One of the happiest places in my childhood memories is my Grandma Polly’s kitchen. She was slightly heavy set (thank God she’s dead, cause she would have wacked me over the head with her iron skillet for saying that!). She always wore the cutest little aprons, the kind that came from the waist down. Not those with the bibs. But her hair was always done just so, with the lightest of makeup on her face and always some lip gloss. She even went through a phase of wearing wigs, when it was close to her beauty shop day and her hair was not so cute.
Anyway, Grandma Polly kept me while Mama worked. Our day usually started in the kitchen, where she’d set a coffee cup in front of me with evaporated milk and sugar covering the bottom in anticipation of the coffee she was brewing. I stirred it up to make what tasted like condensed milk and usually had eaten it before the coffee was done. “I’m not gonna give you any more if you eat this!” she’d fuss, as she spooned more sugar over the evaporated milk she had replenished. “You’re gonna rot your teeth out before you're ten,” she continued. Then when the coffee was done, she’d pour the steaming hot liquid over the mixture in the cup up to half full. I only got a half cup, ‘cause “coffee will stunt your growth,” she’d say.
Most of all I remember the smell of her homemade yeast rolls. She would make enough for the whole town of McNeill, it seemed. Grandma Polly’s yeast rolls were famous in McNeill! The dough was usually on its way to rising when I got there for coffee. Then she’d punch it and knead it some more and make little round balls, which she placed in baking pie dishes. I’d watch those round balls rise until it seemed like they were going to spill over the sides of the dishes. Then she’d placed them in the oven to bake and just before they were done, she’d brush real butter all over the top to make them shine a golden brown. The smell alone made your mouth water for the delicious taste of buttery rolls. I know the reason I am “slightly” overweight today, because on yeast roll days, we had sloppy joes on the rolls for lunch and then homemade jelly on the rolls for dessert! Mmmm! I can just taste that now. Then Grandma Polly would send me out to deliver a half dozen pans to the people within walking distance.
Grandma Polly was always making something in her kitchen. If she was at a loss for food items to make for dinner, she would combine leftovers in some flour and egg and fry them in her iron skillet and call them pea patties or potato patties or whatever the vegetable.
She fried her catfish in lard and made her hushpuppies from scratch on the days that grandpa spent the day floating Boley Creek in his canoe. He’d come back with ice chests that were filled with brim and catfish. I never ate the brim because they had too many little bones. I would always snag a coke from the ice chest (the little ones, that seemed to taste better than the ones in the big bottles). The coke bottles smelled like fish 'cause he didn't separate them in the ice chest. But they were ice cold and I loved the bite.
Although it would seem that it was often scarce, food was a large part of growing up in McNeill. We lived right next door to my grandparents, Polly and Walter. In the summertime, Grandpa would bring home watermelons and put them under the azalea bushes to keep them cool. Then in the afternoon when it wasn’t so hot out, he’d yell, “I’m cuttin’ a watermelon!” And we would all rush over for the cool sweetness, that wasn’t perfect without a dash of salt for contrast. Some nights he’d call us on the telephone and tell us he was making root beer floats and we were there before the ice cream bubbled up in the Barq’s Root Beer!
Yep! Those were the good ole days!
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