Merry Christmas, you chitlin!

The reason for the season is Jesus.
And eating. Down south, the local grocery store's flyer this week:


Chitterlings, sometimes spelled chitlins in vernacular, are the intestines and rectum of a pig that have been prepared as food. They are a type of offal.

Offal don't begin to say it.

Things you will not hear me say at Christmas dinner: "Please pass the chitlins."

'But they're pre-cleaned!'

Where's Andrew Zimmern when you need him?!"

At the laudromat

At Danielsville laundromat, I park next to Papa and his boiled peanut and fried pork skin vendor cart, and enter past a bulletin board advertising the annual chitlin dinner at Watson Mill Fish House. Inside is a women in a brown tee shirt advertising Bubba's Taxidermy.

Above, Papa attending to a customer, wearing his trademark white cowboy hat, matching his white, flowing hair.

I watch my delicates spin, and my interior chortles on the typical southern markers fade as I chat with a woman who owns a washing machine, but there's no water at her house because her well ran dry...so she's here at the laundro. Her well gave up the ghost, and the drought doesn't seem to be easing anytime soon. "I wonder how long it'll be till they tell us we can't use this place," she said morosely.

She runs a farm and has to haul water for all the animals. She heats the water for dishwashing in the microwave. She takes a shower at her friends' house. One load of laundry takes 60 gallons..."I know. I've hauled them," she said.

As I pack to leave, I wish the the no-water dry well woman good luck. She brightens, saying "Nice chatting with you!"