Chocolate Dipped Ammunition

It's been over a year since I shook hands with a nice man after we'd made a deal on my purchase of his handgun and a box of mixed nine millimeter Luger. The box of ammunition was added to my ammo stash in my garage.

I forgot about it. Well, not really, but since it was a box of loose individual rounds, which I promised myself I'd sort later, it simply became lost to the business of life.

Last night I was kicked in the rear with boredom and so went out and began to dig into the mountain of my storage. I came upon the long forgotten cardboard box, glanced inside and made a snap decision to sort the rounds.

All are defensive loads, hollow points of many configurations from many different ammunition manufacturers; Smith and Wesson, Hornady, Speer, Winchester, Norma and many others. The mix included standard nine mil Luger, plus P, and plus P plus. Expensive stuff especially if purchased in today's current ammunition scare.

I went to my reloading bench and dug beneath and found several empty cartridge boxes and back inside the house set to work. About half way into the box I began to find certain individual rounds felt, well, sticky. Weird. I dug further into the box and came upon a mass of rounds stuck into a block of something gooey. This gooey mess gave a sweet smell. I pulled or should say, plucked, a few rounds and each seemed to be coated in caramel, a darkish caramel.

I went to the kitchen for a bowl and I then began to pick rounds from this mess and drop them into the bowl. The block of goo proved to be a huge chuck of candy. It had been neatly stashed or hidden some time in the past. The long Florida summer melted the candy, probably a tootsie roll, and the rest is history.

I'm positive this hidden treasure of candy was left by my Little Bit. I wasn't angry, quite the opposite, I chuckled as I mixed a small bowl of hot water and Dawn. Later, after I'd cleaned forty of fifty rounds of the gooey thick chocolate from my stash, I smiled. I could just picture the little girl as she pealed away the candy wrapper, took a quick bite and hesitate she might be caught with a before dinner snack hid the rest in Papa's old box of junk.

Lord, I miss her.

Stephen