Short Fiction--Two Old Biddies on the Beach: Part 2

"What do you feel like eating this morning?" I ask my mother.

"Whatever you feel like making," was her response. 

So, I made scrambled eggs with low fat cheddar dusted with my version of my daughter's nutritional spice blend. AND, I made amaranth grits--southern style, the way Marylou taught me to. With some modifications. Instead of butter I used a smidge of bacon grease and rather than collards I tossed in some baby kale I had done the other night with steak out on the grill. There was a single wee slice of meat that I diced up and tossed on in. Since the greens and steak were already seasoned, I simply added the hot sauce.

Bless my soul if it all wasn't simply scrumptious. As in, really, really good. She didn't think so, though and had to indicate her distaste for what I was slopping onto her plate beside the nice mound of yellow crumbles with a scrunched up disgusted face. 

Really, mum?

"I told you I don't like steak for breakfast!" 

"Have you ever had steak for breakfast, mother?"

"Well, no. I guess I'm just used to thought of..."

"Of what? Bacon and eggs? Ham and eggs? Sausage and eggs?"

Having made my point, she just sat there nibbling her eggs. As I did the dishes, I invoked my memere who had raised both my mother and I. She had encouraged us to not be afraid of that which we do not know, to at least try things before poo-poo-ing them. 

"I tried," I said to the heavens. 

"Did you," a voice in my head replied.

As I'm spooning the remains into a plastic storage container, I grab a tiny spoonful and march it over to my mother's scowling face. 

"Speak what you know," I demanded.

After some hesitation and more scrunchy face, she tried the modified southern grits, sans steak. 

"It still tastes like steak," she grumbled.

"It can't possibly since I just added the meat. What you are tasting is the bacon drippings."

After a long moment she conceded that the concoction is "OK".

"As in you'll eat it in the future if I serve it to you?"

"Well, no." She scowls at me. "I told you, I don't like steak with my eggs."

"See?! I told you! She's YOUR daughter," I say to my grandmother shaking the spoon to the heavens. 

I begin to chuckle at myself, at my talking with ghosts. I forget about my mother for a moment. Then I remember her, and there she is scowling at me like a three year old, knowing I had told on her. 

"Feel better now?" she sneers.