'Groaning, it’d nearly give up the ghost when we’d complicate things, adding a dusty cloud of confectioners’ sugar and chewy chopped dates.'
My grandmother would start tallying—friends, neighbors, relatives. And always on the list, her fellow amateur tap dance troupe members, whom I always suspected got more peanut butter balls than any of the rest of us .
And there I'd find myself, sometime around the winter solstice, standing in Grandma Ruth’s cramped, harvest-gold kitchen with a choose-your-own-relative , spooning crunchy peanut butter into the bowl of an ancient Sunbeam mixer. Flimsy, tired beaters would slog their way through the generic-brand peanut butter. Groaning, it’d nearly give up the ghost when we’d complicate things, adding a dusty cloud of confectioners’ sugar and chewy chopped dates.
Groaning, it’d nearly give up the ghost when we’d complicate things, adding a dusty cloud of confectioners’ sugar and chewy chopped dates. I couldn’t imagine not giving gifts to our family, though, so as the due date approached, I focused my nesting instincts on homemade Christmas gifts. I’d make up for volume with something little and powerful, something heart-piercingly meaningful. It would be our first Christmas without Grandma Ruth, and I was determined to give out little bags of real-deal Grandma Ruth peanut butter balls. Someone had to do it—the idea of a Christmas without peanut butter balls was indigestible.
Hindsight allows me to see who the fool in this scenario really was, of course. As I tried to resurrect her recipe—piecing together fragments of memory and digging around the dusty corners of the internet—I was filled with doubt. I googled “chocolate coating paraffin sub” and “paraffin wax safe to eat,” terrified that it might be sacrilege to leave the paraffin out. I was humbled, finally. A little late .
By the time I came into the world, she was in her 70s, and beginning to succumb to a subtle, lightly masked bitterness. She spent a lot of time in her own head. She liked to read, to stay up late, and to have a third glass of chardonnay. She sent me cards for every holiday—including Thanksgiving and Halloween—when I was in college, inscribed only with my name and “Gram Ruth” that primarily served to confuse me.
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