Lemonada.

This is a favorite poem of mine. It's called Flash Frozen. Here it is.

My mother grew up in a homemade world. Her mother stitched sunbonnets one stitch at a time for five little girls,

carried pears, beans, tomato, squash in her apron from the garden to the kitchen where steaming

mason jars with wide open mouths stood at the ready to receive.

Jars lined the cool basement shelves like picture books, wild with color, waiting for another season. A huge gray pot, quiet on the stove, made soup for the week. In winter, root vegetables

bounced, softened in water fragrant with the earth.

Clarence Birdseye, born in Brooklyn, practiced taxidermy before joining the Department of Agriculture as a naturalist posted in the Arctic.

There, he learned a thing or two, watching the Inuit make holes in the ice, drop lines,

and bring up a fish, frozen straight through in the blink of an eye. Clarence brought that

thought home in a system that packed food into waxed cardboard cartons, flash frozen, nearly

fresh.

My mother's freezer was as big as a car.

Thursdays were poker night.

She could whip up a meal in 20 minutes once she unwrapped the box.

How about that?

So that was actually written by my mom, Judy Bowles.

And good God almighty, I do love that poem.

The grandmother who stitched the sun bonnets and carried pears and beans and tomato and squash from her garden to her kitchen was my mom's grandma Bessie, my great-grandmother. She was the original farm-to-table chef. Well, I mean, I guess

everybody who didn't have a staff and a cook, which is most people, was a farm-to-table chef not so long ago.

My mom and my sisters and I all hold great Grandma Bessie in a kind of magical, sainted place. We all really want to be a little bit more

like Grandma Bessie, especially in the kitchen. I'm very lucky because my little sister, Lauren, lives in Los Angeles,

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