When Sweet turns to Sour
This is not a food or garden post. One of the few good things about 2020 is time at home to reflect, so this is part of my process. A note of caution: this post contains a few references to racial epithets. How long have magnolias symbolized Southern femininity? Surely before the 1989 film that I and so many daughters born in this region can quote by heart. A few weeks ago I walked down a street one block from my own, and took in the scent of magnolia blossoms in morning humidity. Heady but not overpowering, and slightly sweet and sensual. I stopped to admire the large creamy ivory flowers opened fully at their peak, and a memory came. Credit: Andrew Butko My Grandmother Hazelene, my father's mother, and I used to sit and have a picnic in the low branches of a large old magnolia in the front yard of the home where she grew up, in Badin, Stanly County, North Carolina. "The Old Home Place," as she called it, had an old Frigidaire refrigerator with a chrome handle you h