Spain is known for its brilliant cuisine, the healthy Mediterranean diet, the art of the “El Buli”-style restaurants, the glory of the seafood from Galicia, Austurias, and the Basque country….

Neglected, but equally impressive, is Spanish gummi candy.

When I had been dating my boyfriend long enough that we were still the epitome of charm in one another’s eyes, but not quite long enough that quirks had become intolerable, we were walking over to his parent’s house for Sunday lunch. His parents and I were still new to each other and I was nervous. I paused to visit a street vendor who sold gummi candy.

“Hi Carmela, how’re things?”

“Good, good, what’ll it be today, child?” My boyfriend watched and waited until I finished buying a few peach gummi hearts.

“You still eat those candies? They’re for children.”

“I LOVE these gummis – there are none better in the world. I know. I eat a lot of candy. Want one?”

“No thanks, we’re about to have lunch at my parents’….”

“Yeah, I know….” My teeth were loving the abrasive sugar against their enamel, the contrast from the rough sugar-coating to the tender jelly of the center of the gummi.

A few blocks later we passed a candy shop.  My boyfriend tugged my hand and entered the shop.

 “Here, I will show you how to get rid of that habit.”

I swear the shop was made of sugar.

“Now, choose a kilo of gummi candy.”

I shrugged and took one of the plastic bags and started to fill: peach hearts (of course), licorice bricks filled with cream and covered with “pica pica” (a tart coating), gummi brains, gummi strawberries, pink marshmallows, gummi soda bottles. And I paused, I admit it, I had never bought more than a modest bag of candy, now I was cramming gummis into the bag.

“That should do….”

“That’s only about half a kilo. Get more.”

Twist my arm. Gummi fried eggs, gummi green apples, red licorice tubes filled with cream and coated in pica pica, gummi sharks, gummi feet, gummi hands. One kilo.

“Now if you eat those all during the week, you will never eat them again.”

As we left the store, I undid the plastic bag’s knot and popped gummi after gummi into my mouth, grateful for the pica pica that broke the sweetness. By the time we had walked past the Retiro, I had eaten half the bag. My boyfriend fretted that I would get ill.

“Clearly you don’t know me.”

By the time we were going up the elevator I had put the last peach heart in my mouth and was swallowing it when we got to his parents’ flat.

We had a lovely lunch. We had coffee after lunch and my future father-in-law asked,

“Would you like sugar?”

“No, thank you.” I replied primly, my hands trembling.

My boyfriend was now watching me with open admiration.  He asked to walk me home, back through the Retiro park, across the Castellano, up towards the Plaza de las Salesas….

“Do you think you might feel like having a beer at the Irish pub…?”

“Sure,” I said gamely. My gut cringed but accepted the pint like a champ.

We hung out for about an hour and then continued toward my flat. We were almost there when I saw Carmela’s candy stand.

“Hold on a second….Hi Carmela! May I have two of those peach hearts?”

“¡Hija! Only two?! What, aren’t you feeling well?”

“I had a big lunch.” I patted my stomach, smiled lovingly at my boyfriend, and handed him one of the peach hearts. “Here, you have my heart.  Eat this one and never try to break me of a bad habit.”
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​I like that the plants in my yard look like they all belong there, even though most of them have been contributions.

I have day lilies in my front yard; they are a bright inheritance in orange and crimson. They came from my parents’ garden and story goes that my mom’s dad dug up the original lilies from his mother-in-law’s yard.

When my husband and I bought this house, my mom appeared with a shovel and some lilies. She dug a hole and stuck them in.

“Just water them. They’ll keep coming back…and they’ll spread, too!”

I also have hostas. My friend pulled up some hostas from her yard and planted them in mine on the Mother’s Day when I had had wrist surgery.

“You need something to fill along the fence. These did so well in my yard, they will in yours, too!”

And now, I have a lilac bush from yet another friend. We stuck a two-foot high sapling in the ground last spring before she moved out of state.

“I don’t know if this sucker will take, but if you don’t try, you’ll never know….”

