A Wink From Nanner

My maternal grandmother’s name was Willie.  My brothers, cousins and I called her ‘Nanner’, her grandmother name to us.  But her nieces and nephews called her “Aunt Bill”. 

The name Willie, and certainly the nickname Bill, is a rather unusual one for a woman.  But my grandmother was truly one of a kind.  She was a wonderful grandmother, the best I can possibly imagine.  I hope to be even slightly as good at the job with my grandchildren as she was to me.  She wasn’t just my grandmother, she was my playmate, my confidant, my spiritual mentor, my cheerleader, and my best friend.  She has been residing in heaven now for nearly 27 years.  I miss her terribly, but especially around the holidays.

One year during the Christmas season, when I was maybe  8 or 9 years old, my grandmother and my mother decided to make candy as gifts for all their friends and relatives.  My mother is a wonderful cook and my grandmother was a baker.  But for all the beautiful and delicious things that had come out of the kitchen, I had never seen them make candy before that holiday season.  Maybe that is why the event is so vivid in my memory.

They made two kinds of candy.  An old fashioned candy called Divinity and one my grandmother called simply, Brown Candy.  I remember the name distinctly because it struck me so oddly that this candy was brown but not chocolate as one might expect a ‘brown candy’ to be.  Though I barely remember the taste, I do remember that it looked a lot like fudge and had a similar texture.  The taste of it though, as little as I recall, was more similar to a praline, a candy I was very familiar with, having grown up with a mother and grandmother from Texas.

More than the taste of the candy I remember the production that it created.  There was a lot of sugar and nuts and butter and a huge mess everywhere.  And I remember my mother pronouncing to us that she “would never do that again” referring to making candy.  She kept her word.  Never again did either my mother or grandmother make candy.

As Christmas is approaching, my thoughts go back to all the holidays spent with my grandmother and so many memories flood back to me.  Some humorous, some poignant, but all sweet, because Nanner is in them.  I find myself wishing she was here or that I had some small sign that she is watching over me as she always did when I was a child.

Just the other day, in an attempt not to end up on an episode of the cable show “Hoarders”, I began getting rid of some stacks of old magazines I had been saving.  Many of them were cooking magazines, mostly Bon Appetit.  I carried several stacks out to the trash bin and as I was about to take my last bunch out to throw them away, one of the magazines sort of beckoned me to leaf through it.  I stopped by the back door and began flipping the pages quickly as I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just obeying the urge to look at it before I threw it away.  I got almost all the way to the back of the December 2008 issue of Bon Appetit, and was thinking to myself that this had been a waste of time, when suddenly, in a colored insert that caught my eye, there was that small sign, a ‘wink’ from Nanner that I had been longing for.  Tucked away on one of the last the pages of the magazine on it’s way to the dumpster was the recipe for AUNT BILL’S BROWN CANDY!

Within minutes my kitchen was a mess with sugar and nuts and butter and it was as if I was that little girl again watching with awe the magic that can come out of a kitchen filled with love.  Much more quickly than in my childhood memory, Brown Candy was cut into small squares and sitting on a candy dish waiting to be eaten.

The truth is, though the whole house had the delicious fragrance of caramelized sugar, I didn’t really care if I ate the candy or not.  Just looking at it made me happy.  Nanner, Aunt Bill, as she was called by everyone else, had made her presence known.  Actually she had just reminded me of what I should have realized all along.  I needn’t wish for her to be here again, she is always here.  She lives in my heart 🙂