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This page will include columns specifically written to help Yankees and other foriegn persons who are priveleged and fortunate enough to move to the beautiful, sunny South.
The bumper sticker on the back of my pick up truck says it all:
"It's Too Bad Everbody Can't Be Southern"
The Rising of the Sap
The sap is beginning to rise. All over the sunny South, the leaves are starting to bud, flowers are starting to bloom, and spring has sprung here once again.
For you Northerners new to the area, spring is what we call this time of the year in these parts. Just so you know, it lasts three months and is followed by summer, fall and winter, which is different from the two seasons you have up North called winter and the Fourth of July.
If you’ve noticed that maybe your nose is causing you trouble just now, we have a name for that, too. We call that hay fever. Why it’s called hay fever I have no idea. What we ought to call it is pollen fever because that’s what really causes it, especially if you throw in a dose of cut grass, dust and dog hair.
As for me, I’ve had hay fever most of my life. When I was a child I had it so bad I could’ve been the poster child for the National Association of Asthmatic Nerds. Back then I survived spring only by taking allergy shots twice a week all year, and when spring came I had to add inhalers and one of those paper masks just to stay alive.
When I was a teenager, my brother Tommy — who is 3 years younger than me — saw this situation as his opportunity to get even with me for all the tormenting I gave him during the other three seasons. Tommy waited patiently all year until spring came so he could do something that would make me honor-bound as a big brother to chase him down and beat him whether I could breathe or not. He would then run off into the side yard, where Daddy had a grove of pine trees with low-hanging branches.
With me hot on his tail, Tommy would run through those pine trees, shaking the pollenladen branches, until I collapsed in a wheezing, swollen heap right there on the ground.
These days I’m not bothered all that much by pollen anymore, and Tommy and I don’t beat each other like we used to. We both figure now that as middle-aged men, we might wind up busting something on each other that won’t heal anymore.
And now I can enjoy the springtime. Mostly.
Again, for you Northerners new to the area, just as a friendly warning, there are some other things we have down here that come out in warm weather that are worse than pollen ever hoped to be. One of these would be wasps.
f you ever hear a Southerner say, "Watch out, a whaw-st is fixing to bite you," take cover. The Northern translation of that statement is "A wasp is about to sting you." W-A-S-P is usually pronounced here as whaw-st, and pronounced either way they will sting your butt.
Southerners have been tormented by wasps longer than they’ve been tormented by Yankees. It’s just been since that April in 1861 that we’ve had to contend with both.
When I was a boy, my daddy fought a continual war with the wasps. Every spring they made their nests in the corners of his windows and since they didn’t make bug killer that shot 20 feet way back then, my daddy did what any normal Southern male would do in similar circumstances. He used gasoline.
As was the custom of the time, my daddy would take a cup of gasoline and sling it up into the corner of the window where the wasps were, and then run like a maniac away from the house.
Running here served two purposes. One was that in the event you missed the wasps, hopefully you would have a chance of escaping before being eaten alive. The other was because this technique had caused more than one Southern home to explode and burn to the ground.
We had a fellow in our community named Ned Rudisill who used this technique to get rid of a wasp nest in his outbuilding. Mr. Rudisill, known hereafter as Lucky Ned Rudisill, flung a cup of gasoline in the front door of his outbuilding and straight into the pilot light of the hot-water heater he had in there. The ensuing explosion burned off both of Lucky Ned’s eyebrows and brought three fire departments and the lifesaving crew to his back yard.
The good news is Lucky Ned killed every single one of those stinking wasps.
Of 'Possums And The Women Who Wear Them
When it comes to Southern wildlife, about the nastiest creature we have here is the possum. Most Northern Yankee persons and other strange people I know call this thing an opossum, which is how it is spelled in the dictionary. But to pronounce the "o" in possum is about as stupid as pronouncing the "g" in the word gnat.
But no matter how you pronounce his name, the possum is one butt-ugly animal.
In terms of how possums relate to us Southerners, most folks tend to think that we eat them, usually in pie form. Granny Clampett of "The Beverly Hillbillies" has seen to that. Of course Granny also ate gopher gravy and pickled owl eggs, but I will tell y’all this much. If you want to get in more trouble than you can get out of in this lifetime, let the game warden catch you pickling an owl egg and see what happens to you.
Dear old Granny grossed out more than one city feller by feeding him possum pie on the fancy eating table. She also made a gorilla sick when she fed him a bowl of possum broth. That’s Hollywood’s idea of Southerners for you.
