Good thing I'm suffering from total inertia...

...or I'd be bothered about some things.

This is the South. There are some things that are sacred. Two, real near the top of the list, are biscuits and chicken & dressing. I make awesome biscuits. Took me years to figure it out since my grandmother's instructions don't usually include specific amounts. Chicken and dressing? I'm still practicing. Sometimes good, sometimes not so. It happens.

You can now get frozen biscuits, in a bag, that are just as good as mine. Or my friend, Tony's, for that matter, and his are always awesome, too. But now? You can make chicken and dressing in a crockpot using...forgive me, Lord...cream of chicken soup. Out of a can. And this chicken and dressing is AMAZING. I mean, I put two tablespoons of sage in there, some cornbread, onion, celery and eggs and y'all...my grandmother would not know it wasn't her's. It is SO good that my 81-year-old cranky-ass father, who criticizes EVERYTHING I make as "not like Virgie's," literally scraped the pan last week.

It's that good ;)

The biscuits are, too. So what's the problem?

Technically, I'm not sure there is one. But something in the back of my mind is nagging at me that...we're losing something here. We're losing the hands-on artisanal aspect. We're losing the history. We're losing standing next to your grandmother in the kitchen, eating raw biscuit dough and getting to cut out the circles while she shows you how to "not twist" the cutter. It's having a biscuit cutter that is a metal Gerber orange juice can your mom started using when your little brother was born. (He'll be 48 in September ;) It's listening to your grandmother criticize your mother's dressing every Christmas. No matter what.

I think I feel this way about Kindles. I don't have one, so I have no business saying anything but there's something about carrying a book in your satchel, about turning down the corner of the page and feeling guilty, about smelling the pages of an old book and finding the occasional illicit notation or the scrap of paper stuck in for a bookmark. I have my great-grandmother's original red-and-white-checked Better Homes & Gardens cookbook...how do you hand down a cherished bit of .jpeg to a grandchild?

You don't, but at the same time I haven't read The Help. I KNOW!!! How pitiful is that? But...I either have to go buy it or go get on the list at the library and then...well, I have to go get it. And for someone fast approaching hermit-status, that's a big go-do. If I had a Kindle, I'd have read it several times by now. But...

If I'm going to be a hermit, I have to stop thinking so much. I could get busy and clean up this house. And yard. And power-wash the siding and mulch the beds.

I could ;)

Comments

wineandroasts said…
I am fighting the Kindle - and an iPad (but that's only b/c I'm holding out for a MacBook Air). I fly a lot. We, all dressed in grey and black and dragging irritable carry-ons, shuffle onto the plane. We sit. We pull out our reading material. The last two time I've flown, I was the only person not in possession of an eReader. I was the Luddite holdout toting a hardcover copy of The Hunger Games. Even though I'd already listened to it on my iPhone, to READ it I needed to touch the book. I'm all about adopting technology - we were the first of anyone in either family with satellite television, to give up the landline in favor of mobile-only phones, to get XM radio, to blog, to Tweet, to Tumbl, to buy an iTouch, et cetera ad nauseum. But I just cannot give up good old-fashioned books. Won't do it and nobody can make me.