At the corner of Thompson Lane and Nolensville Road there is a Krispy Kreme. If Google Street View is to be trusted, they have torn down the old building and replaced it with one featuring beige stucco. Boo! The old sign remains, however, and that is something. This is the first Krispy Kreme I can remember going to. It was the one where we could see them really making the donuts. It was also the one that Mama and I used to stop at on the way to the airport.
We’d go there a couple of times a month to pick up my father. I’m not all together clear on how he got there at the beginning of the week, but often at week’s end we would venture over to get him. For reasons that I no longer understand (although I was absolutely certain of them as a teenager) the return of my father was always a stressful thing. Maybe he was stressed out or maybe it was the imminent collapse of my parent’s marriage that made these trips so dreadful. In any event, the trip to the airport was no fun.
So we stopped at the Krispy Kreme on the way. Mama would get coffee and I would get a Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled. Boston Creme is not the same thing, or will Chocolate Iced Glazed or Powdered Raspberry Filled do. Enough trips had me hooked on the Kreme. We’d sit there for a few minutes and have our little snack. Sort of a last moment of peace before we all got weird. I could have spent eternity eating donuts with Mama.
But of course we had to get up and go eventually, and one day Mama had to get up and go too. Between the time that we ate donuts and the time Mama went to the Summerlands, she and my father wound up splitting up. I’m proud of the lives each of them built afterwards, but Mama’s was definitely more unconventional of the two. Somewhere along the line, Mama became a witch.
Or a pagan. Or maybe a Celt. I’ve never been completely sure, and she never seemed to be too eager to define what it was she was. If it worked, she did it, including celebrating Samhain, the Celtic festival that became Halloween. It’s the time of year, she told me, when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest. It’s a good time to communicate with and honor the ancestors. That’s why every year, sometime around the end of October, I go to Krispy Kreme for a cup of coffee and a Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled. And to spend some time with Mama.
i’d say she practiced a sort of druidism, without, you know, the human sacrifice and not necessarily (though not necessarily NOT) the reincarnation. definitely the dancing around the fire in a clearing in the woods stuff, possibly clothing optional (insert omg/puke face here).
i, too, remember that krispy kreme, but my memories are from an era just a few calendar years earlier… a few calendar years that multiply like dog years into many mental eons.
Preserving mental images of donuts as I purge the naked fire dance from my consciousness.