Sweet Tea in Sweet Climes

This was taken from a much larger piece. I restored it to its original nonfiction root. The names have been restored to reveal the guilty. I chose this because I never thought of myself as a nostalgic person. The more I write the more I find that's not true. Not even a little bit. What follows is a represention of many nice Georgia moments. I apologize for offering up so little after a long time. I've been busy.

Jody

Sweet Tea in Sweet Climes

Something, actually two things, a person should know about the South: Sweet-Tea, listen up yanks and Midwesterners, is made with store bought ready-to-go bags of commercial tea grounds, usually Lipton’s. The sugar is added, yanks, Midwesterners, hold on to your hats, at the just off the boil stage to infuse and homogenize through out the entire brew. It’s not hard chemistry. The only way a person can personalize their tea is to either increase or decrease the amount of sugar, or one can add a flavored tea bag, usually mint. I prefer an orange flavor. Some will say sun brewed tea tastes better, but only because they feel their effort and patience must be rewarded (The Emperor’s Sweet Tea, if you will). Whatever difference they purport would be made moot anyway by the sugar.

Sweet Tea is as popular as water in the South, but held in only minutely better regard. The only people who really care whether or not a home or establishment has or has not sweet iced tea are Northern tourists and Southern geriatrics; and even then it’s not for tradition but senility.

Having brought that up, one should know that despite all just written there are people who by no teaching, nor trick make exceedingly tasty sweet tea; sweet tea so refreshing and delicious that it gives those who drink it a Tolkien feeling of wellness and reinvigoration. These people are touched, blessed, and, indeed, envied. It is of phenomena, and therefore unexplainable. My ex-roommate from Atlanta, Seth Campbell, was such a person. The Campbells, all, are such people. Myself and others have tried to call this magic into our own brew, and with no success. I have watched Seth and his family many times with their process. No special tea bags. No special amount of sugar, and same tap water as anyone else. I have even made sweet tea at Seth’s family home, with their ingredients and measurements, yet yielded nothing more magical than a regular old glass of sweet that I’ve had every day since come down. While living with me in Atlanta he was given by his family an iced tea machine! Sacrilegious! But I’ll be damned if he didn’t draw forth that sweet, delectable nectar; touched blessed and able to heal even God’s lowliest.

The second thing a person should know of the South is that there are places and times where the heat and humidity do not penetrate. They are random and culled by none. When you find yourself there and then you are having a good day, for such are lazy days of respite; not the same as the lazy August days where to think is to sweat profusely. These days are made up of good company, fine conversation, and the miracle of iced sweet tea where the glass sweats, yet the ice does not melt.

It is not that heat or humidity are absent from this blissful happening, but still omnipresent as ever, only without duty. One praises it to make it stay and never leave, one also praises to appreciate the here and now, because it will end; and at its end no quality of conversation, ease of friendship, or blessed iced brew with sugar sweet will do to win one favor; Summer’s rare grace.

Oddly enough this occurred at the Seth’s homestead frequent enough to say in a relative sense that it happened most often there. We’d sit with our glasses of his iced tea on his family’s back porch. There home was off Dr. Bramblett Road, set back into the woods. Where the house sat was a natural clearing. His parents ran several greenhouses; also on the property and kept their modest yard in palatial splendor. The sun somehow stayed behind cloud. The forest surrounding was allowed to breathe out its store of cool breeze and not be strangled by ray and moisture. Their tea was plentiful, the ice un-melting. We mixed a little whiskey, which is seraphic by design, from a jug. We’d talk and not talk. We’d listen and not listen to Jazz Classics on NPR. I’d close my eyes tilt my head upward as though I were sunning myself in shade. The tea, the clearing, and the whiskey all blessed. Thus we were thricely so. Fucking-A, it was nice out there!