“Just a sugar shaker”

It stands on my dining room table. Tarnished silver-plated top, chunky heavy fluted glass below.  My grandmother’s sugar shaker, with a dusty crystalline residue of caster sugar that hasn’t been replaced since she died in 1984. Nearly 42 years since that January day, with pewter grey storm clouds and fleeting rainbows, when the impossible happened and she died.  Well, it wasn’t impossible, she was 91 years old after all.  But I just had never considered it possible that this strong woman with the sort of life force envied by much younger people could, after all, run out of energy.

I digress.  The sugar shaker.  I look at it and it makes me smile. I’m sitting with my family around the table, it’s summer, there are strawberries, and she’s reaching for the shaker and releasing a snowstorm of sugar onto the redness of the berries.  “For the crunch”, she says.  She always says it.  We laugh. Not at her, with her. She laughs her throaty uninhibited laugh.  It’s a ritual.  It’s an unscripted statement made by someone who has lived through revolution, famine, displacement and deprivation. “I’m not putting this sugar on as an indulgence”. Textural interest wins over sweetness, she’s saying.  And who are we to challenge that?

No easy superficial niceness would do for her.  The crunch of cartilage from a chicken drumstick.  The unexpected flare of outrage over some minor childish misdemeanour.  The mothball-scented enfolding hugs.  The anxious waiting for my homecoming.  The basking in family love.

The crunch of sugar.