Grandma Leona’s candy dish—rounded porcelain with a vaguely Asiatic aesthetic, covered in tiny, delicate red, yellow, and light blue stenciled bunches of flowers and geometric designs inlaid with gold. The lid had a filigree knob handle and a small, jagged chip on the edge about the size and shape of a candy corn.
The dish had been on the wooden table next to the couch at my grandmother’s house. Every time we went to visit her, my brother and I went straight for it, barely stopping to say hello before helping ourselves to a sampling of whatever was inside—Hershey’s chocolate kisses, coffee or cinnamon hard candies, M & Ms, peppermints, caramels.
Everything I love about my childhood memories—about being young— are encapsulated in the remembering of that dish, of the feeling of walking into her house, of lifting the lid to see what exciting, delightful surprises awaited us. The swag sometimes was better than others (I’ve a special fondness for nougats and caramels. I never really cared for the jellied, sugar-crusted “orange slices” or the circus peanuts. Other times, the candies were a tad stale, likely because none of the grandchildren had visited.). But every single visit was brilliant. Simple. Deeply satisfying. Endless.
When she died in 2001, all of us—six grandchildren—asked for the dish, but she had left it for me, knowing that I’d carry on the tradition. I keep it on my mantle and fill it with whatever candy calls to me from the store shelves (peanut M&Ms and Cadbury mini chocolate eggs seem to have the most seductive siren’s song), both to keep Grandma Leona alive and to pass along those wonderful feelings to others.
Everyone should have such a dish.
My nostalgia doesn’t necessarily include a longing to go back to my childhood so much as a deep appreciation for those experiences—to have those moments inside me, to be able to hold them in my mind’s eye, to see and feel them so vividly, to be able to dial up those emotions any time.