Sour Weed

Ugh. When a very young girl, Little Miss Phillips craved a candy called a “Warhead” that was sweet on the outside with a sour inner part. I’m not sure of the name but sure of the face crunching sour core. Peppers are known for their heat according to a subjective scale, but when it comes to sour, I don’t know how to describe something that makes your teeth itch.

While playing “remember when” with a friend, he recalled picking and chewing “sour weed.”

They have red stalks when ripe and about a foot tall. I haven’t seen a stalk of sour weed in a very long time.

The weed was a problem to dairymen in that if a grazing cow got some sour weed in her cud, it soured all of her milk.

I never knew that to happen, but you never know.

Another thing kids chewed were pepper weed that had lines of little seed that were hot to eat.

Now it makes me wonder who discovered that.

Beggar lice are not bugs but the little things that stick to your pants and socks as you walk through grass.

They are small and brown, but the inner seeds are green and taste like boiled peanuts. Beggar lice give a deer hunter something to do while waiting for something exciting to happen.

Fast forward a dozen years and LMP and I were walking through a place in North Georgia informally known as “Hickory Grove.”

This is where my mother grew up, and in the second decade of the 1900’s, there were abundant hickory trees.

This is where men went to find a hickory sapling to whittle down for a hammer or axe handle. In the fall, it was where people took baskets to fill with hickory nuts.

The hickory is a cousin to pecans, but the nuts are harder to crack. Pound the nuts with a hammer or rock and hickory shrapnel flies.

A basket of hickory nuts warmed beside the living room fire place to “cure” and dry. The nut meat shrank, making it easier to extract.

Passion fruit is a common name for passiflora, which grows on a vine, often in tall grass and on fences.

The beautiful complex blossoms appear in the fall, and by removing a few parts, it produces something that looks like a tiny ballerina. It is perfectly alright to enjoy the bloom, but you can enjoy the ballerina or the fruit.

Passion fruit is a fuzzy looking brown or purple fruit that looks like a kiwi but isn’t. They have a sweet custard-like taste.

I think having a passiflora vine or two would be nice just for the flower.

joenphillips@yahoo.com