I don’t try anymore to create sweet tea. My attempts always ended up with a sugary sludge at the bottom. I don’t have the right geography for it. There is no replicating the sweet iced tea I ordered happily by mistake one soggy morning in Savannah, Ga. And then glugged for sustenance all weekend during my daughter’s wedding in Memphis.

The fast food places in my town whose billboards promise sweet tea can’t provide an actual sweet tea experience. For that you have to be in the south where people wear white clothes as thin as a summer curtain and sit as still as a plate of okra. Where you station yourself on a porch or in a restaurant with ceiling fans that nudge the lazy air and everyone is glistening and rosy. To be saved by a woman who saunters over to your table to pour you the most quenching, tallest, coolest drink, better than any alcohol ever, which lets you know that you are truly in a foreign land but will now survive the endless, sticky day.

No zucchini before its time.

In California I don’t really need sweet tea. I don’t need to quench. A chilled sauvignon blanc from a local winery pairs perfectly with our summers. When I crave sweet tea I probably need to leave home.

Back East I get to eat Ipswich clams, dug by my nephew that morning, steamed in a dented pot by my sister, to be piled in a communal bowl and convivially slurped by family members plus babies and dogs as the sun shimmers across the salt marsh. Nowhere else can I get clams or a moment like that.

Now I’m thinking that one healthy result from the current gas crunch is that our palates, numbed by cross country road trips and freeway food, may come alive again. There will be renewed opportunity to eat and drink where we are planted.

Dive into the chicken-fried steak when you’re in Missouri. Hold off on barbequed oysters until you’re in California. No zucchini before its time. And keep it simple.

I dream of the cheese and tomato sandwiches on soft bread they used to sell at a snack booth on Crane Beach, north of Boston. The cheese was orange. The bread was non-artisan. But the tomato tasted like it came from the farm stand on the beach road.

It was unadorned and perfect, like the sandwich your mother would have waiting when you ran shivering from the water.
Plain food. Lasting memory.