When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (best short novels TXT) 📕

Not too long ago, I stood ever so patiently in line at the grocery store behind a very pregnant woman who looked to be somewhere between 35-40 wearing flip-flops, shorts, and an oversized T-shirt bearing the inspiring phrase ‘Beer & Duct Tape . . . need I say more?’ And from the amount of foodstuffs I spied in her shopping cart, one might have thought she was buying supplies to last through a nuclear winter. But one look at her 3 sons, all under the age of 12 and sporting very short summertime crew cuts, and I knew she was probably buying provisions that might last the next 7 to 10 days.

When Megan, the checkout clerk at register #4, greeted her and asked if she had a frequent shopper card, La Femme de Beer-n-Duct Tape quickly said 'YES!' and frantically started searching through her pocketbook looking for the thing. In her mad hunt, she pulled out a hairbrush, a book of stamps, a pack of Marlboro Light cigarettes (well, at least they were lights – that has to count for something, right?) and a mini-lighter which she then handed to her eldest son saying, “Jamie, baby, keep uh eye on that for Mama.”

As she continued her search, her youngest child grabbed hold of the hem of her shorts and started tugging on them saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama. . .” (I lost count after the fourth Mama).

She looked down at him and said in a very exasperated tone, “WHAT!?”

He pointed to his middle brother and said “Joey took my Octopus Prime and he ain’t giving it back to me.”

Joey retorted with, “It ain’t Octopus Prime, Mama. It’s Op-toe-mist Prime.”

The woman, who had finally found her frequent shopper card and triumphantly handed it to Megan, looked to her middle son with the wild expression of a woman on the edge of a parental breakdown and snatched the action figure out of his hands as she scolded, “Joey, I done told you before to keep your hands off’a Josh’s toy.”

With the Optimus Prime saga behind her, the mother turned her attention back to the rhythmic ‘boop-boop’ of the price scanner as Megan methodically swiped each canned good, boxed item, and bottled liquid she picked up out of the overstuffed shopping cart before swiping it across the barcode reader. Now typically I’d have gone to another register, but I had always known Megan to be an efficient checker who slows down only to look at the produce code chart when she comes to fruit or vegetable items she is not familiar with; so, I decided I’d tough it out for a few more minutes. Besides the other two open registers had fairly long lines and I figured it would look terribly rude to dash away just so I could stand at the back of a longer line.

At first things moved along at a brisk pace. Mark, the witty bagger who graduated from high school a few weeks earlier, offered silly little bits of information as he quickly placed the cans of cream of mushroom soup, tuna, and giant sized Chef Boy-R-Dee ABC’s & 123’s into the shopping bags as fast as Megan could place them on the yard long conveyor belt. Their checkout groove was so solid that Megan was even able to slap 3 red ‘Thank You’ stickers on the 3 gallons of milk that were in the cart and return to her super-fast scanning before Mark could replenish the stand that holds the plastic bags.

But then after a couple of minutes of rapid fire barcode swiping and bagging, the Beer-n-Duct Tape Mama, who had been carefully watching as each scanned price flashed on the register’s display screen, reached out, quick as a flash, and grabbed hold of a small package that had been scanned and moved for bagging. Megan stopped swiping and Mark stopped bagging and they both stared at the frazzled looking woman.

She handed Megan the package and said in tone that is best described as irritated, “That souse is supposed to be two for $5.49.”

Souse. Pronounced 'sows' – like cows only with an ‘s’. I tell you, there’s nothing quite as interesting as this Southern pork product! For some people it's a delicacy though for others, myself included, it's avoided like the plague.

So, just what is souse you ask? Well, you might know it by other names, but south of the Mason-Dixon Line souse, a pork product which is also known as head cheese, is a sausage-like luncheon meat made by mixing together the meat of a pig’s head (and sometimes the tongue, feet and heart) that has been stewed with herbs and spices. This mixture is then put about into a square mold (like a typical loaf pan) leaving a about a ½ inch gap up to the lip of the vessel. Then the loaf of pork by-products is coated with warm pork stock.

The loaf pan then goes into a refrigerator where the stock congeals. If you’re still having issues trying to conceptualize it, think of one of those Jell-O molds popular in the '70s with the bits of fruit floating around inside. Only instead of it tasting like lime with tasty bits of pears, it’s pork flavored and has chunks of meat in it. And for people who can tolerate the consistency of gelled, mashed meat and don’t really care where it came from on the pig, it’s quite tasty. Or so said my father, a man who, mind you, liked to eat bread doused in buttermilk for a snack. Oh, yes, my Daddy l-o-v-e-d souse (as well as it’s much less popular pork cousin, scrapple) I tried it –souse that is– once. It wasn’t for me. And as for scrapple I think I would have to be under severe duress to eat it.

