Best sweets fall from the sky

Bite-size sweets are hard to top as everyone’s favorite treat.

As a kid, growing up far enough from the candy shop as to not know that such a thing existed, such sugary snacks were usually limited to the selection at the convenience store, on the rare occasion that you found yourself there and could either convince the legal-driver who got you there to spend some money on your sweet-tooth — or you had a little cash to spare in your own small pocket.

The better source, albeit one that wasn’t even as often available as the distance stores of town, is Grandma’s kitchen. There’s a great deal of joy in discovering that a batch of cookies — or even better, peanut candy — had been made and not yet all eaten by your cousins and Granddaddy yet.

My personal favorite is undoubtedly peanut brittle with an emphasis on the peanuts.

Resourceful, candy-seeking kids can maybe make friends or do a little spare tractor driving for other kitchen-using neighbors and kinfolk to increase the probability of random candy encounters. In a pinch, or really, anytime that it was time to put out such block, the sweet, molasses-glued cubes of mineral blocks (for the cows) were a lick or two of sweet — and they were in the back of the pickup, which is often quite convenient. The right kind of cane at the right time of the season might yield a little sweet out in the field.

Pasture melons, cow cake, and wheat grains all make for something to chew on (and usually spit out), but sweet is not really a word that can be associated with those common treats, but bitter is better than nothing at all.

Then there is the greatest source of candy — the sky. The best tasting treats are the ones that come from Grandma’s, and the ones that come unexpectedly falling from up above. What sorcery it is when kind kinfolk (or friends), pilot their plane out over the far, isolated sandhills that I call home, and air-drop a bag of candy right to a kid’s front yard. (Or at least within eyeshot of home.)

You can’t know when or what you’re gonna get, but it’s a great day when you get told to go out and look for candy falling from the sky, sometime soon.

Audra Brown doesn’t always eat sweets, but she’ll never refuse the air-dropped kind. Contact her at: [email protected]