Green-Eyed Lady

I was juicing an orange the other day, old-school style. And flashbacked to my maternal grandparents’ house on Lee Street in Americus, Georgia.

Bobo, as we all called my grandmother, every morning as part of Papa’s breakfast, would make fresh orange juice. Hers was a pale green electric thing with a porcelain striated spindle and it worked brilliantly, better than any juicer I have seen since.

I don’t eye family things enviously as others perhaps might. I have no idea where it is. I have nothing from their house on Lee Street. But that one piece of the past, I dearly wish I had today, both for the flood of memories it evokes and for its practicality (although 110 V appliances in our 220 V soul food kitchen doesn’t make much sense).

There are a few other things from family members who have passed on that I connect with deeply. In my mom’s kitchen, for instance, there were these tacky-looking corncob holders, pairs of small prongy things decorated with miniature corn cobs. Those things take me way back into my childhood. Or there’s this poached egg contraption, essentially a double boiler with the smaller inset pan having 3 cut-outs for small aluminum placeholders for cracked eggs. While the corncob holders evoke steak dinner nights on Sylvan Drive, that poached egg double boiler is all about mid-morning Sunday brunches in our breakfast niche in the kitchen.

It is (obviously) a non-ending source of fascination to think about the various, modest, often trivial things that connect us so viscerally to our past. Not fancy stuff. Mostly everyday stuff that knocks you over with emotion.

I’ll stop there.