With all the chaos, death and mayhem going on, my adviser-in-chief (my wife) suggested I find something light to talk to you about this week. My mom came to mind. 

Virginia Elizabeth Creech Hedgepeth was a country girl, born on her parents’ farm in Middlesex. According to her siblings, she got into most anything that was remotely “fun.”

Her “fun” mostly involved dirt. It was everywhere, so why not play with it? But her mother had other ideas. 

Where my mom saw “fun” in the dirt, her mom saw germs. Thus, my mom was brought up to fear germs. They were everywhere — in her food, in the dirt, on her toys. The only way to remove germs, according to her mom, was to cook all food well-done.

Thus, she burned everything she cooked: breakfast, lunch, supper, even cookies, cakes and pies.

Virginia was incredibly talented, it seems. Except she could not cook or boil water without some disaster. That is what I was told by Dad, and what Mom demonstrated. But the cookbook she had purchased during World War II helped a great deal, as well as the emerging wartime recipes to cook with less. She was learning to cook as the war ended in 1945, and I was born that same year.

But being from the South and a Southern farm girl, she knew she had to learn. The food we had was most interesting.

One day when I was young, I remember the hamburger that Mom cooked for supper. The buns were toasted in the gas fired-oven and were well-done, meaning black on the bottoms, very brown — with hints of black — on the tops. 

The hamburger was described by Dad as a hockey puck. That was when Dad started eating more meals at Fire Station No. 1, since we lived in the Oettinger Apartments on the corner of Vance and Douglas streets.

Mom became a lover of cooking. She could make brownies that were out of this world, from the time I could eat them to the year she died at age 70.  She would make those brownies for our kids. And our kids loved them. Well, that is, the brownies that were not on the sides of the glass baking pan. 

Those in the center, about an inch from the sides of that 13-by-9-inch pan, were soft and gooey. Those bordering the sides were black and hard and crusty and all sorts of nouns that describe burned food. 

But guess who eats them? Me. 

My wife and I made brownies last week and I left them in the oven on Virginia time — that is, too long. Boy, were the edges hard. And no one in our family wanted them — except for me. They were good. And thanks to dental floss, my teeth did not suffer too much.

My mom also loved chicken pastry. But that poor chicken cooking was a scary deal back when I was a kid trying to help in the kitchen and later when she spent her last years living with us. 

She would place that chicken in the pressure cooker, and look out! She killed any germs that might be on that chicken. Those cooked bones were like rubber bands, or just nonexistent.

These are some of the good memories of Virginia. You have such stories of your grandmother. Tell them, write them down. Even bake a few pies that have burned crust to remember those good old days when refrigeration was an ice block delivered by a man from an ice truck.

Virginia burned everything, but she loved me, my dad, all her brothers and sisters and everyone she met in Wilson. Mom never had a bad word about anyone, not even the butcher who messed up the steak order. 

Call your grandmother. Tell her you really would like to have some of her brownies or whatever she used to cook. And then watch her face grow younger.

Oliver Hedgepeth, a native Wilsonian, is a professor of logistics, teaching online at the American Military University. Email him at blh4835@gmail.com.