One of the most useful skills ever perfected in the Taylor house in Higley was how to carry off a successful raid of the pantry without alerting the parents. A successful raid could mean a stash of snacks to satisfy an entire week of late night munchies. Even more, it meant bargaining power with the other siblings. But with power came danger. Once your secret was out, the others had a bargaining chip that had to be quickly countered by equally condemning blackmail, otherwise you were sure to be thrown under the proverbial bus at any moment.
Despite the risks associated with carrying of a raid, the lure finally became too great when SAMs club opened in Gilbert and mom started buying lunch snacks in bulk. Once the boxes of snickers and crunch bars, fruit rollups, and CapriSun juice packets passed the threshold of the house, each of our hands began slinking its way towards the pantry door. Mom and Dad must have noticed that an invisible tractor beam in the pantry had been turned on because a hook and eye latch was installed at about 7 feet above the ground in short order. With most of us too short to reach the latch, we had to wait until we could catch the door unlocked. We sat salivating in our rooms.
Of course we dragged chairs from the kitchen table and stacked overturned trash bins on top of the chairs to reach the last few crucial inches. As soon as the latch had been compromised, a swarm of boys would soon be at the pantry door. Without bothering to ensure that the coast was clear we would tear into whatever high-calorie, sugary snack was most consumable at the moment. Usually we would try not to stare into another's eyes as we stood there munching on chocolate bars as the sugar-deprivation shakes subsided. Mom was soon aware of our secretive activities. Several times she caught us red handed as we just stood there munching while chocolate melted in our mouths and our hands. We were moths drawn to the flame with no hope of escape!
Necessity (aka our collective bottomless stomachs) was the mother of our invention, and the objects of our pantry raids became more varied. Some of the new pilfered items were not so noticeable. I remember one day catching Jon tucking a tupperware container back into a cupboard on his headboard. Waiting until he had left his room I went in to investigate. What I found was a chocolate pudding or cake mix that had been emptied into the tupperware and a chocolate encrusted spoon for shoveling. From the looks of it, the cake mix had probably lasted a full week and it was less than half gone, probably on account of the lack of fresh milk in the basement.
After a while, the novelty of raiding the pantry wore off. Looking back it seemed to coincide with when Mom threw in the towel and discontinued chocolate bars and the other snacks from her weekly grocery supply runs. And eventually even the latch didn't slow us down when we became tall enough to reach it without the aid of a chair. However, there would still be times when two or three of us would crowd the walk-in pantry and stare longingly at the empty shelves where the treats had been while we munched on what was available. "Sure miss those snickers," Quinn would say as he crunched some raw spaghetti noodles over an over. "Yeah, me too," I'd mutter while carelessly letting some uncooked cracked wheat drop to the floor. "I loved the frosting on those Hostess cupcakes." Suddenly, Jon's eyes would perk up and he'd dash past us out of the pantry and head down the stairs. Quinn and I would glance knowingly at each other. We'd count to five and then slink off after John. Blackmail was out at this point but we still harbored hopes of catching him uncovering a stash of forgotten good.
