What are my American friends doing to celebrate the Fourth today?
   Doyle and his mom have gone to Little Rock (about two and a half hours from here) to pick up his granddaughter, Morgan, 12, who will spend the weekend with us. She lives all the way in south Florida, so this is a special treat for all of us.
   We're hoping the rain that poured down this morning will go away so we can all go to Harrison's really spectacular fireworks on the lake in the middle of town tonight.

   And meanwhile, we'll make some spaghetti and brownies for an easy supper, and hopefully Morgan will enjoy the saxophone her granddaddy found for her birthday present! She played sax in her junior high band this year - LOVED it and did very well - and doesn't have one of her own, so we're hoping this will really make her happy.

   I'm feeling just a little bit sad because all four of my siblings are together in Sarasota this weekend...Holly and Marie live there, and Cissy flew in from Alexandria, Va., for 10 days with them (Cissy is a school librarian, so has a break), and our brother Jay, who moved to Chicago after Mama died, is also there for the weekend.
   I'm saving my vacation for our trip to Boulder the first week in August to see my older son, Alex, whom I haven't seen in just over a year now. I'm getting very excited about our trip. We're going to drive our little Prius, and stay near Boulder and do daytrips out from there. Alex, who's a grill chef at the Mediterranean Cafe' in Boulder, is hoping to get some days off so he can spend some time with us.
   By the way, I mentioned in my newspaper column this week about seeing the unusual tracks last weekend near the Buffalo River, and we printed the same photo I posted on my last blog. I asked for readers' opinions about whether or not there are mountain lions in these hills - (the official stance of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is "there is no evidence that there is a breeding population of mountain lions in Arkansas.") I've been flooded with emails and phone calls from people who assure me there ARE mountain lions in these hills. They've given eyewitness reports.
   One man, a retired game warden of 40 years, said he had seen mountain lions three different times with his own eyes. He also said the tracks in my photo WERE mountain lion tracks!
  Are there mountain lions (panthers, puma, catamounts are other names they go by) in your part of the world?

Hey, friends,
I'm sorry I've been so lax in posting anything other than columns lately. My life feels like a train rushing down the tracks - I've worked more than 40 hours a week the past few, and my son is staying with us for a while, and Doyle is working from home, and things are just BUSY around this house, and I don't seem to have much quiet time to sit and write.
Today was a refreshing interlude after a busy, tense week. I slept in this morning, a decision we made last night, to let me sleep and not have to get up for early Mass here in Harrison. So I slept until after 8, then we got dressed and headed for the truck stop for a good breakfast on our way to 11 am Mass in a nearby town, Yellville. We took Hagrid with us, and he slept in the car in the shade while we were in church.
Then we headed for the Buffalo River at Maumee...if you'd like to see the photo album of the afternoon, I plan to post it above right.
Here are just a few to whet your curiousity :

Can anybody identify this track, about four inches wide, Doyle spotted in the mud near the Buffalo? Maybe a bobcat?

