SEVEN YEARS OF LAWN TEA

Seven years ago today---the first post on LAWN TEA, and such a hodge-podge and flurry since.

Mostly, my posts are in the old days and old ways, with visits to older kinfolks, years of family gatherings, church suppers and small-town showers and weddings and funeral feasts and other celebrations.  They seem to have sealed my voice into a time and place that is mostly memory,  mostly centered around kitchen and table, and all about Family.

My roots are firmly planted in that good black Mississippi gumbo; the old homeplace is still there, with the pear trees from which I just made a dozen jars of preserves, the pecan orchard planted by my two sons and their Great-Grandfather when they were young, lining up the checker-board of infant trees with string in modern mimic of their generations-ago ancestors plotting the surrounding fields.

Southern Cooking IS what it IS, a rich parade of homemade, homegrown, home-canned, home-tested fare, with great steps out into the store-bought world in the last few decades. Rattly blue boxes of Lipton soup and Campbell's Cream-a stand side-by-side with blue ribbon chow-chows and jars of Grandma's spiced canned peaches on the storeroom shelves. Recipes are gleaned from Southern Living, Taste of Home, The Food Network; from little church booklets, word of mouth, and under the hairdryer, and are prepared with the fervor of a priest offering a sacrifice. Recipes have NAMES---Sock-It-To-Me, Sawdust Salad, Nevvah-Fail Poundcake, Miz Prysock's Dressing and Aint Maggie’s Lane Cake written right on the card and proudly passed on to the numerous cookbook committees churning out those little spiral-bound tomes.    Ladies who whisper the title, Better than Sex Cake hesitate not at all to write it as the caption on their contribution to the latest edition.   

I’ve already posted about trips, parties,  turkey frying, squirrels I have known, abysmal cooks and absolutely wonderful ones who could bake a cake with the dust from a flourbag, an egg, and the paper off a Parkay stick. I've told about wedding repasts, kitchen paraphernalia passed down through the years, how I learned to cook several things, and from whom. I'm sure there's an endless flood of other kitchen and food-related stories in there somewhere, but it needs a nudge now and then.

Maw's Marvelous FRIES,  Mother's Smothered Squash, and Kim's Scalloped Tomatoes.

We’ve taken food from seed to table for more years than I can remember, working in that hot Delta sun to hoe the rows, keep the plants safe from predator, bug and errant livestock; we squatted, the children and I, in the bean-rows with the heat beating down, picking for as long as the stories of knights and fairies and ogres held out.   Then the hot Summer nights of sitting with busy, shelling hands, the pea-rattle into pan echoing beetle-thump against screen.  The washing and steam-blanching and cooling, the final reward of filled freezer boxes and bags lined up on the counter in the wee hours of another morning, as the sun waited to blast another day beneath our eyelids. 

Canning and preserving and freezing were as much a part of my life as breathing, the steamy kitchen redolent of spicy pickling brine or the rich, fruity aroma of bubbling jam, the tunck of jarlids sounding the ching of money-in-the-bank as our efforts filled the pantry, boxes, all the space beneath beds, the attic stairs.   I couldn’t figure how ANYONE could cook straight out of the grocery store.

The title I chose for this blog was to be GATHERINGS---the reaping, the laying by, the assembling of parts and foodstuffs and books and music and friends, and most of all---Family.   There are small gatherings and large ones, the acquiring of great stores, and the togetherness of two, with all the permutations of all those bits and pieces and souls brought together.

As the bees gather their golden harvest, 
so we gather in for the cold days to come, gathering together to store up the warmth and shine to see us through times apart.   We smile and quote a Grandmother’s sweet conversations, the little one’s baby stories and soft, making-conversation questions, our grown-ups’ silly stories and wry wit, my Dad’s old Southernisms, my Mammaw’s recipes and family lore.  As we part, we quote GrandDaddy:  Pray lots and drive careful.

And I write what I KNOW, what I’ve done 
for most of the years of my life, and it’s centered around cooking for, caring for, and being with family and friends---gathering them around our table is a time of great joy.   The occasions always occasion food and its gathering and preparation, so that is what I talk about.   Little moments which are bits of all that are not incidental, but a vital part of all that I have become and all that I want to portray and practice.  Family and friends, and gathering in others who may become one or both---that’s what makes me happy. 

Making THEM happy.