Fruitcake

I stuffed an extra pair of jeans, a couple of pullover shirts and some socks into my bag and set off. It was a sixteen hour “round trip” drive to my aunt’s house located in the middle of Louisiana. As I started the trip there was a slight sense of visitation obligation tugging at my conscience. Maybe this stemmed from the fact that my Aunt Vivian was the last living relative on either my father’s or mother’s side. But also my sister Diane who lives in the middle of Missouri was going to be there. This would kill the proverbial two birds and result in a net savings of some twenty hours of drive time therefore mitigating the obligatory visiting rule. So, as the miles accumulated on the odometer I began to look forward to seeing my favorite aunt and favorite sister.
After my safe arrival and somewhere during the course of our visit the topic of fruitcake came up. No one cares for fruitcake and I can understand why…that stuff you get at the store is usually very dry and almost inedible. It is a collage of unrecognizable and almost petrified fruits and nuts cemented together with a chalk-like dough. I suppose it would be more suitable for building sidewalks.
But my mother used to make a black fruitcake and it was soooooo…… good. Motivated by thoughts of mother’s cake my sister went digging through the mountain of old cook books amassed over the years by my aunt, a retired home economics teacher. “Viola”! There it was… a recipe for “black fruitcake”. A quick trip to the grocery store to gather the bizarre ingredients, a 300 degree oven, and 3 hours later…there it was…black fruitcake. In our rush to remove it from the cake mold, before it completely cooled, we degraded its structural integrity. But who’s worried about looks. We just wanted to see if it was the same recipe mother used.
Now as I remember, my mother made this before Thanksgiving and we were not allowed to partake of it until Christmas day. During this time it was treated with small amounts of bourbon on a regular basis. Of course for our experiment, due to time restrictions and a large amount of our impatience, the remainder of a bottle of “who knows what” spirits was dumped onto the irregular pile of fruit and cake.
I placed the dark brown cake into my mouth and pressed it to my palate. The taste buds on my tongue fired neurons in the brain that brought back a flood of memories, memories long forgotten. I was taken back, taken back over half a century to a time and place where I could see my mother removing the tin with its precious contents from its hiding place. She would unwrap the cotton dish towel soaked in whiskey, inspect the cake and ceremoniously pour another measure of bourbon onto the holiday treat, then she would return it to the secret storage place. No one was allowed to even touch it until Christmas day.
The memory is so vivid that I could even smell the liquor. Oh! Maybe that was my nose, not my memory…after all we used a significant quantity of that mystery rum.

I can’t help but think how blessed I am. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for such wonderful memories and the wonderful relatives to share them with. Oh! Yes! Happy Birthday too.
Amen.

Christmas 2008