I Started Over at 50 From My Own Kitchen

By Amy Johnson

The first big thing I bought after my divorce was a shaved ice machine.

Not a couch. A shaved ice machine, and seven bottles of syrup in a hand-painted wooden rack on a folding table in the garage.

We lived in Alaska at the time. I know.

That summer we drove our motorhome down to Seward and parked it by the ocean. The RV was where we slept and where we worked. We had nothing else. We set up a tent. Paper lanterns. A chalkboard menu in my handwriting. My girls handed rainbow shaved ice across the counter, and on the Fourth of July the line went down the street. I remember standing there thinking, okay. Maybe we're going to be alright.

Then in late July somebody backed into the RV while we were camped. Crushed the whole back end. It couldn't be driven, so it went to a shop and stayed there. Our season ended before August did.

My brother took us in. He worked the last events with us, his family next to mine, scooping ice in the rain.

Then winter came.

Nobody wants shaved ice in Alaska in January. Nobody. It's dark by four and the snow squeaks under your boots. I had a stand I couldn't use for seven months and a house full of kids who kept wanting dinner.

So I went looking for something I could make at home. Any month. Any weather.

I found malasadas. They're a Portuguese donut that Hawaii took in a long time ago. No hole. Rolled in sugar while they're still hot. I had never made one in my life.

My first batch looked like something you'd find under the seat of a minivan. Dense. Lopsided. One of them came out gray and I still don't know why. The kids ate every single one. Teenagers will eat anything that has been in a fryer.

I kept at it. For about a year our kitchen smelled like hot oil and there was sugar in the grout. Alaska has a cottage food law that lets you sell what you make in your own kitchen, so I did. The next summer the malasadas came with us to the fairs. Fair mornings up there are cold even in July. I'd stand at the fryer in a hoodie with my hands held over the oil like it was a campfire. On the gray days when nobody wanted ice, people wanted a warm donut in a paper bag. Turned out that was most days.

This wasn't my first time starting over. A head injury had knocked me flat for a long stretch of years, and I'd climbed back out of that too. We brought our kids home from Ukraine when the oldest was already a teenager, and none of them knew the English word for spoon. So I knew how it went. You get up. Do the next small thing. Go to bed. Then you get up again.

The fryer helped, in a strange way. You can't walk off and feel sorry for yourself when there's hot oil on the stove. You have to stand there and watch it. Some mornings that was the only reason I was standing anywhere.

In June of 2020, in the middle of all of that year, we opened a little shop. People told me it was the wrong time. It probably was. We did it anyway.

Today other families make this same donut in their own home kitchens, in fifty-some towns I've mostly never been to. We call it Wiki-Licious. A lot of them started at a folding table at a fair, same as me. I think about that more than I think about the shop.

I'm 53 now. My youngest is in kindergarten. She's the one who opens the boxes for our malasadas, and she takes the job seriously.

Every summer we still go back to Alaska. My brother has a boat now, and he takes us all out on the ocean. I stand at the rail. The water is cold and gray and I love it more than I can explain.

Then we fly home. And I turn on the fryer.