I’m Fixing to Wish Someone a Happy Valentine’s Day
I’m fixing to wish someone a happy Valentine’s Day.
I remember when I was a little tyke that I would always pay particular attention when my Grandma Nell told me to take a bath or come to the table.
She was born as Nell Mary Brooks in 1882 and came up during hard times in the South, during which she not only learned how to survive, but also how to make very well to do with what the good Lord gave her.
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For instance, she could make up a big batch of soap in her wash pot, pour it out into pans and cut it up into big yellow blocks that would not only wash the dirt off of you, but also take a little skin with it.
She could cook up hominy, big swollen kernels of white corn that she somehow transformed from hard dry ones, in that same big black wash pot and put it up in quart jars for the winter.
But I’m remembering the sweet side of her today. Soap and hominy were harsh commodities compared to the other sweet and tasty comestibles she could make—like jams and jellies out of watermelon rinds, wild blueberries, black berries and dew berries. There was also her fresh strawberry jam, which turned a hot biscuit into manna from heaven.
She had two separate arbors where she grew muscadine and scuppernong grapes. She would make jelly out of their juice and jam out of hulls from them.
Grandma Nell had peach trees and apple trees, too. After she made some tasty apple pies and some apple sauce she would cook the apple cores and the peeling down and make some apple butter. It was brown, sweet and buttery and turned a hot biscuit into a banquet.
Her fresh peaches with some real cream from her milk cow with some brown sugar sprinkled on them made me love her like a bee loves a field of flowers.
When she used to call us children from our frolicking in the fields to come in and sample her crusty peach cobbler, my young face cheeks would tingle from the sweetness of it.
I remember on one Valentine’s Day she made us up a big batch of peanut brittle candy using homemade molasses and dry peanuts from my grandfather’s field.
What I remember most was that her sweetness of self surpassed her culinary talents, and it grieves me to say I never remember wishing her a happy Valentine’s Day.
If it’s not too late, Grandma Nell, I’m fixing to wish you a happy Valentine’s Day!