Amy and Grandfather Sanners Honey Suckle Candy

Amy clutched the worn, faded photograph, the edges softened by years of handling. Her grandfather, Raymond Sanner. The man she’d met only once, a fleeting, hazy memory from her earliest infancy. She’d been twenty two months old, a baby barely aware of the world, when her mother, with a desperate urgency, had flown them from the bustling, sun-drenched city of Izmir, Turkey, to Erie, Pennsylvania. The purpose of their journey was stark and heavy: to see her dying grandfather. The details of that brief visit were a ghost in her mind, a wisp of sensation rather than a clear image. Yet, one sensory fragment remained, sharp and sweet as if it had happened yesterday. The sticky, floral perfume of honeysuckle candy, a small, delicate confection pressed into her infant palm by her grandfather’s hand. Within weeks of their return to Turkey, Raymond Sanner had passed away, leaving Amy with a single, poignant taste of his presence. Now, standing on the precipice of this inexplicable encounter, the memory of that honeysuckle candy felt like a key, a faint echo resonating with the spectral sweetness offered by the figures in the vanished store. It was a connection, however tenuous, to a past she barely knew, a past that seemed to be reaching out to her across decades, across worlds, through the shared language of a simple, sugary treat. That memory has stayed with Me forever.... Grandfather stayed alive long enough to meet Me.