Mark Millican: Good eatin’ and colorful kinfolk

Summertime brings it on — fresh vegetables out of the garden and going to see relatives you haven’t seen in awhile, oftentimes during vacation or too infrequent family reunions.

At least that’s how I remember it. Spending time in Sugar Valley, going skinny-dippin’ in snaky creeks and getting in maypop wars, eating watermelon and fried chicken. Yessir, summer means good eating out of the garden, visiting your kinfolk and remembering how bigger-than-life some of your relatives seemed.

On my Dad’s side, my Uncle Frank was a true outdoorsman, taking us down to the Oostanaula River to try our luck and all the while regaling us with tales of his own hunting, fishing and trapping prowess. Later in life his doctor said he probably suffered one or more minor heart attacks while out checking his traps, but he just kept on going. I couldn’t count how many messes of fried fish he, Dad and my Uncle Mel provided the family at large.

Over in LaFayette lived my great-grandfather, Pa Norman, who was a big rasslin’ fan. Once he got excited during a match and got to boxing around and punched a hole in the side of his woodframe TV set. He was also quick with his cane on any of us kids who dared to get between him and rasslin’ when it was on. Of course, that’s back when wrestlers were Real Men, not braggarts pumped up on steroids. We’d sit down at his table for supper and he always admonished me to eat my sliced tomatoes because the seeds were what gave you muscles and made you strong.

I hung on every word and still eat my tomatoes today.

My great-uncle Shields lived with Pa. He was in World War II and during the Allies’ second landing at Salerno, Italy, sustained shrapnel wounds in his hip. Surgery took out some of the metal, but not all, and the pain through the years became unbearable. Eventually he took his life by his own hand.

Memorial Day is not just for those who died in combat.

In upper South Carolina amid the watermelon patches, gnarled oaks and sandy expanses lived my Mom’s side of the family. Some of my earliest childhood memories centered around my grandmother and grandfather’s pond amid their 300 acres of pine and oak forest. It was down in the woods on a winding road away from the house, and many a day of fishing resulted in fish frys and cookouts with a big black kettle of catfish stew — with corn, tomatoes and okra thrown in — kept on the roil by my MaMa Nellie Mae Faile and a hot fire underneath.

My great-uncles were a colorful bunch with names like Buck, Bull, Shark, Squire, Wop and Jake (the Snake). One of my great-uncles produced a fruit jar of clear liquid once at one of these outings (away from the womenfolk, of course) and asked me to go down to the pond and dip out some water to cut it with. I’m sure the corn juice killed all the paramecium and bacteria I saw floating around in there. And no, Mom, I didn’t drink any of it back then as a boy.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Uncle Bull drove a grader and always fixed the road down to the pond after a few rains gullied it out. He also rode herd over the local chain gang. Once he had the “boys” — black and white together — digging the foundation for my grandparents’ cabin at the pond. How could I ever forget the sight? A huge man, sitting there on a stump with a pistol strapped to a wide belt, a pint flask of whiskey in his back pocket, and keeping a cigar lit just enough to light a firecracker every now and then to throw down into the footer between one of the workers’ feet. He’d roar with laughter when it went off and they would, too, especially if the joke wasn’t on them.

Because they endured the Great Depression, many of our kinfolk thought more frugally about food back then. In other words, it wasn’t something to waste or be “picky” about as we are today. If you grew up on a farm, you worked in the fields. The summer I spent while being off from school at Young Harris College — picking green peppers for a quarter a sack, stripping corn and cutting sugar cane — pales in comparison to my parents’ stories of picking cotton all day long in the hot sun, albeit hundreds of miles apart.

On leave from Camp Lejeune, N.C., one time I visited my late grandmother just a couple of hundred miles away. She asked me to cut some fat off a pork loin and when I was done she mildly reprimanded me for cutting away too much of the flesh with the fat. If I had been one of her sons 40 years earlier I’m sure that would have gotten me a “whuppin’.”

Well, I could go on about relatives, including my MaMa Lottie with her fried pies, poke salet and squirrel dumplings. She used to buy chicken whole and cut it up, frying every bit of it — and then she’d nibble on the skinny neck while the rest of us ate the meaty parts. It was only years later it dawned on me that as a young woman she ate the most meager piece of the bird so her family could get the more nutritious legs, thighs, breasts and wings during the Depression era — and the habit had stuck even into more prosperous years.

And I could go on about Southern food in general. Speaking of which, I’m getting a hankering for some fried okra, fried squash, pinto beans, cornbread and a chunk of raw onion ... and don’t forget the buttermilk.

Anyone care to join me?

Mark Millican is a former reporter for The Daily Citizen.

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Mark Millican: Good eatin’ and colorful kinfolk

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