Bill Ahlschwede (billahls@utm.edu) from MMLab2.utm.edu at 09/28/98 10:57AM
comment
    If Miss Mary is what is meant by a Southern Lady, then being a Southern Lady is a worthy aspiration. Miss Mary is one of several senior Matriarchs at our church. Her grandchildren sit with her, if they are in town. One is in high school, one away in college. Early this summer, she and I began a limited exchange of vegetables from our gardens. She had tomatoes and cucumbers in excess of her needs before mine were ready, so I borrowed some of hers in exchange for some eggplant. I raise two varieties of eggplant. One is the long skinny type in purple. These seldom are more than an inch and three-quarters in diameter, and can be as long as fifteen inches. In dry years, like this one, they usually are about eight inches long. The other variety bears white fruit. These are usually about an inch and a half in diameter and about six inches long. Their skins are a milky white color, a color which one can almost see into. In return for four tomatoes and three short cucumbers, I delivered Miss Mary two egg plant, one purple, one white. She had requested that I not leave much because she lived alone. On Sunday, Miss Mary thanked me for the eggplant, and commented that she had only eatten the purple one. I said that they keep well. When I asked her a couple of weeks later, she said that she had not eatten the white one. "I loved the color so much that I just looked at it," she said. "I've never seen one of those before. I love that color." I have delivered to Miss Mary several yellow squash, a handfull of okra and three round white Peter Pan squash. My egg plant have been slow, aided by the lack of rain. But her gracious appreciation for the lone white eggplant qualifies her for emmulation. I have come to regard her willingness to give and to receive, without any sense of keeping track, the true mark of a Southern Lady.