She. Kathryn Tucker Windham

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      I expedite

      With all my might,

      But still this room

      Is a messy sight!

Cooking for She

      Friends are thoughtful about bringing food: jellies, preserves, pies, cakes, homemade rolls and biscuits, Brunswick stew, figs, peaches, country syrup, and vegetables fresh from the garden (I like to shuck the corn, pull off all the silks, and eat it raw, right off the cob). But ninety-two-year-old appetites can’t deal with the bounty—every bit of it appreciated. Some days I am tempted to open a curb market on my sidewalk!

      I’m a right good cook (simple foods) so meals are no major problem. She and I do argue occasionally about the prolonged use of leftovers. Being a child of the Great Depression, I have a hard time throwing anything away, especially food.

      My mother and Aunt Bet were brag cooks. Their reputations for making cakes, candies, date logs, chicken salad and rolls were unchallenged in the Thomasville community. I can close my eyes now and still hear Aunt Bet saying, “Tiptoe through the kitchen. Don’t shake the floor. I have a cake in the oven.”

      When I was a little girl our kitchen was in a building in the backyard, unattached to the house. Many Southern kitchens were.

      I liked to cook until She arrived on the scene. Now everything takes so much longer to do. By the time I plan the menu, prepare the meal, eat and wash dishes, it’s time for exercise and a nap. Medicine must be taken then, too.

      Then it is time to start all over again. There is barely time for the other thing She and I do a lot of, remembering the past.

      When I was a child, everyone rested after a big noon meal, especially in the heat of summer afternoons. Rest time was over when I heard the windlass on our well squeaking. Somebody was drawing water for lemonade, and making lemonade was my assignment. I squeezed lemons, measured sugar, stirred it well in one of Mother’s big pitchers and cooled it with chunks of ice from the dwindling block in the icebox on the screen porch.

      She reminded me that Oma, the delivery man from Mrs. Wilkinson’s icehouse, always filled the metal-lined chamber of our icebox when he made his Monday rounds in his horse-drawn wagon loaded with big blocks of ice. If I met him down the street, Oma would let me eat slivers of ice that broke off when he chipped a customer’s smaller block of ice from the big blocks on the back of his wagon.

      In the summertime, when we had iced tea and made ice cream, we needed two deliveries a week. She laughed about the summer when my brother Wilson was so involved with playing baseball that he neglected his duty of keeping the drip pan under the icebox emptied. The pan overflowed, the floor rotted and the icebox fell to the ground. Daddy was not amused.

      Being so much younger than my siblings, I was the family pet, but Daddy was strict with my brothers.

      As a teenager, Wilson had to get Daddy’s bank ready for business each day. He swept the floors, emptied the wastebaskets, sharpened the pencils, filled the inkwells, saw that there was tape in the adding machines, and filled the big jug that supplied water for the drinking fountain. All this had to be done before the bank opened at 8 a.m.

      She interrupted my train of thought by reminding me Wilson always said that our older brothers, when they didn’t have other chores, had to move the woodpile from one side of the backyard to the other, stacking it neatly. Daddy believed that idleness bordered on sinfulness.

      I have few memories of those two older brothers, Wood and Jamie. They were grown and had left home before I was born. Wood had graduated from medical school and was an ear, eye, nose, and throat specialist on the staff of the Tennessee Coal and Iron hospital in Birmingham. It humiliated him that Daddy insisted on buying reading glasses at the drugstore instead of getting prescription glasses from him.

      Jamie was married and had two daughters. Sing (Hazel) and Sugar (Dot). Sing, the eldest daughter, was my niece but she was a month younger than me. Jamie was the only one of my siblings who did not go to college and he was the only person in the whole family connection to become a millionaire.

      Wilson also got in trouble one day when he was supposed to be watching me.

      The rambling frame house with its unplanned ells and porches where I grew up in Thomasville was on a hill above the lumberyard and the railroad. We had a grand view of much of the town including the bank where Daddy worked.

      One day Daddy called Mother and asked, “Where is Kathryn?”

      “She is in the backyard playing with Wilson,” Mother replied.

      “You’d better go see,” Daddy said.

      When she went outside, Mother saw Wilson, his dogs, and me walking back and forth on the very top of the house. I was maybe three years old. Mother had what my nephew later called “a committee fit.”

      Those reminiscences are examples of how She and I spend our time now that I am within scratching distance of my ninety-third birthday. Between recalling memories, cooking, napping, taking medicine, and otherwise looking after She, there is not even an hour to spare for what I want to do!

      I do know that nothing is right since She arrived. I used to fix good, nutritious breakfasts of bacon, eggs, crunchy toast or waffles and orange juice. Not anymore. Takes too long. Takes even longer to chew!

      “Your cooking is becoming simpler and simpler,” She complains.

      “I notice you’re still eating it!”

      One of my simplest meals is sausage balls browned in an iron skillet, drained, and put in an oven-proof container with apple butter (not apple sauce) poured over them and heated until the apple butter is bubbling. With a green salad and crunchy bread, that one dish makes a satisfactory meal. So does a small baked potato stuffed with sharp cheese.

      Dessert? No more pies and cakes. Maybe ice cream from the grocery store, but more likely a treat some friend has provided. I still favor a simple concoction from childhood: saltine crackers with marshmallows on them, run into the oven until the marshmallows are lightly toasted.

      I also confess that I am an Eagle Brand condensed milk addict. I keep at least one can in my refrigerator and eat it with a spoon. My high school friend Lyles Carter Walker used to boil a can of condensed milk for four hours, let it cool and then roll it in crushed pecans. Oh, it was good! But I like it just as well plain and cold out of the refrigerator.

      Also from childhood, I like a bowl of cornbread and milk for supper, with fresh fruit for dessert.

      “You are so old you can’t remember but two ingredients for a recipe,” She said.

      “Some excellent recipes have only two ingredients,” I replied. “You seem to like well enough a bowl of sliced bananas with orange juice poured over them.”

      She couldn’t say anything to that.

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