Journey with me back in time to 1976. America celebrated a bi-centennial, and in honor of American Revolutionary heroes, men grew long beards and families baked apple pies. The Mississippi summer heat that year baked city streets, sidewalks and driveways. In the sizzle of another humid July day with American flags and buntings hanging from homes, Mom pulled out a clear gallon jar and announced she planned to make sunshine tea.
I had never heard of or tasted the drink and, as a ten-year-old, wondered how sunshine and tea had anything in common. Mom showed me. She reached for the cupboard and drew several bags of Luzianne tea, filled the jar with tap water, added the bags and told me to follow her to the back concrete patio. In the bright midday sun, Mom placed the jar on the ground, added the top, and instructed me to sit by the container and watch the tea steep. Sure enough, in the blazing sun, the tea bags released tea into the water, and the hazy, cloudy mixture slowly turned into a beautiful caramel brown color.
Added to the experience, Mom sliced some watermelon for me to pass the time, spitting seeds while observing a natural process of making tea. After a couple of hours, Mom came out with cut lemons and tossed them in to float and add a zesty flavor to the drink. The easy-to-brew, tasty tea needed a few large ice cubes from the ice tray and voila!, we were in thirst-quenching business.
That summer we had slip-and-slide parties with sunshine tea, Wiffle ball birthday bashes with sunshine tea, and hamburger picnics with, you guessed it, sunshine tea! The popular tea-making event had a few failures. On one occasion, the hot sun’s rays cracked the glass jar. Another time, we abandoned the pitcher without a top and for too long, contaminating the refreshment. Still, we made sunshine tea all summer, and the drink became synonymous with bell-bottom jeans, embroidered western shirts and Farah Fawcett hair. Everybody I knew by summer’s end drank gallons of ultraviolet ray-induced black sunshine tea.
Unfortunately, when the patriotic party ended that summer, the craze of sunshine tea similarly faded. I heard a few people became deathly sick from bacteria, and news stories of gut-wrenching diseases from outside tea experiments may have accelerated the decline of sunshine tea. Yet, I miss the cold taste of pure unsweetened rich sunshine tea and long for its return to my Southern fare. The absence of my childhood tea is heartfelt and reminds me of the Bill Withers hit song of 1971, “Ain’t No Sunshine.” He earnestly sang slowly over my AM transistor radio, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. And this house just ain’t no home, anytime she goes away.” So, I want to shout out to my favorite tea, the restorer of energy on a sweltering day and healer of parched lips and a dry mouth. To you, I say, “Please return home, my long-lost sunshine friend!”
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Clark Hicks is a lawyer who lives in Hattiesburg. His email is clark@hicksattorneys.com.
