Where Memories Simmer Slow

I stand here in the kitchen on a hot day, making beans, because the thought of beans, fried potatoes, cornbread, and a side of creamed onions sounds like just about the finest meal in the world.

My family will disagree tonight. They’ll turn up their noses at the beans but come running for the cornbread. I’ve managed to love on this group of outlaws, but I haven’t quite convinced them yet that beans are a treat.

It’s not just that I find them delicious—it’s that they hold memories.

They carry me back to sitting at the table, picking through them with my mama, Carla, and my grandma Jewel. They remind me of days when we didn’t have much, but as children, we didn’t know the difference. We just knew we were fed and loved.

Now, my own kids have seen both sides of life. They’ve lived in times of plenty, and the two oldest remember what it felt like when there wasn’t much at all. They know why pancakes showed up for dinner some nights. They understand what it means to learn how to feed yourself on pennies.

Truth be told, some of our sweetest memories came from those thin-ice seasons. I’d make things like divinity candy, mostly sugar, Karo, and a prayer. To this day, I’m still mailing that candy off to family, and still fussing at my kids to leave it alone long enough for me to get it on a plate. It’s simple in ingredients but a downright fight if you don’t know what you’re doing. And I promise you that it’s always made with love, even if it’s through gritted teeth.

Feeding people is one of the deepest joys I know. I can’t fix everyone’s problems, and I can never quite say “I love you” enough to satisfy my heart—but I can set a plate in front of someone. And somehow, in that moment, it all gets said.

There’s a kind of magic in it. We talk, we laugh, we cry… sometimes we just sit quiet and breathe between bites. It’s healing. It’s love in its most tangible form. Whether it’s feeding folks in my home or mailing something sweet across the miles, it fills something in me just as much as it gives to them.

Because through every season, easy or hard—I’ve always been taken care of. And I reckon the best way I know to honor that is to pass that feeling along.

So here I am, standing over this pot of beans, thinking about how rich I always felt as a child eating them. I never once thought of it as “a meal we had when we had nothing.”

To me, it was a pot of something slow-cooked and loved over for hours… something I couldn’t wait to eat.

And to those of us who understand beans that way, we are rich in ways this world will never quite understand.