Ice Tea...

Jul 14, 2005 21:52

It is interesting in the end, the associations we make towards different people, the things that become iconic of them in our minds.

For my grandmother, I always come back to Ice Tea. She is an amazing woman (and an amazingly crazy woman) who has done and seen so much in 74 years, but Ice Tea will still be the way I remember her most in my life...

For as long as I can remember, she has always been at best... "eccentric". Despite a fairly conservative, texas oriented, mostly mexican-italian background, she was never puritan. She was first married at 15, had two kids, and was divorced by 19. That seems outrageous now, but I guess back then, the divorce was more odd than the age at which she married. She fully believed that women should be free to dress sexy (even if she seemed to have crazy ideas about what sexy was). She loves big flashy jewelry that would almost border on gaudy but still look perfect on her. She loves rusty colors and golden colors, colors that might otherwise be autumn-like, but that would be to sell-short the amount of glitter and shine she combined those with those colors.

And my god, could she cook. Tons of wonderful mexican dishes she learned as a child in Texas. But you could never get those recipes from her. Oh, she would tell you, if you asked, how to make them, but it wouldn't be the real recipe, not the was she made them. And likely, if you asked for the recipe again, you'd get some other version, different from the last, and still not the way she made hers. Luckily, there were always large family gatherings while growing up, and she always managed to provide a feast for the occasion, all by herself. No one was going to get her cooking secrets from her, not even by "helping" in the kitchen to spy on what she really did there.

But more than all the food, I loved her Ice Tea. There was always a large container of it in her fridge, and much more than that ready for any gathering. And it didn't use any amazing ingredients - I know that all that goes into it is some brewed lipton hot tea, some frozen lemonade, water and a bit of sugar - but somehow, she knew just the right balance of those basic items to turn it into the most thirst quenching tea I have ever known. Even after I moved some distance away and stopped visiting as often, when I did visit, a glass of that tea was almost always the first thing I looked for.

It was being home.

It was my childhood.

It was time with my grandmother.

Yesterday was the first time I have visited her without sipping on a glass of that tea, and it was almost all I could think about...
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