Here in the real south, we don’t eat possums anymore. Well, most of us don’t anyway. Fact is, I’ve never met a living soul, Southerner or they are ugly. Any animal that waits beside the road so it can jump out in front of oncoming traffic and be run over is just plain dense. The average Southern motorist runs over at least 900 possums in his driving lifetime. I am convinced that if Henry Ford hadn’t invented the automobile, we would at this very moment be up to our Southern armpits in possums.
Recently, however, I came across something that might help us use our possums to improve the environment, help our economy, and improve North-South relations all at the same time.
This idea occurred to me about a month ago when I was told that a dear friend of mine, Linda Roberts, retired Gaston County school principal that she is, was recently sighted wearing a possum-hair sweater. I had never heard of such a thing, but I am told that this particular possum-hair sweater was imported directly from New Zealand, where they also have plenty of possums.
And that got me to thinking. Our Southern possums are just as good as any foreign possums, and we still have plenty of them to go around. So what we need to do is gather up all the dead possums off the side of the road, shave them, and send all that possum hair to a factory that will knit it into sweaters. Then all we have to do is ship them up north where it is cold year-round, and sell them to all the Yankees who still live there.
we be able clean up our Southighways and make money off of cold Yankees all at the same time, but hopefully this will keep the northern Yankees warm enough so they’ll stay up north and not move down here.
Growing Grits Made Simple
With so many Northerners moving down, I thought maybe I should spend some time explaining that most misunderstood of Southern delicacies -- grits.
It bothers me some to see these poor folks wandering around in a fog of ignorance that could cause them to miss out on this Southern form of manna, so here's a grit lesson, for free.
First, it is important to know where grits come from. They don't really grow on trees. Southern good ol' boys have had a pretty good time telling Northerners brave enough to ask. The truth of the matter is, grits really grow on vines. They can be planted right out of the same bag you purchase off your grocer's shelf. And you can actually grow grits in your own back yard if you plant them correctly.
The real secret to good grit growing -- and this is important if you are going to try this it home, folks -- is to make sure you get a grit arbor. Grits need space to spread out so they can run. Grit arbors can be purchased at most Southern hardware and feed stores or anywhere that fishing tackle is sold. If you have the knack for building things, you might even try building your own. Just make sure you ask a good ol' boy how to build one. He will enjoy helping you more than you can imagine.
Once you get your grits planted and your arbor in place, it won't take very long before you are ready to harvest. Grits grow pretty fast. You will know it is time when your grits vines begin to sag low to the ground. Harvesting your grits can be done using one of two preferred methods. The most popular is to have two folks stand under the grit arbor holding a clean white sheet underneath. A third person then vigorously shakes the vine so the grits can fall onto the sheet. When the sheet is full, the grits are poured into a gunnysack.
The second method is not as popular, as it involves the expense of purchasing a grit picker. Again, this is available at most Southern hardware and feed stores or anywhere fishing tackle is sold. Don't try to make one of these yourself. If it is not properly calibrated it can pinch off a finger or put out an eye.
When you have shook up a mess of grits, you are ready to cook. This process is really quite simple. If you've saved the bag you planted your grits from, it'll have the cooking directions right there on the back. It is extremely important to follow the steps on the bag in the sequence they are given, which is something I learned the hard way.
My first attempt at cooking grits almost ended in tragedy. I was 18 years old and a member of the Mount Holly Lifesaving Crew. My best buddy and I decided to cook breakfast for the crew. My job was to cook the grits. I boiled the water and the grits together at the same time. I continued cooking them for over a half hour, adding more grits and water to try to improve the consistency. When breakfast was finally served, our lieutenant, Jim Owen, took a few bites and inquired, "Which one of you two clowns warmed up these grits?" I proudly acknowledged I did. "Well," he said, "that's all you did, because you sure didn't cook them." He then mumbled something ugly about us starving to death or poisoning ourselves if we didn't marry soon.
Once your grits are cooked properly, it is important to know what is appropriate to put in them. A good rule of thumb is that unless it will raise your cholesterol level, it doesn't belong in grits. Examples would be country ham, red eye gravy, sausage, livermush, bacon, and, of course, butter and salt. Maple syrup, white or brown sugar, jelly, or anything of this type is nasty and should be left out of your grits bowl.
Thus endeth the grit lesson. I hope I have cleared up some grit mysteries some of you might have been experiencing.
By the way, if any of you plan on growing your own grits this year, drop me a line and let me know. I would love a picture of you standing next to your grit arbor. Who knows, we might even be able to get them to run it in Grit magazine
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