Let's talk about pickles. It was rumored around the neighborhood that Grandma Nelda O'brien made the best home made sweet pickles in the entire world, but being a dill pickle connoisseur I was at first a reluctant doubting Thomas. (I always hate to use his name because it seems unfair to have your name forever linked with something like doubt), but like Thomas I became a true convert and can bear testimony that her sweet pickles were simply divine, and I wanted to learn how to make them.
   "Start with the finest baby pickling cukes," she said and told us about a Japanese man who sold them out of a warehouse on Saturdays. Wynn, who was eager for his wife to learn all of the culinary arts as quickly as possible, offered to go purchase the cukes. I was about to learn something I didn't know about Wynn. (Newly weds are always discovering unique quirks about their spouses.) When something is a good deal, he goes overboard. He came home with what must have been two bushels of the most darling prickly baby cucumbers I'd ever seen.  "I've got the cukes," I announced to Nelda over the phone. "What's the next step?" "Cover them with brine water immediately," she said, "and in a couple of days you will add the vinegar and then the sugar a little bit at a time over the next two weeks." "I can't just dump all the sugar in at once?" I asked. "Oh no, no, no," she said. "They would shrivel up."
    The cucumbers were in boxes. I didn't have any buckets. I didn't have any money to buy buckets. I didn't have any room for pickles to sit around in the kitchen for two weeks. I guess these are things I should have researched first before I had 2 bushels of the finest baby cucumbers staring me in the face.
   Wynn and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and filled up the bathtub, adding "enough salt to float an egg." Those little babies were so cute floating around in our tub in their salty bath, but you will be relieved to know that by the end of their second day in the tub, and our second day out of the tub, we had rounded up some buckets and put the pickles down in the scary cellar where I dutifully daily scraped off some sickening scum and added cupful after cupful after cupful of sugar for the next two weeks. That was the first and the last time I ever made sweet pickles. Forty years ago and pickle-making is a lost art I never intend to resurrect. Vlassic and Nalleys hold a special place in my heart, but Nelda O'brien and cucumbers are a fine golden ray of light in my Mink Creek kind of day.