The Place You Most Loved to Spend Time as a Child.

? Topic: The place you most loved to spend time as a child. Ma Vio’s Kitchen Today, nineteen years after the passing of my grandmother, her kitchen looks the same with its walls in the same pastel orange and green she had painted it in so many years ago. The floral patterns that were done by my cousins and I using ochoes that she had cut in half and potatoes which she carved flowers from to make stamps that we gleefully dipped in containers of paint and placed on the wall hap-hazardly to form various patterns.
I remembered her being so delighted in the end product that I don’t think there was a neighbour, friend or visitor that my grandmother didn’t boast to about her beautiful kitchen wall hat was so artfully decorated by her clearly talented grand children. I look at those walls to day and sometimes laugh at what persons out side of her family may have thought of her walls of art that anyone could have see were decorated by children all under the age of eleven.
Walls that have been laquered to preserve what Ma Vio, as she was lovingly called by everyone, considered a ‘masterpiece that not even the most renowned of painters could have done with such perfection’. My fondest memories however, are not of the many different art projects that Ma Vio encouraged us into doing on her huge kitchen table but of the aromas drifting out of that little haven off of her livingroom. I remembered how she used to have these large bottles filled with all different types of homemade treats lined off on top of the kitchen counter….. ed mangoes, stewed tamarind, tulum, benee balls, sugar cake, fudge you name it Ma Vio made it. Boy! Don’t even get me started on her bread bin that never seemed to run out of mouth watering cakes and pastries…. coconut tarts, lemon bread, drops, peanut butter cookies and my favourite banana bread. Mmmhmmm …. I can smell it all now…. fresh out of the oven. Her pound cake and whole grain bread were what my brother used to call ‘the bestest in all of Trinidad and Tobago’, you couldn’t find a bakery for miles with anything that good.

You ever had homemade bread where you felt as if you had anything at all with it you’d spoil the taste? That’s how everyone felt about Ma Vio’s bread. It’s good when accompanied by a filling but it’s best when eaten by itself. Ma Vio’s Kitchen smelled like christmas morning almost everyday as she was always busy making or baking something. Her kitchen was my own little ‘snack heaven’ where everything that came from there seemed to taste extra good. By Havilanna Davidson