If M&M's Were Antidotes

When I was young I had a dollhouse built with care, made by the hands of my father. With soft wood that smelled sweet, the aroma of home. Roof shingles painted red and the front walls open to the world. The rooms were small and filled with furniture, carefully crafted, painted and placed. A bathtub, a bed, a kitchen table, the tiny dishes in the perfect place. The dolls were dressed in prints with flowers and colors, their faces perfectly content. Smiling always at me with ease. I would create their stories, each with their own life theme, the dreams, the hopes, the dashing realities. Hours would pass as I sat in front of these people writing their stories, every day different from the next. A young girl goes out for a walk and if I decide differently, in moments she is upstairs fast asleep instead. The beauty of the redo. The simplicities of moving from one moment to the next. I used M&M’s to supplement the things I did not have.  Green ones filled plates on the kitchen table. Everyone needs his or her vegetables; I learned that as a child. Black ones came later if everyone had been good enough for desert. Upstairs on the bedside table there were red M&Ms used for medicine to cure the sick child who was still in bed. The blue were outside in the yard; soccer balls, basketballs and toys, which I never had. Green and orange I ate slowly sucking on the chocolate candies until they melted away.

Twenty years later I sit here eating these small candies by the handful noticing the colors; blue toys, red medicine, green vegetables.  I think about the many years that have passed since I held those little wooden people. Who knew these sugar coated candies could meet so many needs. I wonder as I am eating them now what our world would be like if M&Ms were antidotes. I wonder what it would be like to hand the dying mother a red candy to take away her pain, and move her from one moment to the next, from her death bed to her child’s wedding. If only color coated sugar could really make a difference.