Thank you for the candy memories Bill! Hope you will continue with the candy posts. They are a wonderful deviation from the crazy stuff we deal with daily in our lives! I love the read! What a great tribute to your grandmother also.

My grandmother kept her hard candies in a glass dish that had a top shaped like a rooster. I now have that rooster dish...but alas no hard candies. Perhaps I should go shopping...

My grandmother baked with cinnamon red hots. I ate them in lieu of the dish of candies. And drank tea. And learned to gamble playing card games like "31" for money. She even took me to the bingo hall where I won the cover-all and took home all the old people's money. A brown sack filled with dollar bills and coins totaling $284 and some change. I was the only winner of that round. And the old people were not pleased.

She would take me to the grocery store on nights I stayed over and let me pick out any tv dinner that I wanted (hey, she'd have fixed me a seven course meal but I could have home-cooking at home - only grandma let me eat the crap that was in a tv dinner!) and I could sit in her living room and eat it at a tv tray watching television. It was truly a vacation going to grandma's house. No rules. Staying up half the night watching tv all by myself with nobody telling me what I could or could not watch. Mem'rieeeeeeees...

I bet your grndmother was looking down and smiling as you tried that first one.