The Recipe Card I Set by the Pan

How I Got Here

I married Warren Calloway in the spring of a year I remember mostly for how happy I was.

We met at the feed store in Bainbridge, where I kept the books two days a week. He came in for calf starter and chicken grit, and then he stood at my counter too long.

He asked me questions about a bag of feed that any farm boy already knew the answer to. It took him four visits to work up to asking me to the fish fry at the Methodist church.

It took me about four seconds to say yes.

Warren is a quiet man. He runs a small cow calf operation on the ground his grandfather cleared, forty head of black baldies and a line of fence he is always out mending.

He is not a fool and he is not a coward. I want that said plain and said early, because of what comes later in this.

Lorraine was already a widow by the time I came along. Warren’s father, Hugh, had passed two winters before we ever met.

She lived alone in the big farmhouse with the wraparound porch and the dining room that could seat the whole family at one long table.

She was the kind of woman who had run the church kitchen for forty years and let everyone know the roster was hers to keep.

She had opinions about how green beans ought to be cut. She had opinions about how a ham should be scored, and who was allowed to bring which dish to a potluck.

I understood early that Thanksgiving belonged to her. The house was hers. The table was hers. The whole day was hers, down to the plates.

I was the daughter in law from a family she considered a notch below her own. My people farmed too. We just farmed smaller, and poorer.

She never once let me forget that difference, and she never once said it out loud. That was her particular gift. She could put you in your place without leaving a mark on you.

So when she asked me, that first October, to make the cornbread dressing for the dinner, I took it as a kindness. I thought she was letting me in the door.

I had so much to learn about Lorraine. She was not letting me in. She was handing me a rope and watching to see what I would do with it.