Today I Want To Eat At My Grandma’s Table

Think ~ Write ~ Thursday

Linking up with Carole ~

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 Remember the times when we would pull around the bend in the drive and come to a stop in front of the garage? We’d tumble eagerly out of the car and head for the door, knowing we’d be greeted with delicious smells and warm hellos and smiles and hugs.

I’m thinking about my Grandma and her house and I’m thinking about the delicious meals she cooked and I’m thinking about gathering around her table.

And today, I just want to go to her house and slip onto the wooden bench at her table and listen to the voices and feel the hustle bustle as the dishes of food are placed on the table and cousins and aunts and my parents and my siblings and my children gather around the table.

I hear the water running over in the corner as my sister fills a pitcher with water. I sniff. The aroma of Grandma’s meal is delicious.

Grandpa’s words rise as he begins his prayer, “Kind merciful Father in heaven…”

I want to eat the creamed lima beans she would fix. Mine just aren’t the same. I want to dig my fork into her spinach salad, awash with homemade dressing using bacon drippings from the bacon in the salad. I want to savor the tang and salty on my tongue. She really didn’t have a recipe for the salad, so I can only try to imitate, but I doubt it matters. Even with a recipe mine wouldn’t compare to hers.

I want to eat hot dogs. The ones she’d take and make a slit in and fill the slit with cheese and then place them under the broiler.

We loved it when she’d buy Pillsbury Grands biscuits and pop open the cans and bake them. Somehow, even these were better when Grandma made them.

Butterscotch pie and sugar cookies. I have her sugar cookie recipe, but mine don’t turn out the same. Hers were so much better. Kept tucked into an old metal tin, layered, buttery soft and pillowy.

We’d laugh as she’d work at last-minute meal prep and remark, “I don’t know if this will be fit to eat.” It always was. Never was it not “fit to eat.”

Some days my mother would be at Grandma’s after school and we’d go there instead of home. She’d have iced long john doughnuts waiting for us and we’d gobble them and lick the icing off our fingers. They came from a local grocery that quite possibly bakes the best apple fritters and long johns in the world.

Tapioca. She often made tapioca and I don’t know if there was any grandchild who didn’t like it. Minute tapioca with whipping cream, whipped, and mixed in along with sliced bananas.

I want to dip out of the bowl of mashed potatoes with butter melting and running down in rivulets and all around the edges.

Steaming stew in our bowls and glasses of milk to drink.

No escargot. {Thank heavens!} 😉 No fancy chef-ness. Pretty much down-home cooking and simple living. Homey. Wonderful.

I want to walk into the potato storage building on my Grandpa’s farm and get a 16-ounce bottle of icy cold Pepsi. Those wonderful tall glass bottles that you had to open with the built-in bottle opener on the machine. Nothing tasted quite so good.

Every year at Christmas, Grandpa would buy a huge slab of solid chocolate. He’d break it into chunks and pieces. I delighted in going and choosing a chunk of chocolate and biting into it and tasting the sweet deliciousness as it melted in my mouth.

They’d always have chocolate covered peanuts too, at Christmastime. Another one of my favorites. There were various other kinds and flavors of candies. Those chewy, sugary orange slices that I loved then, but can’t stand now!

And party mix. Gallons and gallons of party mix at Christmastime when all of Grandma’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered under her roof.

We’d gather around the table and we’d pass the food and fill our plates and eat ourselves full, amidst talk and laughter and clatter of silverware. Grandma would pass the food again and then again. “Now, are you sure you got enough?” she’d query. We’d laugh at this ridiculous question. “Did we get enough?” The only correct answer was, “We’d had more than enough.”

She loved to feed her family. She’d been doing this for years. It makes me so curious to know how many meals she prepared.

My grandparents loved KFC. Sometimes we’d pick up a bucket of chicken or meals from there and go eat with them. Sometimes we’d get Spanish hot dogs and homemade Root Beer from the local drive-in and head to grandma’s house.

Food and memories. Memories and food.

I don’t think you can separate them.

They both make up life.

You can’t live life and not have both.

And now I realize the lessons and heritage she was passing down. I wasn’t aware of it then. I don’t think she was either. She passed it to her daughters and to granddaughters. Feed your families. Fill them up. Be thankful you can. Fix favorites. Fill plates and bellies. She wasn’t only filling us with physical food, but with love. With caring. In her preparing and offering and gathering us in.

She’d wave it away if I could tell her.  It was just life and daily living and providing and caring for to her.

Thing is, it mattered. More than any of us knew.

Me? I’m grateful. I want to grasp the lesson better than I do.

Today, I remember when, and I smile and I close my eyes and almost, almost, real-on-my-tongue, I can taste Grandma’s cooking once again.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2017