Bacon grease, melons and everything in between

It’s funny how sometimes I can’t get away from memories of my grandparents.  Not that want to get away from them, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that there are days, where everything seems to bring back a sweet memory.  Bacon, for example.  I don’t know how she did it, but my grandma managed to keep the smell of bacon in her house at all times. Possibly, a bacon grease diffuser, I’m not sure.  I fried bacon yesterday to make biscuits and gravy since the kids were home and I had some time to cook breakfast, for a change. I fried an entire pound of bacon for my little family of four. (I would like to tell you that I can put that in the “Cook it Once, Serve it Twice” category of my life, but that is just not the case. We ate it all. Happily.)  I thought of her while that tasty treat was sizzling away. I wondered what she did with all the bacon grease she must have accumulated. (diffused it, obviously). 

My entire adult life, my grandpa had a garden. Well, he called it a garden. It was huge. Almost ‘farm’ status, I think.  It was an hour and a half away, but for years he drove out to that garden several times a week during the summer, watering, harvesting, weeding, mowing; tending.  There was way too much produce for just him and grandma to eat, so he would bring his truck home loaded down with squash, tomatoes, cantaloupe, cucumber and start handing it out to friends, family, neighbors and grocery store check-out clerks so that he could load it back up a few days later. He worked hard and he had something worth sharing.  Yesterday, my neighbors brought a Jerusalem melon over.  They had grown it in their garden and there was just more than they could eat. It was juicy and sweet and I was grinning through tears as I cut it up and thought about grandpa and ‘something worth sharing’.

So many of my meals are based on recipes that my grandma wrote out for me. So many of the dishes I cook are things I remember discovering at her table.  She taught me to fry a cucumber, stuff a roast, and spin a thread of sugar.  They taught me to serve and to share.  They taught me that generosity had nothing to do with wealth and contentment was often found in doing something for someone else.

I remember talking with my uncle as the family was preparing for my grandma’s funeral six years ago.  I told him that I was afraid that I hadn’t learned everything I was supposed to learn yet, and I wasn’t ready to let her go.  He told me that I had learned it all, and it would be there when I needed it.   Again, as we were together at grandpas death six weeks ago, I looked around their house and hoped that all of the hours I’d spent there had somehow made me more like them.

photo cred: Laura Atterbury