As the late holiday seasons rolled around the thought of my great grandmother’s rocky road and fudge started to fill my mind, a simple recipe that took years to perfect.

“You now know my secret, only a few do,” said Violett Salvetti, or as we call her, Nonnie. It only consisted of five ingredients, but those few simple ingredients were able to find their way into our minds and couldn’t help but make our mouths water.

The melted mixture of butter, semi-sweet chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk was the glue to hold the sweet little square of mini marshmallows and peanuts together. Now that I’ve moved, the hour drive to have a baking day with Nonnie every year is something my three sisters and I don’t take for granted.

The drive consisted of laughter and loud music and the small rain drops hitting the window, ‘cause it never really pours in California. As the drive came to an end and we made a right to turn into Nonnie’s gated community, that was full of old people who knew all of us as Vi’s Girls. We dialed the number 0-6-6 into the keypad and it started to ring.

There was a short pause before her small voice came through said “Okay,” already knowing it was us. The call box beeped and from the back seat I could see the big black gate in front of us start to open. As we drove to her condo, which wasn’t far from the gate, we could see her small body walk out of her home to greet us, slightly hunched over under an umbrella. We all groaned her name, it was something she always did when we would come over but our protests of “We will meet you inside,” or “It’s too cold,” never stopped her.

We all got out of the car and individually embraced her into a warm hug, bending down slightly because she was much shorter than all of us. As we walked into her warm home, stopping to take our shoes off so we wouldn’t drag mud inside, the familiar sound of the Italian music she was playing from her CD- player in the other room filled our ears. She pushed past us to turn it off as all of my sisters and I spread ourselves out evenly in her living room. However; we left the green and grey rocking chair empty. It was her chair, the spot on the chair where her head sat all blurred and old because of her hairspray, it was all her own.

We spent a good half an hour catching up talking about school and work until we finally started baking. The two youngest of the sisters, which was me and the 18-year-old worked on the rocky road and the two oldest, the 22 and 20-year-old worked on the fudge. Nonnie sat silently watching us from the barstool. Her kitchen could only fit so many people, sometimes one is a crowd, but we made it work, bickering and all. After making a few more desserts, such as snickerdoodles and peppermint bark we all took our seats back in the living room and made  small talk.

I was sitting closest to the slider and she had the screen door open. The ducks playing outside in the pond that brought back many memories. We used to walk around her complex with a small digital camera, a notebook and a pen. As we walked past a duck we would take a picture of it and thought of a name for them and wrote it down in our journal. I vaguely remember one duck out of many. Sparkle, we still don’t know if it was male or female, but it was black and had a bright white head. It was named Sparkle cause when it would walk in the sun it’s coat would shine like no other.

It was memories like this that brought back the good times of my childhood, the times where my sisters and I were all together, and we were content, with our Nonnie, and of course our Rocky Road.

by HALLE COVENEY