Flying Peas

There was a time when my cousin David and I were deposited at our Great Aunt’s home, spending the afternoons until our mother’s retrieved us after work. Aunt Sable always kindly had a hot meal waiting for us, but little did she know that the meals she labored over were the least appealing to our appetites.

For what felt like a year while we were still children, my cousin David and I were greeted by cheers from the audience of the Ellen Show as we walked through our Grand Aunt Sable’s door. We stripped off backpacks as she sat grinning at Ellen shuffling on stage.

Aunt Sable fed us an early dinner that always featured rice and peas paired with some semblance of a protein. Only, Aunt Sable’s food was horrendous. It was lukewarm and tasteless. Flavor-evadingly bland. It had no spice, even less essence, a particularly absent aroma, and no distinct savor.

Our homemade meals at Aunt Sable’s house were food stuff that for some weeks David and I forced ourselves to eat lest we caught the cutting of eyes, the kissing of teeth, or even worse — phone calls to some potentially over-caring relative on what ungratefully wasteful children we were.

To save ourselves the lecture on food waste and a soliloquy on a humble childhood in Jamaica, David and I hatched a plan. We began placing the cold, brown-greyish peas into the table napkins resting on our laps.