  I was just reading an article in the Washington Post about newsman Tim Russert, who died suddenly Friday at only 58.
   "No
one could see Tim in a room and not smile," said his fellow journalist
Diane Sawyer. "He brought so much joy and curiosity and sheer vitality
to all our lives."
   What a testimony to a personality that glowed with love.
   I
long to think that when I'm gone, somebody could say something like
that about me. Not because I long to be famous, like Russert was, but
because I long to glow with love. I long to be the kind of person that
when people see me walk into a room, they smile, because love radiates
from me in waves and touches them with joy.
   I long to be
the kind of person who has an aura of peace around them, a person who
doesn't sow discord, a person who doesn't repeat unkind rumors, a
person who looks for the strengths, the good in people instead of the
weaknesses and failings.  A person who helps build bridges, a person
who helps heal hurts.
   I fall far short. But it is good to have an ideal, a goal to work toward.
A
long time ago in the Becomers Sunday School Class at the First
Methodist Church in my Mississippi hometown, our teacher, my dear
friend, had us memorize a lot of Scripture verses. And one of them was
from Galatians, about the fruits of the Spirit. To me, it means if you
have let God in and let Him have you, you will share His personality
traits. Which are, according to the list in Galatians: Love. Joy.
Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness.
Self-control.
   That list is a kind of a litmus test, for
me. If I'm living the way I want to live, thinking the way I want to
think, praying the way I want to pray, walking close to my Shepherd in
His green pasture instead of wandering off into the brambles and poison
ivy, my personality will start to glow, like His does, with all of
those qualities. And Love is at the top of the list.
   If
I'm walking in His light, I'll be ABLE to love. To me, that means I'll
be able to see into people's hearts, past their masks, past their
natural human personalities, and into the real person deep inside, the
person God made them to be, the person they really want to be, the
person they are in the process of becoming. The tender, inner person
that most of us do our best to keep hidden and protected from a
potentially hurtful world by building walls and putting on a variety of
diversionary masks.
   And if you can pull that off, if you
can look into people's hearts, you really CAN love everybody. That
doesn't mean being best friends with everybody, or even really LIKING
everybody. It doesn't mean that everybody is a person you'd choose to
go on vacation with. But it does mean that you can look at them with
God's eyes, just a little bit, and see the good in them. See that they
are much like you, on the inside. That they have their hopes and fears
and dreams and hurts, too. That they are, in their inmost tender core,
longing to be loved — just like you are, just like I am.
   Loving
people like this has been a challenge for me always. You can just
imagine that it was sometimes difficult when I was teaching school. I
usually had no trouble loving my junior high and high-school kids, but
every once in a while, I'd get one that I just couldn't make myself
like. I remember one in particular. She was from a wealthier family
than most of the kids in our little school, and was better-dressed, and
had a smart mouth. She was famous for her sharp, "cool" put-downs of
other kids, and she turned her sarcastic tongue on me more than once. I
really felt like she hated me the first year she was in my English
class, and believe me, she wasn't my favorite.
   I would
reluctantly pray for her sometimes, because He says we're supposed to
pray for our enemies. I made lots of mistakes. But my Shepherd
faithfully helped me when I'd drop the ball. He really wanted me to
love her.
   Let me just tell you this. After she had
graduated, three years after I had first taught her, I was at the first
high school football game of the next season, and I saw her walking
along the front of the bleachers, all dressed up, home from Ole Miss.
She spotted me in the stands and climbed all the way up in her high
heels to give me a hug and sit by me for a little while. I was glad to
see her, I really was. Love had won.
   However, I’m sorry
to tell you, there have been others over the years whom I've really
struggled to love, and still haven't succeeded. One in particular has
hated me ever since we first met when we were teenagers, and to be
perfectly honest, I harbor a deep dislike for her, too. I need to pray
more for her. I need to pray for her as she cares for her elderly
mother, pray for her marriage, pray for her children — but to be
honest, I rarely do. I need to get serious about it.
    I
hope before we die, we'll be able to look into each other's hearts with
love, and see the real women hiding inside. And to forgive each other
for a long lifetime litany of hurts and resentments, with the help of
the One Who forgave us. And be able to glow more brightly with love.
By Celia DeWoody
Copyright Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times 2008

Hey, friends,
It's summertime in the Ozarks! Another season full of nature's blessings....

A sweet Great Pyrenees guards his flock of goats....

A kitty keeps an eye on the family's garden....

A leopard frog soaks up warmth on a road ...

A bug feasts on a banquet of Queen Anne's Lace...

A Great Dane sniffs some flowers planted in a stone birdbath....

An old Chevrolet panel truck decorates a mountain pasture...

Wild blackberries ripen on the roadsides....

Poison ivy flourishes everywhere....

And pink flowers  decorate the edges of the woods.

Summertime in God's country. A time to walk in the sunshine, look around at all the beauty, and breathe a deep sigh of gratitude.

