JIM HENDRICKS: Finding peace with a hint of orange

Riding to work the other day, I passed a sight that I always enjoy seeing this time of year.

Southern snow.

White bolls were peeking out in a field, looking a bit like a thin layer of the frozen stuff we hardly ever see this deep in Southwest Georgia. It wasn’t a full moon, but on a fall night when there is one, a cotton field like that almost seems to produce it’s own luminescence.

It’s one of my favorite sights in the fall, just like one of my favorite fall smells — I almost want to call it an aroma — comes from freshly turned peanuts waiting to be harvested.

For some reason, I’ve always found both of them to be comforting.

Maybe it was because the house I grew up in was within sight of a peanut mill. When fall came, you’d see big red metal wagon after big red metal wagon of peanuts being pulled to that mill, where they would be parked under tin-roofed sheds. All night long, the dryers would drone away, drying out those goober peas.

On nights when I’d wake up for some reason or another, I’d usually end up in the kitchen for a drink of water. A lot of times, it came from a green glass quart-sized jar with a lid in the fridge — one that originally had been filled with orange juice but had been pressed into the more noble duty of serving as a cold water bottle.

We called it the water jug. There was only one rule about it. If you drank the last sip of water, you were responsible for filling it back up.

For some strange reason — strange right now, that is; at the time, it made perfect sense — nobody wanted to be the one who had to refill the water jug. You would open the fridge, pick up the jug, know by touch that it was too light and see there was maybe — maybe — a quarter-inch of water left in it.

And you’d put it right back in the refrigerator. So somebody else would fill it up. Which would take maybe a minute to do, but there was a principle that seemed important at the time that somehow escapes me in my old age.

I do remember, however, it was long before I ever entertained the absurd notion that a person would pay good money for a plastic bottle filled with water that you’d just up and throw it away when you had finished drinking it, like the one I’m sipping on as I write this.

It’s not the same. That green bottle, it always seemed to me, anyway, had a hint of orange juice that you just couldn’t quite completely wash away. Maybe it was in the metal lid, but it was there.

I miss it. I miss it like I miss the white enamel dipper with the red lip-ring we used to keep next to the kitchen sink, which we all drank out of, at least when the cold water jug was down to under a decent swig. I’m not sure why people had “family dippers,” but I figure it probably was because dishes got washed by hand, and most folks I knew hated washing and drying dishes and glasses worse than they did refilling nearly empty water bottles.

Nowadays, you just grab a glass from the cabinet, drink, and put it in the dishwasher. If more labor were involved in the washing of that glass, we’d probably all still be drinking out of family dippers.

There’s a certain peace I always had, sipping water from a dipper — or a green glass bottle that someone finally got thoughtful enough to refill — while I looked out a kitchen window and into the darkness at the soft glow from the peanut mill across the way, and listened to the steady hum of peanuts being dried. It’s one of the things I love about fall, when open cotton bolls and turned peanuts remind me of it.

Because when you find that kind of memory, you also find it still has a little bit of that childhood peace stuck there in it. Just like a hint of orange.

Email Jim Hendricks at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_JHendricks on Twitter.