Right down the street from my home church is the spot where my great-grandmother’s house once stood.  I loved that house.  Every Sunday after church, my dad and I would go and get animal crackers and gumdrops from her.  I would always bite the heads off the crackers and give the bodies to my dad.  For some reason, I never ate the bodies. 

The animal crackers were great, but my favorite part was always the candy jar sitting on the counter.  Overlaid with near see-through prints of some of her favorite spots in New Orleans, the town where she grew up.  My grandmother, her daughter, inherited it when she died.  Since I was five, I always begged her for it.  Put me in your will, I said.  Leave me the candy jar.

She would chuckle, and say, it’s yours, of course.  I never believed it would happen.  I thought that she would keep it forever, and I wouldn’t get it until maybe even my dad died.   Then it happened.

I reached into the box that I had just unwrapped and felt something.  It was round and covered in bubble wrap.  I didn’t believe.  I didn’t want to believe.  I didn’t want to believe and then get crushed once again.  I refused to let myself hope as I tore away the bubble wrap…

It was truly there!  The candy jar felt so right in my hands like it belonged there all along.  As I traced the designs of the overlay, I couldn’t help but smile.  It’s perfect, I said.  I wanted to cry. 

We may have sold a lot of her things.  Her childhood home, her clothes, her house.  But this candy jar is mine- and it is most definitely not for sale.