Well, hey y’all!
We were talking about people from the South the other day and my daddy came to the front of my mind, as so many memories came rushing in. I always thought he missed his calling being a mechanic and should have been a stand-up comedian. He was such a funny and comical man.
People from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina were just far enough south to be labeled as from the land of Dixie. He honestly was from Dixieland, and if you knew him you would pick up on his colloquialisms and idioms during the first few minutes of the conversation. Some of them I can tell you and some of them, well, let’s just say as a “Southern Belle,” I’d better straddle that pond and just wade around the water.
He loved telling stories of his boyhood being raised in the country and some of the mishaps that went along with being raised in the country.
He had two brothers but one really close in age and the two of them had some hair-raising adventures, to hear my daddy tell it. They had several fishing holes to drop bait in and many trees to hunt ’coons and squirrels, and those were the times they were not wrestling and scrapping on the ground over some type of challenge or hitch during the hunt. This competitiveness continued throughout all their years.
I can remember sitting on my Big Daddy’s front porch on Sunday afternoons and listening to the men talk, not realizing I was witnessing history of my kin that would carry in my memories for all my life.
They would talk about everything from the weather to ugly women to life in general. The euphemisms that they threw around were the ones I heard all my life and never thought they were weird or peculiar.
I remember them talking about one of my aunts that had remarried, and she married maybe 12 times in the course of her life, and the man she had just married was not, shall we say, too bright and they referred to him as “the lights being on but nobody was home.” adding “that even a blind hog could find an acorn every now and then.” Then they finished with, “Looks like he has one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave.” Her intended was usually quite older.
Daddy would always say a plain woman fell out of an ugly tree and hit every branch to the ground and she could make a freight train take a dirt road. You just never knew what might come out at any given time. One thing he always asked my mother for, and I loved his saying, was “Gimme some sugar, Mary Jane.”
I have noticed myself opening my mouth and some of these colloquialisms just falling out of it, and my grandchildren have to ask for clarification.
My husband and I eat lots of chicken, and one night we were eating our third meal of the feathered bird for the week, and I told him I had eaten so much chicken I felt called to preach. The boys needed an explanation. We had corn on the cob that night and it reminded me of one of my cousins that could eat corn through a picket fence. Another explanation. It’s been so hot here this summer that the trees are bribing the dogs. Expound?
And I love the way we Southerners say goodbye as we leave after a visit. There are several steps that hold fast.
First, you say, “I better get on home” and then say you are “fixin’ to leave.”
Then you tell your host what a good time you‘ve had.
Tell them how lovely their home is.
Tell them you plan to have them over for supper real soon, maybe some of that venison Bubba killed last winter. Then you add all the hugs, hugs, hugs, and “See y’all soon!”
And, oh yes, if she has leftovers and offers, aways take a plate, as “your husband” always gets hungry before bed.