I suppose it’s a texture thing because I love a good helping of hash and rice. Oh, Lordy, Lordy...let me guess–you haven't got a clue what Southern pork hash is...do you? Think souse without the weird gelatin then add in a good bit of barbeque sauce (I prefer honey mustard style) and let it stew for a couple of hours. When that spicy, sweet aroma knocks you backward and you begin to salivate, it’s ready. Next, you’ll want to spoon a huge ladleful it over some fresh, hot rice. Presto! You’ve got another flavorful, historically southern version of a classic meat staple that has helped many families stretch out their dollars during lean economic times. And I LOVE it! (Incidentally, my husband, a . . . Yankee even likes it, too!)

Oh, how that makes me laugh to say it! Because a few generations ago, my family (the side of family tree with the snooty leaves) would have balked at the idea of marrying anyone from up North! Lucky for me, my grandmother was a maverick and bucked the system back in the early 30s when she married a fellow from Ohio and then in the late 30s when she . . . oh merciful Heavens . . . divorced him! Then she had the gall to marry a fellow from England! Yes, my grandmother was quite the woman indeed.

Good grief! Please pardon my tangent. Where was I? Let's see...yes, yes...the souse was mispriced - 

Megan sighed and handed the parchment paper wrapped cold-cut product to Mark, “Hey, can you check this? She says it’s supposed to be a two-fer.” Mark smiled, took the item, and dashed off to the rear of the store as Megan started scanning the items that had been stowed at the bottom of the cart.

The stressed out mother then looked back at me with my half-filled, half-cart (yes, half-cart which I truly believe was designed for those of us who don’t really need a standard-sized cart but enjoy the ‘push the cart’ experience while shopping) and my eco-friendly canvas shopping bags (not that I’m a plastic-bag-hating-green-freak . . . I just like getting the bonus shopping points for using them) and smiled apologetically as she said in one of the deepest Piedmont North Carolina (tobacco country) accented voices I'd heard in a long time, “I’m so sorry. But my granny loves her souse and since they don’t give it to her at the home, I always like ta snatch it up when I see it. I slice her up some for sam-a-ches and take it to her on Sundays after church.”

I’m not really sure why she felt the need to apologize to me or to justify her price check request. A sale is a sale no matter if it lowers the cost of pricey caviar or sausage encased in gelatin. Maybe she did it because she thought I was wearing a perturbed sort of expression. But if I did have a sour look on my face, I can promise it had nothing to do with her request. Not in the least. No. If that was the expression she saw, it was probably because her youngest two sons kept running into my cart while playing ‘I touched you—I touched you back’.

Then again, she might not have been directing her apology specifically towards me. Because when I glanced behind me, I saw an openly annoyed young woman who was in her early 20s wearing extra small Barbie clothes on her tiny frame and carrying a basket filled with wheat bread, yogurt, and organic alfalfa sprouts in one hand and a Heineken six-pack in the other. Of course, I could be wrong about her age because once I hit 35 my ability to guesstimate ages of people younger than me started to slip. But with the beer in hand, I assume she was at least 21! Though to be honest, she acted more like a bratty 13-year- old as she stood there rolling her eyes to such extremes you would have thought someone smacked her chin with a 2x4 so hard her eyeballs got stuck at the top of her eye sockets. 

But despite to whom the polite statement was directed, I shook my head and replied with a smile and an emphatic, “Oh, no need to apologize. I understand. I’m not in a hurry.” Which drew a smile from the harried mother who was rubbing her swollen stomach and looked like she might go into labor right there.

Within a few moments of my reply, Mark returned with the down-low on the souse. Was it a really a two-fer or was she mistaken? Mark sighed as though he was informing a loved one about a death in the family when he said, “I’m sorry. The sale is only on the pound sizes. This is an 8 ounce package. I can go trade it out if you want.”

I heard Barbie girl groan and mutter something as she dashed over to checkout #5. Then I glanced at the T-shirt sporting mother with the belly button popped out like a thermometer on a Thanksgiving turkey and saw a look of genuine disappointment on her face as she said, “No. That’s fine. Granny’ll never eat that much. I’ll just take this one. Thank you kindly, though.”

In the end, her grocery bill wound up being $144 and some odd change. Wow, I must say, I was impressed. She got a lot for that amount but then I worried, how can she possibly afford that? Yes, I suppose I did judge her economic status based upon her style of dress and the fact that she practically tackled Megan, the innocent checkout girl, over a sale that would have saved her all of about $2. But when she pulled out her wallet and doled out $160 in cash, I knew either she or her husband or someone had worked awfully hard to earn that money and it reminded me to not judge someone just because of how they look. And the fact that she wanted so badly to please her elderly granny by bringing her something so simple as souse reminded