You're invited to Sunday dinner

Pull up a chair at my grandmother’s Sunday dinner table.
She put the extension leaf in the table this morning and Papaw helped her set the table before church.
She’s been up since 6 a.m. cooking, but she and Papaw started preparing this meal months ago.
It may get a bit crowded around this table with my parents, my three living grandparents and all of my aunts and uncles, first cousins and second cousins (some of whom will have to use TV trays in the living room), but there’s always room for one more.
Pace yourself as you start to fill up that plate. As soon as a bare spot appears, Mamaw will insist you to go back for seconds and then thirds.
You should know we don’t always pass things to the left, which is proper etiquette. Everyone dips first from the dish in front of them.
That plate of roast beef — it’s from my grandfather’s herd of black angus cattle in the pasture across the street from this little white house in West Iredell.
Those mashed ’taters were made from potatoes planted in the garden out back.
Fork you a slice of that tomato and sandwich it between the layers of one of the yeast rolls in that bread basket. Mamaw makes the rolls like her momma did. And yes, there’s Duke’s mayonnaise in the fridge.
Here, have a heaping spoonful of green beans and one of corn. They come from that same garden. As do the cabbage in the slaw and the cucumbers in the pickle jar.
While you enjoy this fresh meal, let me tell you about one of my favorite childhood memories. It involves corn, cows, watermelon and swimming.
Pick a summer evening out of my childhood and you are likely to find me at my grandparent’s house, which from my house was just through the woods and on yon side of the hayfield.
My grandparents worked full-time jobs, Mamaw at the textile plant Beauty Maid Mills and Papaw at Southern Screw. But they still made the time, found the time, took the time to work a garden.
Papaw would come home and change out of his work overalls and into his farming clothes. He’d pick the corn and bring it by the bushels-full to the side yard where my grandmother and her sisters and my mom and aunt (and sometimes me and my cousins, until we got bored) would sit in a circle in lawn chairs and shuck and silk and tell stories of the good old days or who has the best price on paper towels this week.
Once a batch was ready to be cut off the cob and cooked, half of the group would go into the kitchen and start the process of freezing the corn.
I can still hear the whir of the box fans blowing around this kitchen table to cool the corn. I spent many a summer night around this table with a spoon in both hands to stir hot corn around aluminum pie pans to speed up the cooling process.
Once the last bag of corn was put up in the freezer and the last pie pan cleaned and dried, us kids would pile into Papaw’s old, blue, ’60s-something Chevy truck with the gear shaft on the steering column. He’d dumped all the corn husks in the bed, and we would ride on the tailgate, legs swinging, with him driving to the pasture to give the cows a treat.
“Suuuuuue cow!” he’d yell, to get their attention. Not that he had to. When those cows heard that truck bouncing through the pasture it was like a dinner bell calling them to the table.
Papaw calls all the female cows Blacky and most of the bulls Abe.
Why was it that Papaw could walk up to one of the cows and pat it on the head, but that same cow would always run from my outstretched hand?
Once the cows were fed their corn-husk snack, we’d head back to the house and gather around the picnic table.
Papaw would grab up a freshly picked watermelon, Mamaw would fetch a sharp knife and I’d grab the salt shaker.
Papaw cut that watermelon in half-moon-shaped pieces and we’d pass around the salt shaker. As we chomped on that bright, red melon, we’d let the juice run down our chins. The seeds we spit out over a shoulder.
To avoid having to take a bath when we got home, my cousins and I would jump in the swimming pool, which by that time was the same temperature as the night air.
Oh, did you save room for dessert? There’s persimmon puddin’ made from the persimmon tree in the back corner of the yard in front of the muscadine vines. Or you can have apple pie. Or both. And yes, the apples came off the trees beside the persimmon.
We ate meals similar to this in the winter, too. How’s that possible? My grandparents have lived off this land since they were knee high to a grasshopper. That two-story gray house you passed on the corner to get here is where Mamaw grew up.
You can’t get much closer to your food source than the Bustle table. They were growing and eating homegrown, organic and more local than local before it was the “in” thing to do.
They once did it out of necessity and still do it because it’s a way of life, it’s a way to feed their still-growing family and Mamaw can do it better than any jolly giant that’s green.
Throughout my life I have popped in and out of the process to string a few beans here and there, peel a cucumber or two (I hate the film they leave on your hands) and turn a spoon around a cooling pan of corn.
Except for making blueberry jam one summer from my own bushes (I inherited a green thumb, too), I’ve never canned, frozen or dried fruits or vegetables from garden to shelf.
But this summer, I am making the time, finding the time, taking the time to learn how.
If you have any tips for me or others, e-mail cshuffler@morganton.com.
See you at Mamaw’s next Sunday.

Cheryl M. Shuffler is the news editor at The News Herald.