sweet owen + life
Cousin Grace's popcorn balls Missing holiday recipe serves as a savory reminder to push forward despite challenging circumstances BY GEORGIA GREEN STAMPER
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p GEORGIA GREEN STAMPER grew up on a tobacco farm in Owen County. She will publish her third book of essays titled “Small Acreages” in spring 2022 with award-winning independent publisher Shadelandhouse Modern Press, of Lexington, Kentucky.
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sweetowenmag.com + winter 2021
n my wispy, earliest memories, I am staring at bubble lights, red, yellow, green, blue, bounce magically around Cousin Grace’s Christmas tree. The scent of the fresh-cut cedar merges with a sweet, spicy aroma drifting from her kitchen, and I grasp in my childish way that this fragrance somehow is Christmas. Cousin Grace and my mother call for me, then, to come to them through the wide opening that connects her small living room to her equally small, yet oh-so-pretty, dining room. There, treats parade across the top of her high, mahogany sideboard: a white-frosted cake perched on a pink glass pedestal; chunks of fudge nestled inside a clear, sparkling dish with a lid; and fancy-looking homemade cookies and treats piled on a big, black, metal tray edged in painted flowers. Bedazzled, I stand silent, waiting. “What would you like, Georgia-Dexter?” Cousin Grace asks. She uses both my names in our Kentucky-way and holds the large tray low in front of me so that I can choose. I reach first – always – for one of the red and green popcorn balls piled in a pyramid in the center. And so, in December 2020, after “the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” year of COVID-19 that we had lived through, I became obsessed with re-creating Cousin Grace’s magnificent popcorn balls. I knew that her legendary baking skills were beyond my reach, but perhaps I could stir up the equal of her popcorn balls. If I could – well, I irrationally fantasized that I could “save Christmas” – for my family. For myself. That somehow innocence would be restored, and the earth would once again circle the sun without wobbling. But I didn’t have her recipe. I hadn’t even eaten a homemade popcorn ball in 50 years. Oh, I found a thousand versions online, but what does a com-
