Setting: August 2025 — A hot summer barbecue-soaked evening
Holden lives for condiments. Ranch and barbecue sauce are his crown jewels, and no chicken nugget shall pass without a proper dunk. He dips everything he possibly can into sauce: bacon, sausage, you name it. And when the food is gone? He scoops the leftover sauce straight out with his fingers and eats it just like that.
For Holden, sauce isn’t a side... it’s the main event.
McDonald's is the restaurant of choice for the boys. Anytime we go, Holden always drains his sauce stash before I’m halfway through mine, then sets his sights on my barbecue like a vulture. Twice now, he’s marched right up to the counter to ask for seconds — and both times they handed it over, no charge.
One day, luck (or so I thought) was on my side. We scored an extra barbecue, and instead of handing it off immediately, I tucked it away in my purse like contraband. My plan: keep my own sauce safe, and pass the extra to him when he inevitably ran dry.
Weeks later at home, Holden was hollering for me from the next room. I hurriedly jumped up from my bed, stepped on my purse, and immediately heard a crunch. Panic. My Kindle? My sunglasses? I unzipped the bag to find the culprit: that long-forgotten sauce, now exploded in a fiery red eruption across everything I owned. My hairbrush, my keys, the lining of the purse itself. Even my Kindle case was sticky the next morning at work.
I scrubbed, sprayed, and wiped the inside of the purse until my hands were raw, but seven washes later, the tang still lingered. I turned the purse inside out, tried again, and still, no luck. In the end, I had to toss the whole thing.
I thought that would be the end of it, a barbecue disaster contained to one ruined purse. But chaos rarely stops at one mess in this house.
While I was scrubbing barbecue sauce off my Kindle, Holden started hollering again from the bathroom, and in my rush, I dropped the toilet paper holder into the toilet. Sauce. Screaming. Soaked cardboard. It was pure pandemonium.
The purse was ruined, the toilet paper drowned, and Holden still rules with a packet in each hand. Long live the Condiment King.
This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.
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