This morning I had tea. Not just any old tea, but peppermint tea. Peppermint is special to me. It brings back several memories, all of them soothing and calm.
My Grandfather and a couple of uncles helped run a farm in Indiana that grew mint, spearmint and peppermint, even hybridizing a wintergreen-ish type. When we would visit it would often be during the mint growing season, usually toward the end...the harvest. You could smell the cuttings on the breeze. Big tractors with collector bins lumbered through the fields, collecting the leaves. They would then dump the mint into hoppers then boil out the oil to get pure mint oil. Sometime it would be really cold and some of the new farmhands would hug the boilers, almost instantly regretting it when enough of the oil would seep into their clothes and start burning. They would jump up and down, rub on the areas that burned, eventually taking off their clothes to try and get rid of the burn....to no avail. The more seasoned farmers loved this and would just laugh like crazy at the newbies.
I remember one of my uncles collecting the mint, keeping an eye on deer so as not to run it over. He got distracted for a moment and then noticed the deer was gone. He stopped his tractor and ran back to the bin to look inside. He saw the deer, it seemed to still be alive and relatively unhurt, but stuck in there. So he climbed up into the bin, untangled it, then pulled an pushed it out. He forgot that mint puts off such a strong smell in that enclosed space that it will easily suffocate someone. He passed in and out of consciousness for a time but woke up on the ground, outside the bin, next to the deer. The deer had a head start on recovery and was soon staggering away, probably completely freaked out by its close call. My uncle recovered after 30 minutes then went on his way harvesting, mostly unfazed by his close call.
I would ride on the tractor with my Grandfather. He would talk about the mint and farming a bit, show me the tractor, especially when they bought a new one, and let me drive it a bit (it's hard to screw up driving in the middle of a field). Then we'd go back to the shop where they fixed farm equipment and he'd hand me a peppermint candy made from the oil they harvested. He always seemed to have a bag or two on hand of these, and I loved them. Better than any other peppermint candy I'd ever had.
Years passed and I had forgotten about those mints, and many of the memories. When my Grandfather passed away, at the funeral home the director had a bowl of these mints. I couldn't believe I'd forgotten them! I grabbed a handful, pointed them out to others, and soon there wasn't a single mint left. People kept coming to me to see if I had any left.
A few days afterward my cousin and I we out and about and we were in a grocery store. As I passed by the candy section, there they were!! The mints! I bought every bag there, then insisted we hit another grocery store, where I bought them out as well. Probably had about 20 bags.
My relatives thought this was really funny, that I would buy all these mints and make such a big deal about them, but to me they recapture a moment in time of happiness, before the ugliness of my relatives caused me to disassociate myself from them.
Well, a week ago Karen was digging something out of the basement when she came across, guess what, the large shopping bag of mints. Probably about half of them left. She asked if I thought they were still any good, and my answer was Hell Yes! I opened a bag and put them in a bowl.
Now I have some instant happy memory at my fingertips from two sources.