The Brazilian store occupied the leftmost lower corner of a two-story strip mall. Somehow, every time we went, it was raining. Puddles in the parking lot, yellow hatch-marks of rain under every streetlamp, blue-purple clouds swollen with rain, rain drawing out the warmth of the store’s yellow lights. Paper advertisements printed in Portuguese plastered the inside of the glass windows. The only English I saw glared off the faces of prepaid phone cards.

The best part of the Brazilian store was the candy case, and the best part of the candy case was the stack of dulce de leche bars. If you’ve ever had dulce de leche – a type of caramel – you know it’s sweet. Dulce de leche bars are the result of magically solidifying dulce de leche so that it’s even sweeter – so sweet that it makes your tongue tingle, as if you’ve dipped it into thousands of tiny sugar pearls and your brain can’t handle all the sweet as the pearls roll around.

As a child, happiness was sitting in the backseat of the van, watching raindrops race each other across the window, and every now and then taking a bite of a dulce de leche bar.

[Featured Image from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license]