The old green cupboard.

The old green cupboard was so tall that it took a chair and a balancing act on the ledge to reach  for the cookie jar filled with home-made hermits. I expect that the jar was kept high so we kids would not empty it in minutes. My gran would usually hear us fumbling with the rickety old chair and be towering over us before we even reached them. But, we always got a cookie or two no matter what time of day it was.

The old green cupboard almost reached the ceiling in the summer kitchen. It had glass doors displaying her tea-cups, glasses & knickitty knackitty's (as we called them). There were two drawers for cutlery and then more shelves on the bottom. Even at the age of 8 or so I was in love with this cupboard. I liked to re-arrange her cups and saucers and make sure the fronts were always facing out. I guess I was already a dishaholic by then.

                                                               

If I had to put a familiar smell to this old cupboard it would have to be the smell of orange kool-aid.  One of the drawers always had plenty of packets of the sugary stuff and we were allowed to pick a flavor each day that we were visiting. It was stirred up with the cold well water in a glass pitcher. My grandmother didn't have a fridge, just an ice-box where we would keep the pitcher if there happened to be any left. There usually wasn't.

If we had timed it right, gran would put the water on the stove to boil for tea. When it was steaped 7 minutes (I still remember her telling us to time it) we would grab our favorite tea-cup and saucer and fill it half and half with tea and milk and then a spoon of sugar. It was then that the cookie jar would be quickly emptied and we'd sit around the table or in front of the fire in the cook-stove and just have a good old gab-session. Gran would rock in her chair with Maggie, her tabby cat, almost engulfed by her big, white apron and she would laugh at the silly stuff we'd come up with. We must have said some pretty wild things sometimes because I remember her saying more than once, "Oh my goodness, now don't be tellin' your mother that."
It was all innocent,  I'm sure, as we were too young to have done anything that bad. :) I think she just liked that we knew we could talk to her about anything, silly as it was sometimes, and she always had a loving, caring heart to listen.

(our tabby girl, Sierra)

hugs, Deb