I remember walking home from school, crunching leaves beneath my feet, daydreaming about – candy. Fall meant Halloween and Halloween meant candy but not just any candy. Delicious Swiss chocolate made with care and precision in a chocolate factory next door to my home.
Now don't get the wrong idea. My next door neighbor was not Willy Wonka and no Oompa Loompas were involved - only a white haired lady named Dorothy. She and her husband operated a candy store that was located on Versailles Avenue but they made their chocolate on Lafayette Street.
This was a dream come true for this little girl who loved and continues her love affair with chocolate. When you have had the best chocolate money can buy within the United States – of course my frame of reference does not go farther west than Ohio or farther south than Virginia – I assume that this chocolate could hold its own worldwide.
Being that Dorothy lived next door, on Halloween I could have just gone to one house and been done, but I was not stupid. When talking about chocolate I wasn't going to turn anything down. I enjoyed a good Hershey Bar as much as the next guy and we're talking about bar size treats not these bite size rip offs from today. But going to Dorothy's was saved until last because we knew, being her neighbors, we were going to get something special.
Bags of foil wrapped chocolate, molded chocolate on a stick, samplers - yeah, we got it all. Sometimes we would need a separate bag for the goodies that Dorothy would be handing out. She was a very generous lady not just on Halloween but on all holidays.
On the days leading up to Christmas I anxiously waited for her to walk up the sidewalk, which for her was no easy task. She needed two canes to get where she wanted to go. Dorothy would have a white paper bag with handles, balanced carefully on one of the canes, weighed down with what she called ‘mistakes', but that just meant they did not meet her high standard of excellence. We could never understand why they didn't make the cut because they looked and tasted ok by us. In fact we would sample a few at time to see if we could detect the imperfections.
At Easter she would bring over her fruit and nut filled eggs, which in honesty were not my favorite, but were a delight to my mother. The Easter Bunny could not compete with Dorothy, which was probably frustrating to my mom who had to think outside the box to fill our baskets. Having anything that resembled the yummy goodness from next door would blow the bunny's cover.
My Grandma Dorothy would walk to the candy shop a few blocks away from her home each Easter to buy our gifts. Mine was a chocolate glass slipper, like that of Cinderella, filled with caramels, melt-a-ways and nut clusters. The slipper was always eaten last, once everything else was gone and I would break it off in sections. I savored the heel – the final and thickest chunk of chocolate.
Although Dorothy and her husband have been gone for decades, her chocolate lives on in a spacious store and factory in White Oak. It is refreshing to be able to walk in, smell the smell that used to envelope my swing set and buy candy that tastes the way it did when I was little.
I was disappointed this past Easter when I filled my kids' baskets with Dorothy's candies and some remained days after the holiday - wrapped and seeming unappreciated. I channeled my frustration into opening each piece and I ate $40 worth of chocolate myself. Sometimes being a grown up needs a grown up dose of sweetness and that day couldn't have tasted any better.
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