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Dear Reader’s, Howdy! How is everyone this week? This is Mama Season. Yep, sure enough. What do I mean by “Mama Season?” Well, all of the mamas are cooking for their families. Every time I go to the grocery store I can barely make it through the aisles, there are so many shopping mamas just like me. Now all of us mamas cook for our families all year round, but the abundance of us in the grocery stores right now leads to a lot of conversations. Here is an interesting conversation I had with a mama at the grocery store recently.

At the meat section I stood patiently waiting for a woman to pick out a ham. I had to buy a ham also. The poor woman was down on her knees peering into the refrigerator. She reached for one ham and then examined it closely. She then put it back and straining her arms reached all the way to the back of the fridge and chose another ham. As she examined it closely she sighed, stood and put the ham into her cart. When she saw me waiting for my turn she apologized for holding me up.  She sighed again and said, “If I pick the wrong ham for my family they will never let me forget it!” Her name is Rhonda, and she is a Ranger at Bays Mountain State Park. She runs the Possum Club. I kid you not-the Possum Club. Now Ranger Rhonda is an accomplished woman, she is college educated. A ranger who wrangles possums, that can’t be easy. But none of that matters to her family. What matters is that she is Mama, and she better serve a good ham by gosh! It was nice to chit chat with another hard working mother. A sort of therapy if you will- I began to tell her my chicken story.

It happened two autumns ago. I planned a lovely chicken dinner for my daughter Amber Page, my daughter Eili Janie and her fiancé Kyle. Kyle was and is the son I never had. I love him to death, he knows this and has no trouble calling me Mama and voicing his dinner requests. So Kyle, being the budding environmentalist that he is, called me up and asked me to buy an organic chicken. In fact what he said was that he would not eat a chicken unless it was organic. So being the good mama that I believe myself to be, I spent hours the day of the dinner party shopping all over Marion County for an organic chicken. Nobody had an organic chicken. So, I bought an organic chicken look alike. I stuffed the chicken and served her up. Alright-I did claim that the chicken had better breeding than what she actually had-she probably was from the wrong side of the tracks, but with the proper stuffing and side dishes she was pretty tasty! It was a beautiful meal cooked with mama love. Served in my log cabin on a perfect fall day. Everyone ate and ate. Well Miss Eili Janie can read me extremely well. I cannot pass anything by her. She would look me in the eyes with a steely expression and ask, “was that an ORGANIC chicken Mama?! Kyle wants to know!” I caved under all the chicken pressure and pleaded, “No it wasn’t, but they don’t sell organic chicken around here!” My darling children weren’t buying it. I still hear Eili say to this day, “Kyle is still mad about that chicken Mama.”  Sigh- Maybe next time I will serve possum. As far as I know they are all organic in this county-

Well y’all, I usually recommend a book from the library, but this week I am going to recommend that you use the computer at the library to research Ranger Rhonda’s Possum Club. It is something else! Until next time, have a good week, and have a literary week!