Tuesday After Easter

Good morning!  I am going to get my orange juice. That's a maguey of some sort that I painted, there, for you to look at.

Orange juice makes me happy in the morning. I think it's its color.  And I like the taste.

For breakfast I had one frazzled egg (an egg "fried" in spray oil, and slightly broken at the halfway point and turned over).  And one nopal tortilla, heated over the gas flame. I put the egg in the lightly charred tortilla and dot over some Mexi-Pep sauce.   Fold on a paper plate and consume in the hand.

We have awakened to a mild but gray morning.  I remember with longing those April or May or June mornings in Texas  when I'd wake up to Weather.  Sometimes it was a rainshower or a rainstorm, when huge drops the size of fifty-cent pieces pelted the earth and the plants of the garden, who seemed to take it very well and come out shining.

When I was a child there was no air-conditioning.  The windows of the house had to be kept open at all times so that the miracle of  crossdraft cooling could take place.  When there was rain, there was a great fluster of running around the house to close windows, and after the rain, the same hurry to open the windows again because it was so warm that we had to have the breeze.

The Gulf complied with our needs and kept us supplied with a steady supply of pleasant air from the Southeast.  As children we had no realization of the extreme heat of summer (April on) that we were living in.  Our mother suffered extremely in the kitchen, cooking   for her husband, five daughters, and often her parents, and the maid or yard man or anyone else working in the house. My father, in the cotton business, came home for  dinner  at midday, but the traffic on the bridge (his office was in Matamoros) often detained him and Mama would often have to keep dinner on hold until two or two-thirty. By then it was getting really hot!  A dozen pork chops might be fried for an average meal. A plenty of chicken pieces for another.There were always frijoles for the workers, but they were not always on the family table at dinner.  There was always a "sallid," as my mother pronounced it, of iceburg lettuce and tomatoes.  There would have been onions, but my dad would not eat them.  This was an onerous restriction on my mother's culinary inspiration.  But she survived it.  And there were always vegetables, well-cooked thank Goodness, with plenty of salt and pepper and butter to make them good. We never had what I sometimes I saw on the laid tables of my friends, a stack of bread served routinely with a meal.  No habitual rolls.  Everyone was svelte.  We had huge goblets of ice tea with chipped icehouse ice.  We often had tortillas but again they were not there to fill up on.

And there was always dessert.  When my grandmother lived with us, or vice versa, we had wonderful desserts every day.  She loved to bake; it was her biggest creative expression.  Day after day she turned out a pie or cake for us.  Yellow cake with jam in between the layers, and dark chocolate fudge for icing.  Chocolate cake with white icing.  Fruit pies.  Cream pies with meringue. Pecan pie. Osgood pie once in a while (I loved it.). My mother made wonderful custards, both boiled and baked.  Once in a while we had flan.  Mother made the best brownies I have ever eaten, though they were meek compared with modern over-chocolated kinds.  To a fifteen year old they were perfect. She made chocolate pudding which she put into a straight-sided china receptacle with a lid (some isolated canister probably) and kept in the refrigerator cold as ice, so good on a hot day.

We lived in a coastal land that was rich in wild seafood.  Oysters, shrimp, all kinds of fish,  they were all on our table in plenteous bounty.  All the fried shrimp you could eat.  That is a bounty!  Mother floured them and fried them in Crisco. We had frog legs all the time.  Our frog legs were not those huge restaurant ones, but small ones, fresh and good, which she floured and fried in Crisco.  They were delicious. There was a great deal of fresh water and we had lots of freshwater fish.  The men would go fishing and bring home their catch, opaleyes and sunfish. The ladies had to deal with it,  though if their menfolk were considerate the men had done the hard work at the water's edge.  Mother described to me the painstaking lesson she had from a fishing crony of my father's, as he showed her how to recognize and remove the parasites from the fillets she would cook for supper. They were very difficult to differentiate from the fish flesh itself, but it was required that she do it and get them out.  It was a lesson I never cared to learn, nor did I have to...but I now wonder of the supermarket does anywhere near such a thorough nor  concerned job.  YAZZYBEL