I had intentions of making cookies this past weekend. The second runner up to Tropical Gingerbread from the previous weekend. I was going
to a cookie baking party where I could share stories of this recipe box with
friends over a cup of eggnog. But alas,
my body had other plans… finally caving in to the seasonal plague friends and
co-workers around me have been sniffling through the last few weeks. So I sent my regrets and spent most of Sunday
sleeping through almost the entire first season of Downton Abbey on the couch.
I tried to fight this thing.
I hate being sick. I hate putting
pharmaceuticals in my body… so I figured I would do my best to soothe the
symptoms with ingredients from my kitchen.
I actually discovered the wonders of lemon water earlier
this summer. Maybe it’s psychosomatic…
but there were a couple healthy months when I was starting my day with the juice
of a lemon and some lukewarm water. It’s
supposedly a good way to get toxins out of the body. Whatever.
I like water. And I like lemons.
Wait. What?
Yeah, I like lemons.
As in I will actually eat them, or at least suck the juice from their
pulpy flesh. And you know where I
learned this behavior? My
grandmother. I was thinking about this
as I drove home from the grocery store today, fully stocked with almost a dozen
lemons to help get out the rest of this sniffly business. I remembered how she came to a birthday
brunch with my parents and sister a few years back. She got these mouth watering peach waffles,
that I remember my nutritionist mother was pleased she ate completely. And then she finished off the meal by eating
the lemon from her water… and several others from the table.
The woman lived to be 91.
Maybe the lemon de-toxing notion is a myth… or maybe it was a healthy
habit. But I definitely have her taste
for the tart flavor of lemon juice.
I owe my grandmother another debt of home remedy from this
week. After a discussion at Thanksgiving
when I asked my father and uncles the favorite drinks of my grandparents, I decided
my liquor cabinet required a bottle of Wild Turkey Bourbon and Seagram’s V.O.
Canadian Whisky.
I’ve only started to appreciate whisky in the last two years
as a drink. It has been a few years more
than that when I’ve appreciated the idea of it as a cure for the cold. Okay, maybe not cure… but definitely a calm
to the sore throat… and an easier path to sleep when prone to coughing. And that proved true with both the Wild
Turkey and the V.O. this week.
I am glad that I spent a couple cold Sunday afternoons with
my grandmother going through that stash of photos I found last Christmas (when
I found that album of pictures from my grandfather’s Air Force training in
Miami). After a little eye squinting and pursed lips, she could tell me
something about everyone in the photos – from her brother to my great aunt Rhea
to the woman who lived on the second floor of the three decker with 8 children
to her head shakes at the goofy pictures of my grandfather… saying he had a
little too much.
It amazed me that in a day when there wasn’t the impulse of
Facebook or digital photography that some of these pictures… were developed
(sometimes in duplicate), never mind kept for over fifty years. How
much of that bourbon or whisky was ingested on those evenings? When the parties would end well after
midnight and they would get up the next morning and bring their five, six
babies to church?
But… it wasn’t the goofiness that struck me most about those
pictures. It was the community. They weren’t going out on the town like the
characters of Mad Men… but they were happy amongst spouses and friends on the
evening of a day off from the work week.
A cellar transformed into a popular destination with a bar, a ping pong
table, and some Canadian whisky.
I think that ping pong table is in my cellar. My grandfather gave it to us so many years
ago, I don’t know when it got here. It
never left. I think now that I have the
V.O., the cellar needs a bar.
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