Summertime....
   Do you remember
the last day of school in the spring, when delicious summer used to
stretch out in front of you like a shining yellow ribbon that just kept
unwinding forever off its spool?
   When I was a child, it
seemed like the span of months from the time school was out in May to
when we went back to school after Labor Day lasted as long as a year
does now, or maybe longer. Those endless sunshiny days, when you could
take your time and never have to get in a hurry, and go barefoot, and
read books, and make chains of clover blossoms, and eat hand-cranked
homemade ice cream and play Hide-and-Go-Seek with your cousins?
   I
hope summertime still feels that way to today's children. I'm not sure
it does, since modern kids seem to be kept much busier than we were
with supervised, planned activities — organized sports, summer camps,
music lessons, dance classes, as well as elaborate family vacations.
They may be so busy that the summer is over before they can turn around.
   When I think of my childhood summers, I think of Mississippi.
   Every
summer of my life, my family packed up the big Ford station wagon and
drove long miles from wherever the Navy had taken us — Florida,
Virginia, Georgia, Washington State, Rhode Island — on the annual
pilgrimage to our ancestral homeland in the Deep South.
   The
house Mama grew up in in Macon was our home base. Daddy would park the
station wagon in the gravel driveway under the huge oak trees, and we’d
invade Poppy and Granddaddy's big old white pre-Civil War house for a
couple of weeks.
   My sister Cissy and I were in
little-girl heaven in Macon, with all the freedom that a small town
offered to children in those more innocent days. We could flip-flop our
way to the American Legion swimming pool a few blocks away, or even the
mile over blistering sidewalks “to town” where we’d spend a happy hour
reading Archie comic books and chewing huge wads of grape bubble gum in
Miss Claire Ferris' Bookstore. Or Mama would drop us off for a matinee
at the Dreamland Theater, the same theater where she’d watched World
War II newsreels as a child.
   We could count on my
mother's sister —my aunt Mimi — and her two boys, our cousins Danny and
Beau, driving up from Jackson to see us while we were in town. Cissy
and I were always ecstatic to see our older cousins, especially Beau,
whom we extravagantly admired. He was rough and tough and knew boy
stuff that our family of little girls didn't know — like how to throw a
football, or build a tree house high in the tallest oak tree — and he
could play the guitar! Beau was sweet enough to let his little girl
cousins follow along behind him some of the time, so we dogged his
steps and waited on him hand and foot like faithful slaves.
   With
visiting cousins and neighborhood friends, Cissy and I spent happy
hours out in Poppy and Granddaddy's big yard. There was a big treeless
lot on the side where we'd play touch football or fly kites. We were
fascinated by the front yard’s gnarled, shady magnolia tree, which had
a long, low branch that allowed even clumsy tree-climbers like me
access to its cool, rustling depths.
   The front steps and
sidewalk were the setting for a crazy-quilt of carefree pastimes.
Poppy's front porch had a dozen concrete steps up to it, and the steps
were flanked on either side by short brick two-level walls that were
the perfect size for children to sit, or even lie down, on. Leading
from the front steps down to the quiet cul-de-sac was a long, wide
concrete sidewalk, where we roller-skated and rode bikes and trikes and
played jacks and hopscotch. The steps and the sidewalk were the stage
for a thousand barefoot games of Rock School, Running Water, Red
Light-Green Light, and Mother May I.
   We played out
there every evening, until the lightning bugs started sparking in the
grass. Then it was time to dash to Poppy's pantry and find Mason jars
to catch them, running through the twilight through the cool grass,
before it was time to go inside. It seems like Cissy and I went to
sleep every night with lightning-bug lamp on the dresser in our room,
twinkling sweetly in the dusk.
  
My sister and I would
snuggle up in the bed under the light white chenille bedspread and
soft, ironed linen sheets, under the framed composite of our Aunt
Kaki's school pictures all the way from first grade through her senior
portrait, which we studied with fascination. The silvery gray wallpaper
was decked with big white feathery scrolls, and the high ceiling looked
like it was a mile away. We could hear the faint murmurs of Poppy and
Mama and Aunt Mimi's voices from the front porch, and the quiet noise
of Granddaddy's TV from the back of the house. The light white curtains
blew gently in front of the tall open windows, letting in the warm
Southern air, soft with humidity. We'd drift off to sleep to the
comforting chorus of crickets and cicadas, and would soon be dreaming
honeysuckle dreams.

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times 2008
Published June 4, 2008

