Pretty Memories

On the first of the month, when my aunty and granny would get the food stamp booklet in the mail, we'd all pile in the back of an old Buick and go to the grocery store. We would have been eating cornflakes and hamburgers for the last week of the month and would be eager to have some new flavor on our palates.

My granny would take one cart and my aunty another. Mostly my bro and cousins would follow my autny around in the grocery store because we knew she'd get the good stuff. My granny would get potatoes, meat, bread, peanut butter, juice, eggs, butter, lunch meats, waffles, syrup, and cereal. My aunty would get cookies, chips, lil'debbie snack cakes, and drink*.

We'd plow through the line with our two carts, not understanding what food stamps were, except for a way to get something good to eat. Not paying attention to the looks we'd get from other customers as we loaded froozen pizzas, ice cream, and candy bars onto the register's belt. See, we hadn't learned words like handout, welfare, liberal, conservative, poverty. We just knew that these brightly colored notes were our tickets to Count Chocula and powerded donoughts.

Our food stuff from my autny's cart would be gone by the end of the week. A bag of chips left opened on the table would allow the chip crumbs inside to turn soft, the kind that melt on your tongue without any drink. The cookies would all be gone, except for the vanilla creme ones that no one liked, and the drink would have been downed in a day.

But what would remain would be the meat and bread and peanut butter my granny brought, and she'd find a way to get in you, especially if you were hungry, and even more so if you were hungry but just didn't know it.

What would remain was knowing that there would always be something to eat, thanks to her resourcefulness and planning.

We always had the cornflakes. And if you wanted a sweet treat, you put sugar on them. But just enough to sweeten the milk a bit.

Pretty memories.