Beulah

According to my mom, my grandma was a lot of things: kind, giving, respectful... the list goes on. She had this hospitable personality that complimented her work ethic and attitude towards life, but that's only half of what mom told me.

When I started learning how to cook, I had to find the perfect recipe to follow to a tee. Without the perfect measurements and following the set rules, I could never create the perfect dish. And every once in a while I would think of the sweet pie dough my grandma would make according to my mom. I tried to make some myself, but in a way it's as if she took that delicious essence with her to the grave. And I know that I would never in a million years find it typed up on Pinterest just waiting to be tasted once more because grandma never did recipes.

Mom says she'd do things like measure her perfect water to rice ratio by sticking her hand in the pot, and that's about as close as she got to actual measures. That's the thing about my grandma: whenever she cooked, her food never came from what someone else told her to do (besides her mom of course). She had two hands, and she put them to work. You had to when you grew up in Louisiana at the time. She was an especially hard worker and not without obstacles of her own might I add. See the women in her community didn't drive - learning how to drive was a recipe for disaster to them, and grandma proved them right when she drove the car into a ditch teaching herself cause no one was gonna teach her themselves. But she needed to for work so you best believe she was gonna learn.

Now when grandpa found out she crashed their only car, he was upset to say the least. However I couldn't tell you how mad he was cause grandma didn't just have two hands. "You gon' find that car right up in that ditch again if you don't teach me how to drive" was what she had to say, and you best believe she learned to drive after that. Of course gossip spreads like wildfire there, and crashing a car will get you quite the attention. That is until her friends started wanting rides from the only woman who could drive. Yep!

I like to think I have that strong will power within me, too. I may not have struggled as she has growing up a woman, but as a gay man I could use that kind of strength in my life. Or at the very least that's what I think to myself whenever I eyeball the spices I add to my perfect meals.