   Writing fiction is something I’d love to be able to do, but it's never been the kind of writing that comes naturally to me.
   When
I was about 13, I discovered a kind of fiction I thought maybe I could
write. Some of you may have read Eugenia Price's historical novels, set
along the southern Atlantic coast. My favorite of them all was "The
Beloved Invader," set on St. Simon's Island, Ga.
   I was
intrigued by Price's method. A student of history, she would find the
story of an obscure person who intrigued her, then exhaustively
research their life and use it as the framework for a novel.
   I
remember thinking even as a young teenager that if I ever wrote a
novel, that's what I would have to do. I'd have to have a real person's
life to base it all on — but I'd want to be free to fill in the blanks
in that life with my imagination, coloring their personality, dreaming
up the words they said, their thoughts, their hopes, their fears, what
was really going on inside their hearts.
   A character in
my own family fascinates me, and if I ever actually sit down to write a
book, it may have my great-grandmother as its central character — Lena
Watermeier Holt.
   Lena's father, Frederick Watermeier,
immigrated to St. Louis from Germany in the mid-1800s. I was always
told, "Grandpa worked in the Kaiser's gardens back in Germany, and he
came over to St. Louis to work in the botanical gardens there."
   I
don't know too much about Lena, my Granny Holt. Family stories said
that our grandfather Watermeier was very strict — that his family was
allowed to speak only German in their home, and that the children had
to line their little leather shoes up in the hallway outside their
bedroom doors at night so that "Papa" could polish them while they were
asleep.
Somehow, city-girl Lena ended up marrying a man
from tiny Macon, Miss. I know he was a traveling salesman, so I can
imagine him coming to the big city of St. Louis on a business trip, all
dressed up, and meeting this young German girl and sweeping her off her
feet.
   Miss Lena Watermeier and Mr. Henry Clay Holt
somehow ended up married and living in our little hometown of Macon.
They had four daughters — Eddie Lee, Ruth, Lucile and Henrietta (my
“Poppy”) —  and then a baby son, Henry Clay, Jr. — "Buddy."
   But
when all five children were still little, Henry Clay went off and left
his wife and children and never came home. Poppy told me her mama had
to take in sewing and ironing to make ends meet.
   My
grandmother also told me her daddy never sent their mother money, but
every once in a while, one of the children would get a package from him
that contained some kind of extravagant gift — like a fancy beaded
evening purse — when what they needed was shoes for school, or money
for groceries.
   My Granny Holt lost her only son — her
baby — when he was in his early twenties. Poppy told me “her Buddy”
died suddenly of a ruptured appendix. Whenever she talked about her
lost brother, tears would shine in her brown eyes, even 40 years later.

   It wasn't until after Poppy was gone, when I was
interviewing an old, old lady for a story in the Macon paper, that I
learned the truth about Uncle Buddy’s death. Miss Fan had lived next
door to Granny Holt and her family when she was growing up.
   "Yes,
honey, that Buddy Holt was the best-looking thing — such a sweet boy,
so much fun," she told me, looking off into the distance and smiling at
the memory. "He worked at a little grocery story down by the river
bridge, and all the young wives in town would go down there to buy
their groceries, 'cause that Buddy was just so darlin’. It just broke
everybody's heart when got hold of that bad whiskey that killed him."
   Bad whiskey. Poppy had just edited out that part of her precious brother’s story.
   It was from Miss Fan, too, that I heard the story that intrigued me most.
   We'd been talking about how Granny's young salesman husband had "run off."
   Then
Miss Fan said, "One day, a young, real pretty woman got off the train
all by herself, and inquired at the depot about Mr. Henry Clay Holt."
  That
was my grandfather's name. The grandfather who had left his hometown,
his parents, his five little children, and his wife, behind. His lonely
wife, who was struggling to feed those five children, who still wore
her wedding ring.
   "Mr. Henry Clay Holt?" the station
master said. "Why, m'am, Henry Clay Holt left this town about five
years ago and hasn't been seen here since. Is there anything I can do
for you?"
   "Well, I’m his wife," the beautiful stranger said. "I’ve come looking for my husband."
   Apparently, he’d gone off and left her, too.
   Granny
died when I was only four, but Mama and Poppy used to talk to us about
her all the time — about how strong her faith was, how she was always
smiling, always looking for something to be thankful for. How she
taught her family that every hard thing you went through just made you
stronger.
   I'd love to tell Granny Holt's story. I'd love to know how she walked through her fires and kept her faith.
   There's no record of it. I don't have her journal, or any letters she wrote. Almost everybody who knew her well is gone.
   I
may just have to use what I know about the kind of people her daughters
and granddaughters were, and make the rest of it up myself.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times

