Sissy invited me to a Labor Day barbecue and I invited her to my cookie party. We were beginning to blend our lives. Our co-grandma relationship will last regardless of the vagaries of the years on Tara and Special Intent. The baby will certainly receive lots of family love. Sissy’s face is wreathed with smiles and the candlelight catches her jewel-red studs. We both now know about friendship and love in our two different worlds as we execute the dance of getting to know each other.

Now Sissy says, “You know, I wasn’t so sure ’bout this cookie bitches stuff, but you …” She nods at me and then stops, as though she’s decided not to say what popped in her mind. “Well, I’m glad our little bit of genes is mixed together for infinity.”

Sissy’s words remind me of my grandmother. She held me on her lap and explained about the first woman who walked the earth. People everywhere in the world are from her, that long-ago evolutionary Eve who fed and protected her offspring and secured our existence. And my children and their children will continue with what I’ve given them from my body and given them from my soul. That was my grandma’s view of the meaning and purpose of sex and reproduction. Now it’s as though Sissy with her talk of the infinity had eavesdropped on that conversation. Perhaps bridging past and future is the theme of grandparenthood. Straddling. Yes. That’s the word.

SUGAR

Sugar used to be as expensive as gold. Slave labor in the Caribbean islands permitted the production of sugar to be cheap enough for ordinary use. We love sugar. Its sweetness provides a burst of energy now common in drinks, candy, and desserts. But we don’t take it for granted because we know, by the time we’re in middle school, that too much makes us fat and gives us cavities. Excessive consumption is also correlated with type 2 diabetes. So sugar has a dark side—the historical toll it has taken on the workers who produced it and the toll it takes from those of us who over-consume it.

Sugarcane grows in tropical climates and was originally from south Asia and southeast Asia. Ancient humans sucked on the cane to extract the sweet flavor. The juice was first turned into sugar in India about seventeen hundred years ago. Muslims refined the production. Alexander the Great sent some to Europe from India. The 1390s saw the development of a better press, which doubled the juice obtained from the cane. Sugar plantations expanded to the Canary Islands and then the Portuguese brought sugar to Brazil. Columbus procured cane for the Caribbean and it soon became the chief crop, making the Caribbean the largest producer of sugarcane. Slave labor made cheap sugar possible, and by the eighteenth century, all levels of society consumed the former luxury product.