Micro Monday - December 9, 2024
Family Recipe
Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly microfiction, which is four hours late and sixty words longer than usual.
Family Recipe
At seventeen, I’m barely old enough to stir my grandmother’s eggnog, let alone drink it. “They tease me about it every year,” she confesses, “but I always make it the same way.”
A cup of bourbon for each husband - two buried, one divorced. Half a cup of cognac for every kid she put through college, “and half a cup of dark rum, for your uncle.”
She sets it on the table, and my Aunt Kate leads with the first joke: “I’m surprised the ladle doesn’t melt.” They all chime in, this in-between generation that never quite separates me from her. No one thanks her for making it, for making sure it tastes exactly the same in every home.
I pour myself a cup, happy to be the one to break this tradition, giddy at the wide-eyed disbelief on everyone’s face.
“Tastes good to me,” I say. It’s a lie, but it makes the room a little warmer just to say it.
Sweet.