The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

Forty Years of Hot Oil

I should back up and tell you what that stand was, because if you did not grow up in our town you would just see a beat-up trailer with a striped awning and a cartoon strawberry.

Grandma started frying funnel cakes at the Strawberry Festival the year my mama was in diapers. That is more than forty years. She did it to make the money that got the family through the lean stretch between planting and the first cutting of hay, back when Granddad still farmed.

By the time I was old enough to stand on a milk crate and shake the powdered sugar, the stand was not about lean stretches anymore. It was about Grandma. She knew every regular by name. She knew which ones wanted extra sugar and which ones were diabetic and only came to say hello. She kept a coffee can of dollar bills to make change and a second one, hidden, that she called the “somebody will need it” can.

The Strawberry Festival is the big weekend in our part of southern Missouri. It takes over the whole square the last weekend in May, from Friday evening through Sunday dark. There is a parade, a queen, a quilt show in the old bank building, a pie contest, and a fiddle stage that goes until the sheriff makes them quit.

And there is Hazel’s Funnel Cakes, in the same spot on the courthouse lawn, under the same oak, every single year.

A funnel cake at our festival costs six dollars. That is the price Grandma set three years ago and would not raise, even when the cost of oil about doubled on her. Six dollars, and she would hand a child one for free if the child looked at it long enough and did not ask.

That stand cleared enough across one weekend to float her property taxes and her propane for the year. I knew that because I had been helping her run it since I was sixteen, and I did the books for her the last four Februaries at her kitchen table.

So when I tell you that stand was forty years of her life, I am not being sweet about it. I am telling you a fact you could look up in a ledger.

Then came March, and the morning my mother found her on the kitchen floor with the coffee pot still dripping, and everything changed.