My Grandmother’s House
My grandmother always sat in the kitchen of her house. This is where she used to drink her hot black tea without sugar and smoke her China Slim Cigarette. She would sometimes sit in her kitchen for hours upon end and watch the ducks and geese swimming by on the river, and if it were warm enough outside, she would crumble up some bread and feed it a little at a time to them. Although my grandmother was a humbled person; her kitchen’s walls were made of stucco, and it had an old fashion woods that looked like a clay color. When my grandmother was not smoking her cigarette, her kitchen was clean and full of delicious smells which makes me starving, even though, I was not hungry. Her kitchen was decorated of pretty flowers and fancy refrigerator magnets in the refrigerator’s door. The pots and kettles always boiled on the stove. In the oven there were constantly cakes and breads. When she ran out of milk, she would prepare tofu for breakfast. Some of my favorite memories of childhood were sitting in grandmother’s kitchen, helping her grate potatoes for her pancakes and folding raisins into the thick, crumbly mixture that would eventually become her indescribable strudel. Sometimes, I remember helping grandmother with a butter pound cake, by stirring the bowl, helping pour the batter into grandmother’s ancient, dented tube pan, licking the beaters from the hand held electric mixer that was bought long time in Best Buy, and savoring every single finger-full of leftover batter. Grandmother was the type of person who could make anything tastes wonderful, even something as ordinary as toast. A good deal of the emotional significance of eating something my grandmother created was that in doing so, I was also ingesting a bit of her spirit that I simply adored, even though she was a smoker, I did not care because all I cared was the abiding love
she felt for those she fed.
In the summer time, my grandmother and whoever happened to be at the house would sit out on the garden patio for hours to talk about anything, and smoke her China Slim Cigarette for interminable hours. She was known as the neighborhood gossip queen. The garden patio was a place for everyone to sit and relax in the warm sunny breeze. She had two pet geese in the yard, and also a goldfish in the fish pool. My grandmother’s garden was bathed in everlasting sunlight and her home always had lust house plants, some in full flower, despite living in a drafty house without central heat. My earliest memories of helping in the garden were from age six or seven. Her garden was uprising of color with all sorts of flowers shouldering each other for space, in no visible order. But there was always room for one more new plant. In my mind, her garden patio was always summer, hot intense sun, shade a rare commodity, but cool and refreshing when found. This was the garden of my childhood. Her garden was a place of discovery and pleasure, a practical garden, joyful and blessed; a place to challenge and delight all of the senses.
As you can see, my Grandmother was always involved in many things like gardening, cooking, and cleaning. Her house’s doors were always open to everyone, no matter what or who he/she was. My Grandmother’s house was special to me because I was indeed having a lot of fun and she was a big influence on my life. She had a unique knack for everything she did, such as food, the smell of her cooking, the cake batter, the intoxicating smell of bread baking, and her China Slim Cigarette smoke. She always instilled the best and greatest qualities in me and she always insisted that I must act the best that I can be. Most of the time, her house was full of joy and through the two special spaces in her house, she would spread her happiness to everyone around her like me or her neighbors.
