I consider my grandmother to be the perfect hostess. She’s always concerned about her guests. And she is perpetually second-guessing if everything is up to par.
She may go to the kitchen for butter and look for several minutes before she finds it on the table where it has been for the last forty-five minutes. Granted, with all the food on the table, sometimes the little dish of butter gets hidden.
Thanksgiving meals start with her finally seated at the table, and after saying grace, she will immediately say, “Oh! I think I forgot the salt and pepper.”
Salt and pepper shakers are already on the table, but she might have another set in the cabinet. And God forbid we should have to pass them or wait our turn. Or she will get up to check if she turned the coffee pot switch to “on.”
Or, she’ll say, “I feel like I’m missing something.”
This is after several trips from the dining room to the kitchen, with Grandpa finally saying, “Oh, sit down, Grandma. If we’re missing something, we’ll get it later.”
And truth be told, we couldn’t fit another item on the table if we had to.
Recently, we gathered for Heidelburg soup. She made a pot and invited us for a bowl. It was a hard decision, but we finally acquiesced to her wishes after five seconds.
She kept saying she didn’t know if the soup was hot enough. Several times, she mentioned the temperature of the soup. We expected the soup to be in the negative Fahrenheit double-digits.
We expected to pick up the ladle and a round, pot-shaped block of soup-flavored ice to emerge.
It sounded like this soup had its own free will and refused to be heated. The impression we got was that she had been to war in the South Pacific to ensure this soup didn’t get cold.
Finally, we sat at the table with the pot of soup poised on the pot holders. Steam escaped the lid, although this wasn’t proof of heat. Maybe Grandma had put dry ice in the soup.
We ladled the soup into our bowls and soon discovered the level of heat we were dealing with. We couldn’t hold the bowls in our hands for very long.
This soup was comparable to molten lava. You could melt glass with this soup.
The plastic covering over the tablecloth got sticky from the high degree of the soup. We had to put ice cubes in it for the children.
Grandma had been successful in her war against cold soup.
In the middle of the meal, she piped up, “Two things I can’t stand are cold soup and cold coffee.”
At that reminder, she got up from the table to check the switch on the coffee pot.
to the perfect hostess,
– Caleb
caneymountainblog.com 