You never let cows run out of water.

That’s one of those unwritten rules, animals need water and should never be without. If the water is good everything else could be worked out, if it wasn’t the whole operation would come to a stop.

The mineral was kept at the Quonset, that is where I remember it being. I’m not sure if it was kept there or if I’m pulling memories from a picture I have. One of Lonnie and Grandpa talking while standing around the bed of the pickup. Seemed to me that they were loading up corn seed. It’s just a still image but I can put their voices in a memory in my head. Sometimes my perspective feels more like a fly on the wall.

We would load up a couple bags of mineral and head out to the pastures, making our rounds while we checked waterers along the way.

As a kid I never really understood how those waterers worked. They were made of concrete, but in my mind, they looked like little coffins sunk into the ground. Strange detail, but it’s stuck with me all these years.

By the time we got back to the house, I was ready for lunch – and especially for Grandma’s garden tea. To this day, I can taste it: ice-cold, sweet, and unlike anything else. All my cousins agreed – it was the best drink in the world.

When I got older, I asked her for the recipe one time, I couldn’t believe how much sugar went into it. Maybe that’s why we craved it so much.

Lunch itself was usually leftovers because Grandma always saved her real cooking for supper. Tater tot casserole, I think it was better the next day, or maybe I was just hungry after drinking all that tea. And there were always greens from the garden, may have been canned from last year or fresh picked, but either way it was raised right there on the farm. The tomatoes were juicy, the onions sharp and sweet. The food that Grandma made carried the flavor of the farm.

Those meals taught me something I didn’t realize at that time: good food starts long before it hits the kitchen table. It starts with water, with chores you do every day without fail. It starts in the garden, under the sun, in the day to day of planting and harvesting.

Grandma’s tea may have been loaded with sugar, but the lessons behind those meals were pure nourishment – and they never left me.