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Spiced Nuts


by Gary Hardaway


I don't know where the recipe
began. The flavor, though,
harkens back to Christmases

far back, before marriages
and children. Before
the complications of adulthood

and independence. Before
the sorrows of Alzheimer's
and death. There are lines

across time, beyond the tug
of elections and fashion,
beyond the turbulence of history

and whatever zeitgeist
prowls the season.  So it is
that the recipe in the hands

of one competent, but not
the mother, resonates through
the fog and mystery of time

to capture something lost
and found again through
the grace of recipes and ovens.
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