The Dragon's Hoard

There is something inexplicably comforting about knowing that there is a bag of candy waiting for you in the refrigerator, right behind the jar of peanut butter and yesterday's leftovers.

The summer after sixth grade, my Sunday school teacher handed me a parting gift, a paper bag. In it was the most colorful, most varied assortment of candy I had ever seen. There were gummy bears, chocolate bars, raspberry-flavored candy canes, jelly beans. There was even one of those gummy ropes with rainbow-colored nerds embedded in them. I understood immediately that this bag was something to be cherished, something to be preserved and savored slowly, colorful package by colorful package. Candy was meant to be admired and gloated over, not gobbled down at once. Determined to protect my hoard, I hid the bag in the furthest corner of the refrigerator, and over the next few months, though I peeked every so often, never touched the lollipops, the jelly beans, and certainly not the nerd rope. I congratulated myself on preserving this undiminished supply of sweets, and guarded it as jealously. My uneaten candy somehow made me superior to those who had none, and I was sure my candy starved parents were waiting for the chance to make off with a gummy bear or two.While I eventually did unwrap some of my sugary store, I made sure to leave most of it untouched. It was my greatest fear that I would one day crave a Hershey's bar and realize that the paper bag was empty.

The paper bag was far from empty when I finally took it out from behind the assorted bottles and boxes that had accumulated in the refrigerator just before we moved. Just as I had shaken out the jumbled contents of my drawers to pack into cartons, I eagerly emptied my treasures onto the dining room table. Only then did I realize the consequences of my hoarding. My treasures had been polluted. Most of the candy was no longer edible--some candies had frozen into tasteless lumps and somehow merged into one misshapen mass, others had absorbed the scents of raw fish and meat and were no longer fruit-flavored. The nerd rope was gone.