Spoonfuls

There is a golden hour in memory where sweetness congeals like the perfect custard: smooth and full of possibility, a landscape of childhood mapped in creamy contours. My sister and I would sit with Granny at the worn, square, over-oiled oak table, spoons poised like delicate instruments, ready to excavate the sugary landscape before us.

Custard is not just a food but a living memory: a tender topology of love spooned out between whispered stories and soft-spoken possibilities. Its surface… a slightly caramelised sugar shell…would crack beneath my spoon like a delicate archaeological find, revealing layers of pure, silken comfort beneath.

"Grace," Granny would say, her hands folded like well-worn, riven origami, "is sometimes found in the simplest of things." And there it was, right before us: grace incarnate in a chipped ceramic bowl.

The texture was everything. Not quite liquid, not quite solid… a seemingly miraculous in-between state that seemed to echo the liminal spaces of childhood itself. Each spoonful was a small miracle of transformation, a gentleness that spoke of comfort, of home.

Nutritionally, custard was our communion. Eggs rich with protein, milk full of calcium, a hint of vanilla like a whispered prayer: this was sustenance that fed more than just the body. It nourished memory and cultivated connection. My sister would giggle, custard catching at the corner of her mouth, and I would remember that food is never just food. It is a story. It is love made edible.

We would linger at that table, time expanding like the custard itself. Granny's stories would weave around us: tales of resilience, of quiet miracles, of love that persists despite everything. The sugar would crackle beneath our spoons, a percussive accompaniment to her narratives and her generous, consistent invitation for us to remember and recall all the unnecessary detail of the day at school.

Sometimes we'd talk. Sometimes we'd sit in companionable silence. The custard was our anchor and our shared language, a golden dialect of care that needs no translation.

"Memories are persistent things," I would later read from one of my favourite writers. "They live in the heart like gentle ghosts, feeding us when we most need sustenance." And wasn't this custard precisely that? A ghostly comfort and a sweet remembrance of tenderness.

The surface changed, as all things do. What began as unbroken gold became a landscape of tiny craters and valleys, evidence of our quiet devotion. We were explorers of sweetness, spoon in hand, tracing memories with the reverence of pilgrims charting holy ground.

It is a strange and beautiful thing how the ordinary, so often overlooked, can break open to reveal something luminous. A simple dessert becomes a revelation, a taste of something beyond us. Our spoons scraped the bottom of the bowl, collecting every last remnant of sweetness, every last echo of love. Nothing was to be wasted… not the custard, not the moment, not the presence of grace that lingered in the air between us.

And in the years to come, when nostalgia pressed its gentle weight upon my heart, I would close my eyes and taste it again: the custard, yes, but more than that. The mercy of memory. The kindness of time. The unshakeable truth that love, once given, is never lost.

The kingdom of heaven, I suspect, is something like a perfect custard… where sweetness and substance meet, where the raw and humble stuff of our lives is gathered up, broken, stirred, and somehow made into something that melts on the tongue like grace.

A spoonful, and we close our eyes… not just because it tastes good, but because something deeper stirs. A memory. A longing. The quiet assurance that we are held, nourished, known. And in that moment, despite the fractures and failings, despite all evidence to the contrary, our hearts whisper the only prayer that really matters: ‘Abba, I belong to you…’

Custard… more than a dessert. A sacrament of tenderness. A prayer in the language of the beloved. A love letter written in sugar and milk and time, bearing the signature of a God who delights in feeding His children.