Sweet Tea-Brined Roast Chicken for Sunday Supper

Good morning. It was peak cherry blossoms last week where I stay, the flowers almost ready to spring off their branches to blanket the curbs like drifts of snow. There was a deep humidity in the air and it made me think of summer down south, the way the atmosphere can seem almost liquid under the sun, everything ripe, everything slow. I made sweet tea and drank it over an enormous amount of ice, on the stoop, marveling at how sometimes sweet tea is the best tea, even if you usually drink tea straight, no sugar, with not even a lemon to counter the tannins.Sweet tea is reckless tea,…