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

As the ready to pop Beer-n-Duct Tape Mama and her 3 sons, left the store, I giggled listening to her lay down the law about holding hands in the parking lot. Yes, that was quite cute.

But if I'm being totally honest, the real reason why I started giggling had to do more with the fact that the snotty, pencil-thin girl who'd dashed over to the next lane (that, if you'll remember was actually a longer line) thinking she'd somehow be able to move faster because no one was stopping the checker with what I'm sure she felt were stupid price check requests, got stuck behind and older gentleman who was buying just a few things . . . one of which was a half-gallon of Breyers ice cream. As Megan rang up my goods, the old man's checker and Megan were going boop-for-boop . . . who would finish first? 

Then, I heard the old man say, “Oh, oh. Now . . . now. . . hold on up there a minute, young lady! That Bryers is supposed to be on special! I said so in the paper." And as he grabbed the advert sheet from the register line and pointed at the sale price, Megan and Mark had finished scanning and bagging my items. Then as I grabbed my reusable bags, I turned and saw that the ticked off Barbie-girl had apparently entered into some sort of 'Oh my God!' trance as her eyes were once again rolled up to the top of her eye sockets!

PRICE CHECK!!

The story you’re about to read makes mention of a few items that, if you’re not from the South, you might not be familiar with, so I thought I’d give you a quick course in Southern breakfast cuisine . . .

Buttermilk biscuits—this is a no brainer people for who hail from my neck of the woods, but I realize there are some folks out there, people with funny accents and whatnot, who are sorrowfully confused about just what a buttermilk biscuit is. These poor folks are under the misconception that this particular biscuit is a cookie! Land sakes – nothing could be farther from the truth of the matter! Southern buttermilk biscuits are most commonly served at breakfast when they’re warm and fluffy and either swathed in salted sweet, cream butter or jelly or maybe smothered with tasty creamed sausage gravy. (Lordy, I should’ve written this after I ate!)

Fatback—the thick, extremely salty wholly fat outer layer of bacon. It’s often used as a seasoning agent in all sorts of Southern dishes. It’s also the stuff from which pure, unadulterated lard is made. Some people love to fry up the stuff until its super crispy and then eat it as if it were a fine delicacy; however, I am not one of those people.

Grits—they’re made from hominy which is dried corn that’s been soaked in a limewater solution, dried out again and then coarsely ground. It’s a staple in a great number of Southern households and is most often served as a porridge-like side dish at breakfast. Grits are probably the best indicator of whether or not someone is truly Southern because Southerners don’t put milk, sugar, syrup or anything like it into their grits. No, just some butter and salt.

Livermush—it’s sort of like sausage, only it’s minced finer and the final product is shaped like a brick before packaging. It’s made up of pig’s liver, corn meal, and the pièce de résistance, select portions of the pig’s head. It’s adored by 1,000s in the region where I live; but just as with fatback, I am not a fan of the stuff.

And with the vocabulary lesson out of the way it’s time to get to the heart of this story.

Several years ago when my daughter was preparing to return to school after a long and fun filled summer vacation, my husband and I had purchased all her supplies and insisted that she start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier . . . to help her get back into the school routine. The only real hurdle was getting her back into the habit of eating breakfast because being a teen at the time, she would have much rather just waited until she got around to it which meant she’d wait until around noon before the Spirit moved her towards the kitchen.

However, I was (and still am) a diehard believer in the positive effects of eating breakfast as a way to get you ready for the day ahead. It’s something that was engrained in me as a child because my parents did not let me go to school without having something on my stomach otherwise I was like a moth in a room full of candles and couldn’t pay attention to save my life. Of course, now I know part of that ‘brain flitting from here to there’ scenario has a lot to do with the fact that I have ADHD. (But that’s fodder for another book all together!)

When I was a kid, my mother didn’t really mind what I ate for breakfast whether it was made up of cereal or bacon and eggs or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And there were some occasions (especially on really cold mornings) when she’d even allow me to enjoy bowl of tomato soup. But as for my father, the issue of a proper breakfast was an entirely different thing because breakfast was not breakfast if it did not include at least two eggs some sort of meat, biscuits, and a side of grits.

