Pressure Cookers…Gone with the Wind

“Song, song of the South, sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth. Gone, gone with the wind, there ain’t nobody looking back again.” Alabama

If there’s one thing Southerners know anything about, it’s “gone with the wind.” Last week the passing of pressure cookers was mourned with dirges and eulogies.

Living along the sweltering Georgia coast, one wonders what the world’s coming to when the law of unintended consequences drops by, as it did last Sunday in Hortense, Georgia, a rural crossroad in a time warp where happenings are few and change is invisible, unless it’s the weather, the thermometer or the water level of the Little Satilla River where the religious right meets the liberal left and neither are unequally yoked in orthodoxy for the rite of baptism of their converts, young and old, like it or not, sprinkled or immersed.

It’s a place where home-grown truth works and outside meddling is as unwelcomed as gnats in August. It’s where the last major battle of the pressure cooker was waged. On a vacant lot next to Dollar General a memorial of a enormous pressure cooker---fashioned with rusted tin from a derelict barn and parts from Lamar’s Junk Yard---pays homage to the desperate struggle.

Hortense is also where hasty ‘shotgun’ marriages of first cousins are not uncommon, arranged or otherwise, allowing for ‘fair and balanced’ gossip and suggesting a bride’s bulge might in fact be a consequence of Cracker Barrel biscuits and not heat.

Heat can cause other strange ‘things’ to happen…like sightings of alien spaceships at night while eating boiled peanuts cooked in a pressure cooker. Some blame these phenomena on the sodium levels in peanuts which enhances mental acuity when dropped into a Coke or Miller Lite, and the resulting fizz is sucked through a straw. Some say a lot of things. This is Hortense.

While all this is interesting, it doesn’t compare to the humiliation Aunt Janie suffered on Sunday. She’s a devout lady, a church tither, leader of the woman’s guild and organist in the First Apostolic Redemption Temple, often profanely referred to by its acronym, FART, where she has not missed Sunday School in 2,721 consecutive Sundays, her only sin being a garrulous widow.

She burned up the phone party line during the week organizing a birthday party for her neighbor, Mabel, who was turning 99. She used certain catch words like ‘tea party,’ how much ‘good stuff’ she’d packed into the pressure cooker, and eventually opined on government spending, taxes and ObamaCare.

No one told her about ‘The Machine,’ a vast government data base where suspect words are secretly collated and monitored by thousands of below-average high school dropouts hired to fulfill the employment mandate of ‘no child left behind.’

Making matters worse, Aunt Janie recently held a fund raiser for the Brantley MudBoggers after the IRS targeted their application for tax exempt status. She later learned the FBI had her on a ‘watch list’ for her effusive jubilance in praising the ‘Patriots’ returning from Afghanistan.

Well, last Sunday 15 octogenarian ladies arrived at Aunt Janie’s house for the birthday. She had possum and potatoes cooking in the pressure cooker. The ladies each brought a casserole. They had barely finished the first cup of punch when 38 black Humvees with tinted windows rolled up. Men in camouflage uniforms with bomb-sniffing dogs piled out and surrounded the house. The Savannah SWAT team unloaded its baggage of hulking men with bald heads and automatic rifles with knives gripped between their teeth.

They assaulted the house. The ladies were marched into the yard, chained and searched, their rights read to them. A bomb robot was sent inside. It retrieved the pressure cooker. The bomb dogs attacked the pot and ripped the possum to shreds. It was an ugly scene.

The blotched incident would have faded into oblivion except for an overhead ATF heat-seeking drone searching for contraband shrubs, the current South Georgia cash crop. Pictures were taken and instantly circulated on YouTube, which alerted the local volunteer fire department who hosed down the miscreants as they fled in embarrassment.

None of this would have happened except for a Saudi named Hussein who was arrested at the Detroit Airport concealing an empty pressure cooker. He swore it was only used for cooking lamb. My, how great a fire a little pot kindleth!

But things have settled down in Hortense since then. PTSD has arrived and settled in. A long recovery is predicted. Aunt Janie now uses an iPhone. Her niece is instructing her in the esoterica of Acronyms for Seniors, a firewall against further government intrusion. Yesterday’s text was BYOT and WTP…something about teeth and prunes.

It’s a sad day in America when lamb, possum or peanuts can’t be cooked in pressure cookers. “Gone, gone with the wind, there ain’t nobody looking back again.”

Bud Hearn
May 23, 2013