The Old South

My, but it's a beautiful night tonight. Nothing at all like the usual sticky Summer nights in Tennessee where you sweat just thinking about moving and according to the mosquitoes, you must have "buffet" written in huge neon letters over your head. The breeze is blowing the trees into a lovely rustle. The milky moon hangs high and shimmers the roof tops making them look like they have a thick coating of quicksilver . The streets are quiet here with only the occasional dog barking or the 10:40 train going down the line. The houses are mostly dark now.

I sat for a while on the steps of the big, wooden slatted front porch and watched the fire flies and listened to the wind bustling through the azaleas and the thick, waxy leaves of my neighbor's magnolia tree. Every now and then, the breeze shifted and the fragrant scent of the iridescent ivory blossoms wafted back across the porch. It was lovely. I inhaled deeply. I love the South.

Lately, my friend and I have been trying our best to recreate what we remember about Southern meals - the kind that always leave those who consume them afterwards gasping for air, unbuttoning buttons and kissing the cook on the cheek. Something just seemed to be missing from weekends and since we still watch cartoons and suck down sugar cereal on Saturday mornings and couple-skate to Steve Perry singing "Faithfully" at Skate Land on Saturday nights, I reasoned that it must be something in our Sundays. I made a list. Sleeping late to get Saturday night excesses out of our heads? Check. Meet the Press? Check. Dreading work or school on Monday mornings? Double check. That only left one thing. Big Sunday dinners!

Hey, there are worse places to start! Especially for my friend who is a Northerner and only knows about Southern food that "it's deep fried in butter, right?" This is the same guy who argued with me when I said that mashed potatoes have to be mashed - like with an actual potato masher - by hand and not with the electric mixer. My version of the perfect potatoes was further squelched when I told him that the taste of truly good mashed potatoes is directly proportionate to how much Duke's mayonnaise you put in them. I think he could feel his arteries closing up as I spoke. Though, tonight he made cornbread - with pats of yellow butter thick enough to choke a horse. There may be hope. A couple of spoons of chow-chow and I think we'll have a convert.

This time, I did a pretty good rendition of a banana pudding and green beans. I had the best time cooking and dancing around in my kitchen with the little transistor radio on as I cooked. I wore my hair tied back, a girly apron and my grandmother's house shoes for luck. I liked the shuffling sound my feet made on the linoleum floor. As a child, I used to lie in the guest room bed at my grandmother's house on sleepy Summer mornings under box-fan draft, listening to her house shoes shuffle from task to task, stove to refrigerator and then back again. It made me feel like she was there with me to wear her soft house shoes with worn rubber soles. She must have been because those green beans were sublime..... I would also like to thank my mom who tirelessly (and with a great deal of humor) fielded telephone calls from me along the way. She's a dear and thanks to her, I now own Crisco shortening - three cans of it.

Last week, she sent my brother and me an e-mail that said simply, "Can a dead possum in the back of the barn in 90 degree heat smell any worse after three days?"

( Okay, maybe that is one of the things that I don't miss about home. )

I'm sure my mom handled it in her true trooper-fashion. For those of you just joining us, my mom takes care of business.

Once, she was driving down the road and soon after passing a country store, saw a hawk swooping down on a baby rabbit. She swerved to the side of the road and jumped out to try and save the rabbit. It was too late for the little animal but she decided that she didn't want the hawk to get the rabbit after he so savagely killed it. My mom is nothing if not stubborn. So, what did she do? She covered up the rabbit with something, went home and got a shovel and came back to bury the rabbit. The Carolina clay ground was too hard. She tried and tried unsuccessfully to break ground but only shattered the surface. She thought for a second and went over to the flower bed of the country store, dug a hole with her bare hands and buried the rabbit, put the shovel in the trunk of her car and drove away. Done deal.

When I asked her, "Mom...you stopped and went to all of this trouble for some rabbit that you didn't even know?" she replied, "Well...you don't usually know rabbits, do you? "

So, here's to the South and strong Southern women like my mom who take minutes out to e-mail her children before burying decaying possums and will bend over backwards for helpless creatures. And to women like my grandmother who taught me Ethel Merman and Hank Williams songs while making thick, mysterious soups containing everything but the kitchen sink. And to my great-grandmother who lived by herself well up into her nineties, watched World Wide Wrestling at ear-drum bursting decibels every Saturday like clock-work and then sat in her Church Of God congregation on Sunday morning wearing a good deal more than the allowed number of jewelry items.

Lift your mint juleps high to them.