   Many
of the writers I most admire are fellow Southerners. With almost 200
years of Mississippi blood running through my veins, you'd think I'd
choose a writer from the Magnolia State as my premiere idol — Eudora
Welty, who shares my alma mater; or Yazoo City's legendary Willie
Morris, who used to speak to us at our state English teachers'
meetings; or Mr. Bill Faulkner, who sat drinking bourbon on his Oxford
front porch when my mama and daddy were at Ole Miss.
   I
respect and admire all of those literary giants, but my truest idol is
a good ol' boy from next-door Alabama — a slow-talking newspaperman
named Rick Bragg.
   A country boy who grew up red-dirt-poor
in northeast Alabama, he started his career covering sports for a
little weekly paper, and ended up a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter for
the New York Times. He has no college education, no fancy degrees after
his name. What he has is bone-deep, God-given talent, a rare gift for
red-hot words that jump off the page and lodge deeply in your heart,
like bullets.
   I'd never heard of Bragg until I picked up
a paperback copy of his first family memoir, "All Over But the
Shoutin'," in Tuscaloosa about 10 years ago. When I read the first few
pages, chillbumps jumped out on my arms, and tears blurred my eyes. I
had found someone who wrote like I longed to be able to write.
   "Rick Bragg writes like a man on fire," author Pat Conroy said, and he's right.
   Bragg's
third book in his family trilogy — "The Prince of Frogtown" —  is just
out, and I snatched it up and read it as fast as I could. It's his best
one yet.
   "The Prince of Frogtown," about the author's
father, closes the circle that was begun with "All Over but the
Shoutin'," the story of Bragg's early life, focusing on his good mother
and how her strength enabled him to break free of the cycle of poverty
and despair that imprisoned his family. In that book, he spoke with raw
bitterness of his alcoholic father. He spoke of him as a "daddy who ...
allowed the devil inside him to come grinnin' out every time a sip of
whiskey trickled in, who finally just abandoned his young wife and sons
to the pity of their kin and to the well-meaning neighbors who came
bearing boxes of throwaway clothes."
   But in this new
book, published 11 years later, the older and wiser Bragg has come to a
more complete grasp of the man his long-dead father really was.
   In
his younger years, Bragg had tried to deal with the pain he carried by
ridding himself of his father's memory. "I sawed my family tree off at
the fork, and made myself a man with half a history," he writes in "The
Prince of Frogtown."
    But that didn't work. Bragg’s
friend Willie Morris told him he would never have any peace until he
wrote about his father. “’My boy,’ he said, ‘there is not a place you
can go he will not be.’” The younger writer took his friend’s advice.
   Woven
into this story of his heartfelt search for the truth about the man who
was his father, in counterpoint, is the story of another father and son
— Bragg and the young stepson he acquired in childless mid-life, who is
teaching him elementary lessons about the relationship between a boy
and his dad. And learning to love this stepson is helping him look back
at his own father with a faltering, courageous attempt at forgiveness.
   Bragg
says he had never wanted children, and made a point never to date a
woman with children —  then found himself hopelessly in love with the
boy's mother. "By the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving
car pool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly
understand, believes I hung the moon.
   "I guess it is
natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my
father....With the weight of that new boy tugging at my clothes, I went
to find him."
   Bragg writes about his pilgrimage back in
time on his search for his father. He digs deep into his father's
family history, of the clan that came down from the Appalachian
foothills to work in the cotton mills, learning stories of the men who
drank whiskey like water and fought like wildcats and broke their
women's hearts.
    Along the way, he found a handful of
people who remembered Charles Bragg with love, who remembered the good
man inside the tortured whiskey-ravaged veteran, and were glad to share
that man with the son he had lost.
One of those people,
surprisingly, was Margaret, Bragg's angel of a mother, who he finally
realized had never stopped loving her black-haired, smiling husband, in
spite of the years of agony he put her and their boys through.
   "'I loved him,' she told me, and in all my life, I had never heard her say those words," he writes.
   After
I read the last pages of his new book, after I wiped the tears out of
my eyes, I wrote Rick Bragg a note and emailed it to his office at the
University of Alabama, where he's now teaching writing and working on
his next book.
“Thank you,” I told him, “for showing the
rest of us who dare to call ourselves writers what can be done with the
English language when the words are powered by love.”

