When dinner was the noon-time meal....

My grandparents always called the mid day meal "dinner," left over from sharecropping days and living in the country with a full garden for energy boosting fare for poor rural folks. Even in the years of my childhood, when they owned their home and ran the adjacent country grocery and Sinclair gasoline station, they'd break mid day for sustenance. There'd be field peas and pans of hot bread (cornbread!), fresh sliced tomatoes, some bits of meat quite often (pork, cold roast or fried chicken). Often, corn, greens, new potatoes. Some days there'd be thick sliced bologna from the store, and maybe canned peaches with canned milk. At my mamaw's, across the river bottom and on her surplus stamps or hard earnings from third shift work at the hospital, there'd be the best biscuits you've ever touched to your lips. Fried meat. Several vegetables and milk or ice tea, maybe a Dr. Pepper. Sometimes, hunks of government cheese.

I have always adored the ritual of gathering (whether from the earth or from the market) foods to be prepared with spirit and generosity, then shared with folks. It is one of the deepest things I know.


So after multiple false starts this day, I've made it back from the market with lots of fresh veggies, lean proteins and some whole grain things I got from Turnip Truck. I love when my larder is full -- it just makes me feel secure and homed in and nested somehow. I like knowing that if you and some child you found on the street were to show up unexpectedly, and ravenous at that, I could feed you. There's my food psychology.

Aside from which, lugging around this changling body and making a new set of lungs for this boy babe is hard work. I need all the nutritive, spiritual and emotional support I can come by.


Ta Dah!