Laudator Temporis Acti

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), Cross Creek, 17 (Our Daily Bread):

I learned to love the soft-shell cooter from Ed Hopkins. Ed is gone from the earth he loved so well, but in his life he was a country gentleman with the tastes and instincts of an Indian. He announced that he would gather us a dinner directly from the land, and we set out from the Creek one Sunday morning in early summer.

"The Lord will provide," he said.

Rain threatened, and the turtles were crawling. They lay their eggs ahead of a rain, so that no trace will be left to catch the bright eyes of skunk or raccoon. We followed fresh trails and came on our cooters in the act of laying. We took two sizeable ones and part of the eggs, leaving the rest buried for seed. Our entree then was to be turtle eggs, the turtle itself our meat course. We cut a swamp cabbage, or palmetto, for one vegetable and wild mustard greens for another. We gathered poke leaves for a salad, to be dressed with the juice of wild oranges. We roamed across a gallberry flat and found blueberry bushes waist high, and picked our dessert into our hats.

"The Lord will provide," Ed repeated.

We made cornpone of our own meal, ground at the old water-mill at Hawthorn. Dinner was cooked outdoors over the open fire. It was a feast. For drink we had a pale dry yellow wine made of wild elderberry blossoms.