Childhood memories

So many things trigger a memory, but nothing more than a taste of my childhood.  Luscious tastes that bring faces and places flooding back.


A really good chocolate cake brings my paternal great-grandmother to mind.  Annie-Jack Stocks made a three layered chocolate cake that was truly awesome.  I would eat only hers from the time I was two.  I remember her smile as I got out of the car each visit saying. . 'Is there cake?'

Dad, Grandma Nettie and holding me Great Grandmother "Granny" Stocks

I was raised in the Carolinas so the visits back to Georgia were always a treat.  Our dad's family home was a large pre-civilwar house in Guyton GA.  It had traditional southern facade.  Sweeping double porches and wide steps that brought you up to huge double doors. A cup of hot sweet tea with lemon takes me back to its kitchen.

Summer or winter my Grandma Nettie and I would get up before anyone else and share a small pot of tea and a walk around the yard.  The house, the family has since dubbed Magnolia Manor,  was surrounded by camellias, gardenias and magnolias. (Gardenias are still one of Charles' favorite aroma triggered memories)

Pop Pop our families first grill master

PopPop, my dad's dad, always had a large bed of zinnias.  they were a riot of pinks and purples, yellows and oranges.  He always had vases of them in every room.


Mema and Granddaddy were my mom's parents.  I loved sitting in Mema's tiny kitchen in Savannah.  Although the proximity could get me in serious trouble.  After using her freshly iced cake to finger paint I was banished to the sun room to sit on the divan until I was told I could get up.  Now I was in deep.  I found the sun room, no problem, but what the heck was a divan?!?!  So I sat on the sofa.

My Mema was an accomplished southern cook.  Her Sunday dinners and garden club luncheons were legend.  But my favorite memory is the one she always kept in the fridge just for me.  Three Bean Salad.  

I know. . . . not her coffee cake or fried chicken or even her famous lemon sour cream cake, but a huge bowl of marinated beans, onions and pimentos.  I still have the big green ceramic bowl she fixed it in.   As I ran through the kitchen I always stopped to snatch a few morsels out of that bowl.  She scolded me every time, laughing all the while.

Granddaddy was our inventor.  He made fishing lures and wind chimes.  He made cabinets out of discarded doors but I think he was most proud of the boiled peanut cart he made.  He sold bags of boiled peanuts in the parks all around Atlanta in his later years.  A bag of freshly boiled peanuts will take me back to the basement workshop where he practiced his magic.


Well the tea has finished steeping.  I think I will grab some lemon and have a reminisce.  Til next time.