There is a particular group of plants in my grandma’s house that are her pride and joy for how green, tall and resilient they are. On the rare occasion she leaves the house for more than two weeks they thrive as if she never left. Even after spending weeks without a single drop of water, they keep growing and multiple times have even reached the roof of the second floor. Each time my grandma thanks God and her plants for being agradecidas, a word that saddens me as it is only poorly translated to ‘thankful’ in English. While being thankful means appreciating others' favors and kindness in the moment and it’s usually related to humans, being agradecida can be applied to all kinds of objects that in return of even the smallest cares still turn fruitful. If things can also be grateful, then there is also a possibility to maintain relationships with them.

    Cooking with my grandma was one of the first things that taught me about love, patience and time. We could spend hours during my summer and winter breaks removing the grains of corncob one per one, opening each bean pod as a sort of meditation or using the mill to extract the juice to make arepas and envueltos. In contrast to my house in Bogotá where my mom would buy brand names for all sorts of goods’—cereal, milk, oatmeal, eggs,—my grandma still preferred to go to the plaza de mercado and to walk back home with the heavy bags. She would often spend that time talking about the development of the neighborhood, on how my uncles and dad had to walk down the hill to bring water in buckets back home to cook. 

    In her table you could always find a porcelain with its own lid to store the brown sugar. Same sugar she would use to prepare all sorts of desserts. Dulce de mora, dulce de durazno, dulce de papayuela, always a sweet of… and any fruit available. And every now ang then, against all my desires, she would make mielmesabe, a Colombian Style Curdled Milk dessert made with milk, lime and panela—a kind of unrefined cane sugar. Probably the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted, Miel-me-sabe or I-Can-Taste-Honey requires one thing many people of my generation lack: patience. Stirring for an hour with a wooden spoon means you can’t do anything else but give the pot your full attention to prevent it from burning. Panela’s porosity allows her to melt into the liquid without hardening, even if it forms a hard structure the sandy texture crumbles. The final result, very distant from the crystal transparency of the white sugar, remains opaque. When you work with sugar instead of only buying sweets, it’s possible to create a sort of dialog with it. Too hot and it burns, turning the pot black in a matter of minutes, too cold and it never melts. It’s a game of give and take. Finally, when some sort of agreement is met, it transforms. An elastic structure you can pull to create threads or a hard shell to cover and protect.