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
May 21, 2008

Not being much of a cook anymore, it's rare
that I have a triumph in the kitchen, but I had one Saturday, and I'm
still glowing from it. I cooked up a batch of old-timey Southern
caramel icing that turned out perfect, and I was just tickled to death.
So
tickled, in fact, that I had to find my pink cell phone and call my
little sister Cissy in Alexandria, Va., because she's the only living
soul who shares a particular memory that was reigning supreme in my
mind that afternoon.
"You will not believe what I just
made!" I told her. "A batch of caramel icing that tastes JUST LIKE the
icing Miss Polly Misso used to make and put on those cakes she'd bring
to Poppy's for us when we were little!"
"YOU DID NOT!!! E-mail me the recipe right now!"
Okay, here's my Caramel Icing Story.
Back
in our hometown in Mississippi years ago was a kind lady named Miss
Polly Misso. She had been a friend of my grandmother, (also named
Polly, but called "Poppy" by her 17 grandchildren), for many years.
Miss Polly was famous for her cakes, especially her caramel cake, which
ladies would pay a pretty penny for when they were hosting a party or
holiday dinner.  Dear, sweet lady that she was, Miss Polly loved to
make her friends and their families happy by taking them a cake as an
occasional gift. When she would find out that my grandmother's far-away
Taylor children were expected for a visit, Miss Polly would get busy
caramelizing sugar and baking, so that when our travel-weary clan
arrived at our Poppy's house from Washington State or Washington, D.
C., there would be waiting, on the green sideboard in the kitchen, one
of Miss Polly Misso's masterpieces. A three-layer cake, iced with her
perfect caramel icing. Icing to DIE for. About four inches thick on the
top of the cake. Creamy and just right, with that dark, New Orleansy,
praliney-tasting caramel icing that melted in your mouth.
As
a child, I never cared for bakery white bakery-birthday-cake icing. It
was just too sickeningly sweet. Miss Polly's caramel icing had just the
right touch of richness, almost like a good cup of strong coffee, that
cut the sweetness and just made it GOOD.
Even after I was
grown and married, I can't remember ever trying my hand at Miss Polly's
icing. A caramel cake like hers seemed like an achievement that was
just way out of my reach.
As the years went by, I pretty
much stopped making anything from scratch, like good Southern cooks
always used to. No more home-made pie crust — what was the point when
those All-Ready pie crusts are almost as good? Why bother to get out
the shortening and the flour and the baking soda to make biscuits when
the frozen ones taste almost the same? The joy I used to get out of
cooking in my younger days when I was staying at home keeping house and
raising little boys had faded. An occasional batch of brownies from a
mix, or an easy Lemon Icebox Pie made with a bought graham-cracker
crust was about the extent of my pastry chef-ing.
But at
some point in the past year, I started thinking longingly about Miss
Polly Misso's caramel cake, and I even went as far as emailing my dear
old friend Janet (ozarksfarmgirl), a wonderful cook, to see if she had that recipe. She
didn't have Miss Polly's recipe, but gladly shared a similar one from
“The Mississippi Cookbook” that she had used over the years.
Saturday
afternoon seemed like the perfect time to try it. I pulled out my black
iron skillet, the one I save for cornbread (yes, I do still make
cornbread from scratch). I caramelized sugar. I cooked milk and butter
and sugar in another boiler, and added the caramel syrup. I delved back
into my childhood fudge-making days and scraped up a memory of how to
tell when candy gets to the "soft-ball" stage when you don't have a
candy thermometer. I stirred and stirred and stirred, and when I took
it off the heat and added the vanilla, I beat and beat and beat. And
after an eternity of beating, it happened. Like magic. Holding my
breath, I spread it quickly on the waiting sheet cake.
And then I reverted back to my childhood and happily licked the spoon.
Oh, my goodness. I took a beater to Doyle to taste. He grinned.
I HAD DONE IT!!!
I'd made caramel icing that tasted just like Miss Polly Misso's from long-ago.
Sweet, with just a hint of faint, rich darkness to temper the sugary goodness.
It tasted like my Poppy's house. It tasted like a happy childhood.
Yes, indeed. It tasted just like love.
•••••••
Just in case you want to try it, here's my version of the recipe:
Caramel Icing (by the way, in Mississippi, we call it “kara-mul,” not “karmel”!).
Put
3/4 cup half-and-half, one lightly beaten egg, two cups white sugar,
and a stick of butter into a heavy boiler over low heat, stirring until
butter melts.
Keep over low heat while you melt one-half
cup white sugar in an iron skillet, stirring until it is brown and
liquid. Watch it carefully, because it will burn.
Carefully
pour warm caramel syrup from skillet into mixture in boiler. Turn heat
up to medium and stir, bringing to a boil. Cook, stirring, until
mixture reaches soft-ball stage. This will take about 10  minutes.
Remove from heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Add one teaspoon
vanilla and beat, beat, beat with electric mixer until icing thickens
and loses it glossiness. Spread quickly on cake. If it gets too thick
to spread, add a little milk. Makes enough icing to frost two nine-inch
layers or one sheet cake.
_____
By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times