And I would chronically ignore it. He had had to learn his lessons the hard way, his childhood marred by a severely diabetic mother ignorant to her dietary constraints and a father unremarkably worldly and confined to their home due to his wife’s relentless id.

Every year since his sixth yielded marked weight loss for his mother, with knives and needles harvesting her numb, gangrenous limbs at regular intervals. Her mind had lapsed due to neuropathic complications, so, by the time he had barely seen what it meant to live, the doctors had taken from her everything but her torso, her family, the bag that disposed of her waste, and her ever shrieking mouth. The pallbearers said it was the lightest casket they had ever had to lift.

Often I wondered who had enabled her eating habits, whether it was saccharine poison with intent. But my father speaks on this with little detail and my grandfather’s senility or guilt had buried the information by the time I had needed to ask for it. In the end, there are only the experiences we keep and pass forward, like recipes!

Get your sweet tooth ready because the recipe calls for two cups of powdered sugar, three eggs, and a whole loaf of white bread!