Now that little lilac is five-feet tall and blooming bold purple buds.
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My father was a man of science. Sometimes, I thought he had had such a large family on purpose: he knew he was going to run experiments on the eight of us, his children.

When we turned sixteen there were no Sweet Sixteen Parties.  Instead, we got a battery of psychological, personality, and potential career tests at a local university.

When I was little, I thought this was very amusing, my older siblings being driven off on a Saturday to take tests. I had all the worries of the youngest child: none.

When I was fourteen, it wasn’t so funny. At fifteen, I waited for my sister who is a year older than I am to hear all about the tests. I leaned against the door jam of her room.

“How was it? Here, have some M & Ms….tests sucked, right?”

“Pretty usual stuff…. ‘What would you do?’ ‘How would you feel if…?’ stuff.  There was a math section….”

We both rolled our eyes. We didn’t do math.

“There’s writing sections, too. Typical test stuff…Oh, but there are these drawings and you have to write stories about them.”

“Stupid sounding,” I said sagely.

“Yeah, well watch out, I got one of this couple arguing and there is a gun on the living room table. I made my story a mystery….”

My sister had always been a big fan of the mysterious, she went on, “Don’t mention ‘there’s a gun on the table.’”

“Why not?”

“They’ll say your homicidal or something…just don’t. You’ll never get the same set of drawings I got anyway, so don’t worry.”

My sixteenth birthday rolled around and I was driven off to be tested. I wasn’t worried. Testing never bothered me because I have always had a solid “do my best and who cares” attitude.

I answered the questions, filled in the circles too carefully when I really didn’t know an answer and too quickly when I had the answer before I could finish reading. There was an ink blot test and then the writing about the drawings.

There was the drawing, just like my sister had warned: a woman sitting on a sofa, a man behind her. They were arguing. There was a coffee table in the foreground. On the coffee table was a newspaper and a gun, a gun kind of in the shadow of the newspaper.

I wrote a story about the couple arguing over what movie they were going to see. Dilemma: how were they going to decide with the movie section of the paper missing?

I liked the story well-enough.

Apparently the testers did not.

“Your daughter has a Pollyanna outlook on life. Although she would make a fine dentist, respirational therapist, or technical writer, we feel that her positivity and blind eye to reality might be a hindrance in the future.”
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Free-range parenting? My mom invented it. There is a big Lilac Festival in town every spring. It has always been quite an event. Mama would walk around with the older children. We younger ones would roll down hills under purple and white lilacs, breathing grass, flowers, and a hint of freedom.

Mama let us wander. I remember dizzily getting up from a good roll and not seeing anyone I knew and the world suddenly stopping spinning, as everything became too still. I ran toward a crowd of people who were listening to a band.

I was little enough to be waist-high to most adults.

I saw a striped Lacoste polo dress. Mama! Security and peace as I slid my hand into hers, horror and dismay as I turned the smooth and straight-fingered hand in mine and looked up into a face that was not my mother’s.

Then a familiar, “Mary! Over here!”

Mama came up behind me.  She had watched my mistake, letting me become aware of my place in the world, and her cool crooked fingers closed around my hand.
​

Mama always said, “Be nice to everyone: you never know when they’ll pop back up in your life.”

She usually said this in heavy tones, we all knew the person who kept popping up in mama’s life, she had told each of us, her eight children, the story many times.

Mama did her nurse’s training in northern Maine in the early 1940s. She was a young woman, full of life and mischief, a mix of Barbara Stanwyck and Carole Lombard, a beautiful spitfire.

When the first week of the course was over, Mama was itching for the weekend, but first the nurses’ quarters had to be cleaned and inspected. They were in a drafty two-story building with wide pine-board floors, and the beds were lined up on either side of the large, open room. Mama stood with her fellow nurses. Four of them had mops, and all of them were looking at the still unused tin pail full of hot soapy water. They were on the second floor, and they could hear the first floor inspection starting below them.

“We’re done for!  We haven’t even washed the floor….” said one nurse.

