First: admit defeat. You will never make as good a pudding as your aunties did in Biloxi, MS for Thanksgiving when you were in sixth grade. You scooped up big globs of the stuff into your grandmother’s blue and white china and hid upstairs in the attic reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales and avoiding your mother.

Listen. The wet slap of bare feet as we hop over the creek, boulder to boulder. Suck creek is powerful but lazy, winding its way down Signal Mountain.

“Faster,” I say.