My grandma didn’t have a dining room.  The table was in the kitchen and was a bright, cheery, red, metal one.  It was the place to be.  As a kid, I remember my Grandpa sitting at that table drinking coffee in the morning or after work having a beer and cigarette.  Grandma kept a ceramic “Aunt Jemima” with a red and white checked apron in the center of the table my whole childhood.  Years later, I gave Grandma a white ceramic chicken  covered casserole that she put on that table.  After she died, it made its way back to me.  I’ll always treasure it because she did!

She agreed to teach me how to make chili.  I loved her chili.  I was 17 and living in the dorm at college.  I walked a couple of miles to the grocery store and then to her house.  I can remember coming through the alley and through her back gate and then through the red rose covered arbor to her kitchen door.

She told me to bring hamburger and catsup.  I misunderstood and brought four big bottles of catsup.  In fact!  She hadn’t said catsup at all.  What she had said was tomato sauce and canned tomatoes.  She belly laughed when she saw them and then giggled off and on all afternoon when she looked at them stacked on her cabinet.

She had soaked the pinto beans overnight.  She showed me how to brown the beef.  We chopped the onion and red and green peppers.  She showed me how to taste as the chili simmered and gradually add the spices and taste again.

I don’t remember her ever having a dishwasher.  We always did the dishes after we ate meals, snacks or worked on cooking projects.  Someone would wash and someone would dry.  At some point in the ritual, she would dance around and snap a large white tea towel like a whip in the air  (tea towel is 1950’s for dish towel) and chant:

Oh Captain, Captain, stop the ship!
I’ve got to get off and walk.
I feel so flippity, floppity, flip;
I’ve never seen New Yok!
(It had to be “Yok” or it wouldn’t rhyme with walk)

My Grandma Orabell taught me to bake in that kitchen.  She taught me how to can peaches, tomatoes and cherries.  She taught me how to make jelly and jam.  She even taught me how to embroider in that kitchen.  She said every young woman should have at least two sets of tea towels in her trousseau….and I did.  I love my Grandma and I loved dancing around her kitchen with her.

As we pass through the seasons of our lives, it seems each one will always be…..but inevitably we move on to the next.  You know how time slips through the cracks.  I’ve shared my thoughts about that before.