“Don’t worry, this is a quick way to clean….” Mama picked up the pail, “I’ll throw the water and you four start mopping. We’ll be done before you know it.”

And she heaved the bucket out and away from her tiny frame, grabbed a cloth, and started to mop at the floor. Not a one of the rookie nurses was fast enough to keep the water from draining through the cracks between the boards and onto their first floor companions - and onto the head nurse. 

This head nurse was a nun, “a real Tartar,” as my mother would say, “the worst kind: a nun with no sense of humor”.

Well, Sister Mary Edmunds, the Tartar nun, came storming up to the second floor, gray water dripping off her wimple and on to her cheek, “What has happened here?”

The four nurses with mops tried to hide them behind their backs; mama sat back on her heels, twisted her palms to the ceiling, and confessed.

“My idea, Sister. I did it to get us out of this place and home for the weekend. I hadn’t realized that the cracks were so big….”

“Alice…that’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Ma’am.”

“Well, Alice, thank you for telling me. Now none of you on this floor will be off for the weekend. You can all help with some cleaning in the hospital.”

Mama would pause after rolling her eyes, and assure us that cleaning a floor with a toothbrush was not a punishment reserved for the military and that if any of us would like to try it she would provide a brush.

In life, a worthy opponent is a rare find, and mama had found one in this nun.

Sister Mary Edmunds liked to lurk and find any nurse who tried to sneak out of the building. So once, Mama unscrewed the one light bulb in the second floor hallway and covered the floor in marbles. That night, Sister Mary Edmunds walked up the wooden stairs to make sure all the nurses were accounted for, and she was promptly taken by the field of marbles.

We never heard what the punishment for that was – but we knew the pranks continued. 
Since mama was wily, she soon learned how to pull off a stunt, leaving absolutely no way to trace it back to her. Sister Mary Edmunds could be heard muttering, “A-lice”, yes, like “a lice”, whenever she saw a crooked painting or whenever she would find things ever-so-slightly out of place in her office. She knew her adversary had been there but she could never prove it.

My mom did graduate from nurses’ training, in spite of having almost weekly run-ins with Sister Mary Edmunds.

At the start of World War II Mama enlisted in the army. She served in the European theater, where she met and married my father. After the War, my parents moved to Rochester, Minnesota, and my father was at the Mayo Clinic for a few years.  Then my parents decided to move to Rochester, New York, assuming that the weather would surely be better. My father was hired by St. Mary’s Hospital and his kindness, brilliance, and movie star good looks made him well-known in a very short time.

St. Mary’s used to hold an annual fundraiser called The Seton Ball. For their first Seton Ball, my mother was stunning in a simple long black sheath and a knot of coral beads tied around her neck. My father beamed at her as he introduced her to the liaison between the hospital and the religious staff.

“Sister Mary Edmunds, I would like you to meet my wife….”

“Alice!” Sister Mary Edmunds grimaced and hissed lightly.

My mother held out her neat little hand, “So nice to see you again, Sister!”

Sister looked at my mother’s palm to see if there was a buzzer in it before shaking it; no need to bother the good doctor….

A waltz started and my parents danced off, but not before my mother heard the nun mutter to one of her colleagues, “How did a saint like that Dr. B. get mixed up with a devil like that Alice?!”

At this point our mom would stop and shake her finger, “So you [and this was directed at whichever one of us eight that had made an unkind comment about someone and needed a reminder], you be careful about how you treat people, because you never know…..”

Decades later, my sister, who is a year older than I am, got her first job teaching at a Catholic school. My sister was excited about setting up her first classroom and was carrying in a box of posters, books, and papers when she was stopped by the principal, Sister Borromeo, “Someone would like to meet you….”

My sister followed the nun down the hall toward the main offices and there sat the tiniest of nuns. She stood as my sister came into the office, barely reaching my sister’s shoulder. Her handshake, though, was a titanium grip.

“I am Sister Mary Edmund, I had to meet you. You see, your mother and I go way back….”
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So, the next time you feel like being particularly nasty to someone, please remember my mother.