Making Ralston

First, get down the big four-quart pot.
Set the stool just right,
so you can sit and ease your back,
reach across to the stove,
and yet be free to gaze out the window
across the fields of sugar beet
to the endless prairie.
You’ve already stoked the stove with wood,
but for making Ralston,
you prefer the steady gas flame
of your new combination Kalamazoo range.
You’ll have to sit there awhile
stirring, so the pot doesn’t boil over.

The author’s grandmother, Helen Larson, indulging in another favourite activity; quilting.

Start with two-thirds of a cup of molasses.
Sorghum will do,
but Karo syrup is too sickly sweet.
Avoid it. It needs to be bitter,
dark, a reminder
that the sweet is hard-won.
Add one-third cup of whole milk
from the dairy cow in the barn.
Set aside the rest
to make ice cream
for after dinner.
As the molasses starts to thin,
add brown sugar and bitter chocolate,
a quarter pound of butter.
You can eye the weight
without thinking twice.
Stir the mixture constantly.
If you get distracted—
say, by the sight of your young husband
Coming in for lunch across the fields—
the candy will foam up all over
your shiny new stove.
Keep stirring until
a spoonful dropped into a dish of water
forms a soft ball.
If the ball is hard and cracks,
you’ve cooked it too long.
Prepare the baking sheet
with a piece of waxed paper
and pour the liquid mass
out to cool. Add black walnuts
if you have some.
When it cools, break it into pieces
and wrap each one.
When George heads back to the fields after lunch,
he’ll take a piece for his pocket,
pop one into his mouth.
His kiss will be bitter,
but it will hold you up till sundown.

The author’s grandmother, Helen, and distracting grandfather, George.

Someday your granddaughters
will use Ralston as a test
to weed out the boys who aren’t serious,
the ones who don’t know
that sometimes,
the bitter is the sweet.

-Olive L. Sullivan performs with the band Amanita. She holds an MFA in creative writing and her work has been published in various journals and anthologies, including A Room of One's Own, The Midwest Quarterly, and The LIttle Balkans Review. Her collection Wandering Bone (Meadowlark Books) was published in 2017 while she was in the hospital recovering from a bone marrow transplant. She enjoys fly fishing, long walks on the prairie with dogs, and travel anywhere that requires a passport.

Yarn

White yarn turned into lacy covers for toilet paper rolls. Skeins of homely grey wool became 17 Christmas mice. Grandma’s knitting needles kicked together on long silver legs through balls of yarn that darted around the living room. Hot afternoons high above Minneapolis, her stout thighs stuck to my skinny ones on the sofa, her needles clacked like a second old lady while we watched Days of Our Lives, with its slamming doors, kisses, and crying. “He’s no good,” Grandma would tell me, or “She deserves better,” or “I was afraid of that.”

The author's grandma, making something pretty.

Over TV trays of Wonder Bread covered in oleo and sugar, with the last of her preserved rhubarb, we’d watch General Hospital, then As the World Turns. Summer vacation passed, as each day Grandma wore a different homemade purple dress, ranging from palest lilac to deep violet, and a rotation of aunts, uncles, and cousins visited while she knit them baby blankets and ski caps, and once, with a tiny, hooked needle, she crocheted a red bikini for my Barbie. Sometimes someone would mention The Farm, a place they all loved but could never return to because Grandpa still lived there. In the city, Grandma had fashioned herself a new life, with lots of accessories and a pink car, just like Barbie. She’d cushioned herself with family and ball upon ball of colorful yarn, made a soft place, a woolen fortress blocking out the one person who could make a big woman feel small.

- Lynn Mundell's flash fiction has appeared most recently in Drunk Monkeys, Tin House "Flash Fidelity," and Pure Slush. More is forthcoming this year in Split Lip Magazine, A3 Review, KYSO Flash, and Five Points. Lynn lives in Northern California, where she co-edits 100 Word Story.