I spy the jar of honey behind the rolled oats and golden syrup, pressed up against the back of the cupboard as I’m pulling out and dusting off expired cans of corn kernels and baby carrots. An aged and faded sticker covers the molten-gold inside: Beec wor h H ney, the border decorated with a faded wreath of flowers and bees.
It looks unopened.
On hot summer mornings, my grandmother used to give us Weet-bix with milk for breakfast, honey drizzled in long fat lines along the quickly-dampening biscuits, a light dash of cinnamon on top being the final touch. Gooey honey would cling to the grooves of the spoon she drizzled it with, the last fat drops refusing to fall. Grandma would give in, calling:
‘Who wants the honey spoon?’
It meant that breakfast was ready, it promised the first child that appeared the sweet tang of the spoon on their tongue, and it sent my sister and me scrambling hand over foot to the beige-tiled kitchen. She was older, and I’d watch the spoon sink into her mouth and make staccato clinks on her teeth when the thick, insulating sweetness had dissolved.
The spoon was curved, the stem that linked the head to the handle twisted this way and that like a winding river, forming the letter ‘S’. The head was shallow and perfectly circular, not oval- shaped like most spoons. Grandma called it ‘Just the thing for honey’.
Her mind passed away before she did. Once fluid thoughts that raced a mile a minute were slowly weighed down, sticky and confused. Things went missing, slowly yet surely. Pearl earrings, house keys, the honey spoon. One afternoon dedicated to walking the streets, trying to find the car she’d parked.
And then she was gone too, her sweetness dissolved into oblivion.
I google it, honey doesn’t expire. The cans go into the bin, and I drop everything else off at the Salvos around the corner on my way home.
I want to taste it again: the school holidays, the beige kitchen. I twist the lid and realise I was wrong. It had been opened, possibly only once, by someone who wouldn’t have remembered doing so. And inside, the whole handle sunk deep, is a spoon with a stem in the shape of an ‘S’.
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