The Cleanest Kitchen in the South

My grandmother, Rosa Lee Spencer Hargrove, was born during the Great Depression.

She practically raised her younger twin brothers. There was another brother somewhere in the mix too, but I don’t think he was entirely her responsibility.

My granddaddy cut lumber and worked with wood for a living. They never had much money. Looking back, I don’t reckon we were fancy enough to be sharecroppers.

My daddy and his sister learned to sit up as baby’s by being propped in the neck of a mule collar in the cotton field.

However,  Rosa Lee was queen of making  a little feel like plenty.

Every Sunday after church, she’d cook enough food to feed half the Methodist congregation if they happened to stop by.

Fried chicken.

Green beans.

Mashed potatoes.

Biscuits.

Pie. With a meringue to the sky.

All from one little kitchen with one sink.

Here’s what has bothered me for years.

There was never a dirty kitchen.

Never.

Not a sink stacked with dishes.

Not flour covering the countertops.

Not measuring cups soaking in greasy water.

Her apron stayed clean.

The countertops stayed clean.

Everything stayed clean.

Meanwhile, I can heat up a can of soup and my kitchen looks like the Health Department ought to condemn it.

Then again…

Maybe Rosa Lee had an advantage.

She only had one eye.

Eye cancer claimed the other the year I was born.

Oddly enough, I never thought much about it.

She was just Grandmother.

In fact, it wasn’t until nearly ten years after she died, while cleaning out their house after Granddaddy passed away, that I opened the top dresser drawer and found her glass eye.

I just stood there.

Somehow I’d spent my entire childhood with a one-eyed grandmother and had completely forgotten she only had one eye.

That tells you something about children.

We don’t see what adults see.

We see love.

By the time the nineties rolled around and I was getting off the school bus at her house, everybody else seemed fascinated with microwaves.

Not Rosa Lee.

She’d put a hot dog in a pot of boiling water.

Then she’d toast two slices of bread, butter one side, spread mayonnaise on the other, and lay that hot dog right in the middle.

I’ve eaten hot dogs all over this country.

None of them have ever tasted that good.

Then there were the tomatoes.

Every grandchild in our family learned to eat tomatoes because of Rosa Lee.

She’d slice one fresh from the garden and hand us what we thought was the salt shaker.

“Salt it like the big folks,” she’d say.

Only she had switched the sugar and salt.

By the time we figured out we’d been tricked, we already loved tomatoes.

She never forced us to eat vegetables.

She simply outsmarted us.

Now here’s another thing.

My granddaddy couldn’t hear much of anything.

My grandmother had one eye.

They never came to my ballgames.

Never came to graduations.

Never came to school programs.

Hardly ever went anywhere at night.

And not once—not one single time—did I ever think they should.

I never felt cheated.

I never wondered if they loved me.

I guess, even as a child, I figured they had more sense than the rest of us.

Why would two elderly people venture out on a cold, rainy Mississippi night, fighting traffic and germs, just to sit on a hard bleacher for an hour?

They’d already earned the right to stay home.

And somehow…

I knew exactly where they’d be.

The porch light would be on.

Supper would be waiting.

Granddaddy would have long been in bed.

Grandmother would be in that spotless kitchen.

Looking back, I think we’ve convinced ourselves that love is measured by attendance.

Rosa Lee taught me something different.

Love isn’t always sitting in the bleachers.

Sometimes it’s making sure there was a stick of gum in her purse during church.  I can still smell her purse to this day.

Sometimes it’s a boiled hot dog on toasted bread.

Sometimes it’s sugar in the salt shaker.

Sometimes it’s a kitchen so clean you still can’t explain it forty years later.

I’ve restored enough old headstones to know history remembers important people.

My history remembers a woman with one eye…

…who somehow saw exactly what her grandchildren needed.

And if I’m being honest, I still don’t know how she cooked Sunday dinner for an army, kept that apron spotless, washed every dish, and loved all of us so completely.

Maybe that’s because some things aren’t meant to be explained.They are meant to be remembered. They are meant to be remembered.