When a penny was worth something

There once lived a girl with her 5 brothers and sisters. She had a sweet and happy growing up. She lived in a small town with barely 5 stop signs, two churches, two gas stations, one elementary school, three other girls her age, lots of sheep, cows, horses, fields, lots of happy relatives, and one small pharmacy.

The pharmacy shared its space with a cute little soda shop with an old fashioned counter and stools. And to the side there was a counter full of jars of penny candy, Swedish fish, sour patch kids, sour fruits, red and purple berries, and 5 cent suckers.

Sometimes the girl's mother would give her and her siblings a quarter each. They would walk up to the store, two whole hot blocks away. They would labor over the precise spending of those 25 pennies. Maybe 3 sour grapes, 5 Swedish fish, 2 sour apples, 5 red berries, one sucker, 3 sour patch kids and 2 pink sour candies, were they grapefruit? And after each pink mouth would voice its own choices, each would leave with a little brown bag full of happiness.

They'd generally cross the street to the tabernacle and sit in the shade of the towering pioneer pines and cottonwoods. And they'd eat those little morsels one by one, the order--a carefully studied routine, the last candy of great importance.

Many years later that girl saw a bag of sour patch kids in the big city store. She bought them and shared them with her sons. And she remembered.