And if my father happened to be the one making breakfast he would always ask me if I wanted a fried or a scrambled egg. However, I’m not sure why he asked what kind I of egg I wanted because I always chose scrambled since my father’s fried eggs were a bit too runny for my taste. Although I suppose runny is not the right word because my father liked his eggs over easy.

Really over easy. So over easy, in fact, they practically floated on his plate!

I can still envision him breaking open the yolk and then mixing the gooey stuff with his grits so it thickened a bit and turned into a pale yellow sludge that would drip between the tines of his fork. And since my Daddy wasn’t one to waste food, after he’d shoveled up and eaten the thickest part of the egg stuff, he’d put his biscuit on his plate and use it like a boom spread across the water to collect oil spilled from a tanker as he’d proceed to sop up as much of the residual stuff as he could.

Needless to say, when he was done his plate always wound up disturbingly clean looking by the time breakfast was done. Oh, the number of times I'd just stare at him wide eyed watching whatever bread product happened to be trapped beneath his fork while he swabbed the deck of his plate free of any and all traces of egg yolk. Gosh. Just thinking of it, though it was decades ago, still makes me a bit green about the gills.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what I call ‘stickety’ eggs where the egg is fried so that the white is completely cooked and the edge of the yolk is firm but the center is filled with a thick liquid into which I can happily dip my bread. But honest to goodness, I cannot eat runny - not quite done egg whites. I can’t even look at them.

Seriously.

I kid you not. Runny eggs make me queasy and my first instinct whenever I see the gelatinous clear to near opaque squishy stuff on my egg is to get as far away from the plate as possible. My family thinks it’s hilarious to see me when I encounter an egg that doesn’t pass my strict protocol. I, however, do not.

But stepping away from one of my weird food issues (as there are a few) . . . 

Aside from preparing the eggs, my father would also fry some bacon because meat was a vital part of the breakfast meal. Granted eggs are protein powerhouses, but I think it was my father’s belief that if it wasn’t actually slaughtered then it wasn’t really meat. Sometimes my father would opt to put aside the bacon and fry a few slices of livermush perhaps thinking that, according to him, I would have come to my senses and would suddenly be head over heels in love with the stuff.

But I didn’t. No. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now.

There were also mornings when my father would fry up a mess of fatback at breakfast time and then he would use the rendered fat left behind in the pan to cook other things later in the day. Once the fatback was so crispy it could crack, he’d always offer my siblings and me a piece of the stuff. However, unlike my siblings (especially my older brother) who loved, loved, loved the stuff – I didn’t like it at all. Because while fatback does provide a fabulous seasoning to things (after all, it’s basically extremely salty bacon and in a Southern household, pretty much everything is better with bacon) in my opinion, the crispy remnants of fried fatback is what I think it would be like to nibble on a skillet-fried salt lick.

But as I said my brother simply adored the stuff and would gobble down his piece and mine as quickly as he got it. I can still recall the way his eyes would light up like it was Christmas Day when Daddy would walk to the kitchen table carrying a grease-soaked paper towel holding pieces of the crisped fat-stuff.  A paper towel that, mind you, would become stiff when the liquefied pork fat it soaked up would cool. Even as a kid I knew that could not be good for a person.

And the crazy thing is . . . people thought I was the weird one because I wasn’t thrilled to death over the stuff.

Seriously. When I was a kid in elementary school, before the age of let’s try to make the school lunch look healthy, fatback was given as a treat on Fridays to students that the ladies who worked on the lunch line liked. And apparently I was an angel in their eyes because I always got a piece for which I’d say ‘Thank you, kindly’ because I was polite. Then, once I was seated at my table, I would offer the salty stuff to whoever promised to give me the little cup of ice cream that we got every Friday after recess.

Oh, my . . . how I did adore those little cups of ice cream the school got from the local dairy plant, Cabarrus Creamery. Gracious, there was something so tasty about eating that cold treat with the little wooden spoon. Of course, I was a picky ice cream eater. I loathe plain vanilla ice cream and I don’t think I’d bat an eye if someone outlawed the orangesicle because it still reminds me of those disgusting St. Joseph’s chewable asprins. No, I was and still