAID A CUSS WORD!"
A minor grease fire and the house potentially burning down, I was cool with. But Gran saying a cuss word? Heck no, things were NOT okay!
It's probably been 23 years since I left the house screaming about Gran saying a cuss word, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Those kind of moments--those kind of memories--are what life's about.
