Unexpected Remembrances
It was grocery day today and, as usual, I was walking up and down every aisle. I have no idea why but it is imperative that every aisle is hit and every item on the shelves is at least glanced at. I’m glad today that I’m so compulsive because I saw a packet of candy that took me right back to my childhood.
Sitting there, on the second shelf midway down the aisle, was a jumbo package of Toffifee. It was my favorite candy growing up and I was transported back to that 8 year old girl who used to ride in the back of her daddy’s pickup truck as he flew down the dirt roads.
I’d close my eyes and turn my face into the wind as my hair whipped out behind me. The sun would shine down bright and hot on my face and bare shoulders and Bubba was a laughing 5 year old boy sitting on the tire well across from me. We always urged Daddy to go faster because we loved the dust cloud that was kicked up behind us like a smoke screen.
Nothing smelled better than freshly mown grass and blooming honeysuckle as we were bounced and jostled along. We would wrinkle our noses and make silly faces until the hog farms were left far behind and even the smell of the chicken houses we passed was nothing bad. They were all the scents of Home.
There was only one store to go to in our little community. Highfill, population 82, was too small to be considered a town or even a township. We were a community. We had one church, one community hall (where my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary years ago), and one general store. The rodeo ground was a frenzy of activity for only a couple of weeks out of the year and the rest of the time it was an abandoned circle of dirt two pastures behind Grandma and Grandpa‘s house.
The only place to really go on a summer day after swimming was Blankenship’s Store. Mrs. Blankenship knew everyone, or at least, it seemed to me she did. The small dirt parking lot was usually full. There was an old fashioned bell on a spring that would ring each time the door opened and she always had something to say to everyone who came in the door. She knew which person’s sister had just had a baby or which one’s dad was in the hospital again. She always asked to see the gaps in our teeth when we’d lost a tooth and would give us a free Little Debbie snack cake after we‘d shown her. The Tooth Fairy had nothing on that lady.
There is no description I can give for how that store smelled. It was tobacco leaves and soda pop, beef jerky and pickles in a jar, candy and newspapers and Mrs. Blankenship’s perfume. It was something unique to that store, that time, and I‘ve never smelled anything exactly like it since.
Daddy would get cigarettes and shoot the breeze while Bubba and I were allowed to pick out one thing and one thing only. There was an old freezer that held ice cream next to an old Coke-A-Cola dispenser, one of the ones that had the bottle opener on the front and no lock on the door. You opened the metal door and pulled a glass bottle from the rack and popped the cap off on the door. We usually had the sodas drunk by the time Daddy was ready to pay for whatever he’d gotten and we’d just show Mrs. Blankenship the empties so she could ring them up. We got a nickel if we gave them back to her.
The one thing I always got, and had never been able to find anywhere else before now, was a package of Toffifee. They come five little candy cups to a package and I thought they were the best thing on earth. I would pop them out of the plastic cups and suck the chocolate disk off the top. The rest, the caramel cup with the chocolate hazelnut filling, got stuffed into my mouth to melt down until only the hazelnut in the middle was left. Some of the best memories I have of my childhood feature that store and those candies.
I know people have a tendency to think everything was rainbows and roses when they were kids and that things today aren’t what they used to be. I’ve done it on occasion too. But most things aren’t what they used to be or, at least, they’re not how I remember them.
The mulberry tree we used to get in trouble for climbing isn’t as big today as I remember it being in years past. The peach trees Grandma had don’t produce as much fruit as I remember having to gather up in buckets. My parents, somewhere along the way, turned into normal, fallible people instead of the all-knowing beings they used to be. Summer break with my kids seems to fly by now where, when I was young, it seemed to last forever.
I thought we were the luckiest family in the world back then, I didn't know we were poor. The trips to the strawberry and blueberry picking fields were a special treat, not a few extra but badly needed dollars. If anyone would've told me we didn't have any money, I'd have shrugged and laughed and went back to happily tramping through the woods in my bare feet.
Seeing those candies in the store today brought back a lot of things that I’d forgotten or hadn’t really thought of in a long while. I threw two packages into my cart. They’ll play holy heck with my blood sugar but I couldn’t resist and I’m willing to pay the consequences.
The funny thing? They taste just as wonderful to the woman I am today as they did to the girl I used to be.