Friday, April 4, 2025

Tea kettles ~

I recently started using an electric tea kettle. I use it to heat my water in the morning for my tea and coffee. I also use it in the evenings to heat water for my coffee. It makes it real simple to have hot water.



I remember growing up, my grandmother lived with us. We called her Grammy. She had her own bedroom and it was filled with everything she could squeeze into it because she had moved from a home to live with us after her husband died and she was struggling to make ends meet.



She didn't drive or anything and my parents just felt it was better to offer her a place in our home. Grammy loved to drink hot tea. She would wake up at odd times in the mornings usually after everybody else had already gotten done and out of the way.



She preferred to walk through the living room when nobody was there because she said she always felt like everybody was looking at her when she walked through the living room.



The tea kettle we had when I was growing up was a regular one with a whistle on it. It worked on the stove. You filled it with water and turned the burner on and waited for the whistle to blow. If you could wait that long. If you overfilled it, boiling water would go all over the stove and there would be excitement.



On winter days, Grammy would like to have hot water throughout the day. There were several times when I came home from school and the tea kettle had the burner on underneath it, but all the water had boiled out of it and the bottom half of it was red hot. It was scary because she would burn up a tea kettle and I would tell my parents about it. Dad would cuss and complain "she's going to burn the house down." Mom would try to talk to Grammy and say, "you really need to be careful and turn the tea kettle off when you're done." And Grammy would be defensive and accuse Mom of all sorts of horrendous things, including making her feel bad.



As an adult we used to have a tea kettle like that in our home. It would get dirty and we never used it enough to justify the space it took up on our stove.





So I'm really glad that I brought up this electric tea kettle. I click the button, it heats the water to boiling and shuts itself off. So I don't have to worry about burning my house down.



Good memories.



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#history #tea #grammy