Bubba likes Red

Breakfast this morning, a cup of collards with thick Italian Modena vinegar poured on. And a mug of hot black. I love collards. Cauliflower is close, otherwise a challenge to find a vegetable I like as much as collards. Well okay, okra. Carrots cooked with pot roast.

Mama wouldn't cook collards, because she couldn't stand the aroma that filled the house, but I love the aroma, which tells me there's collards for dinner. So my first memory of collards is summer 1954: I was working seven days a week at Edgewater Gulf Beach Apartments, different from today (I've recalled this here before), several dozen brick houses, some duplex, some triplex, stretching back three or four blocks, a complete community of full kitchen two or three bedroom vacation apartments across HighWay 98 from the Gulf of Mexico. I was 18, just finished my freshman year at Florida, now classified a sophomore. First day of summer vacation I drove out to the Beach to search for a summer job and the first place I stopped I was hired and put to work that minute. Working with another boy about my age but with arrest and conviction record, he was on probation and was very strict about minding it because if he did so the court would clear his record, delivering linen to the apartments, in a 1941 Chevrolet canopy express.

I actually had a paying summer job driving that truck. It was even that color, light green.

This was 1954, remember, still racial segregation, and, as well as segregation of schools, segregation of theaters, soda fountains, restaurants, hotels, water fountains, churches, sections of town, the beaches (yes, White Only at the beaches, if all that is the America you want to Make Great Again, count me out, you can have it, and I remember America better than you do), and segregation of work positions, jobs available to people. Just so, Edgewater Gulf Beach Apartments had a segregated workforce: staff and supervisors and we two truck-driving linen delivery boys were White, the large crew of cleaning women were all Black.

Seven a.m. to four p.m., so we brought our lunch, the cleaning women were a team of close fellowship and camaraderie who every morning identified one empty apartment as where they'd cook dinner for themselves every day. It was Soul Food before anyone ever came up with that marketing appellation. Sometimes the other boy and I were invited to eat with them, which we always did. I mean, buttery thick chicken and rice? Collards cooked dark green and greasy with a slab of pork fat, are you kidding me? It was when and where I discovered my lifelong love for collard greens. Other favorites, also rans, turnip greens and roots, and spinach, but collards, nomesane? Bill Lee next door used to grow collards in his garden, and often knocked at our back door with a mess of fresh-picked collard greens.

But I was going somewhere with this? No matter.

Saturday morning Farmers Market is supposed to open in Oaks by the Bay park next door at nine o'clock, but the sky isn't lovely and, looking over there I don't see much going on to get set up. It's on our POD for first thing, then a couple of other stops out on 23rd Street.

Early coffee, for a change this morning with two scoops dark roast, one scoop caramel macchiato, needed a pour of oat milk (comes from lady oats).

Linda likes flowers and to garden a bit, so always has something blooming here. I like the red ones best. The top pic is of a rose poinsettia we bought at Celebrations, a favorite flower and gift shop on 12th Avenue at Cervantes in Pensacola a few days before Christmas. We were over there to have a factory recall taken care of on Kristen's Volvo, but I was there to see my brother. We had a great visit, and noon dinner together at a seafood restaurant, also on Cervantes. We were sitting there eating when, at the next table sat down my first cousin Suellen.

I miss my brother.

RSF&PTL