Southerners are a very “cousiny” people – we seem to have more kinfolks than anybody on earth. That is really not true, but we tend to stay put for generations at a time, so it is quite likely that descendants of a set of our third-great grandparents might be close friends in the community as well as distant cousins. Southerners used to call such distant kin, “Kissin’ Cousins” since it was generally considered acceptable to date or even marry them if the family ties were far enough apart, although in Georgia’s defense, your compiler believes such practices were much more common in some neighboring states than they were here.
Then there are mutual cousins, and there are tons of those in any small-town setting, typically. What your compiler means by “mutual cousin” is this: his college roommate and close longtime friend, Keith, is just that – a longtime friend with no direct blood ties to your compiler. But Keith’s older first cousin, Sylvia, married your complier’s uncle nearly sixty years ago and had two kids, who are now successful and accomplished adults named Wendy and Scott, and who are your compiler’s first cousins. At the same time, they are Keith’s second cousins if we measure it the Southern way, or first cousins, once removed if we measure it the way most of the world does. So while Keith and I are not kin, we have mutual cousins in Wendy and Scott.
Such relationships abound around the South, which makes it difficult for a newcomer to talk about any community member to anyone else without stepping into the muck both quickly and deeply. And speaking of muck, your compiler’s late cousin, Vernon Woods of Brooks, had more of it than just about anybody.
You see, Cudn Vernon was for many years the largest independent egg producer in Georgia, with something like 175,000 layers and replacement pullets in his houses at any time. Periodically he had to clean out those enormous chicken houses, a semi-annual assault on the olfactory sensibilities of everyone within smelling distance of Brooks. Another byproduct of those clean-out days was flies – swarms and swarms of them, in such Pharaonic quantities that no child in Brooks in those days had trouble understanding on a first-hand basis the Fourth Plague of Egypt in Sunday School.
But a good thing about clean-out days at Cudn Vernon’s was the rich fertilizer that gardeners and farmers from miles around came to collect. One such day, your compiler’s grandfather drove his 1964 Ford pickup to Cudn Vernon’s and said, “Councilman Woods, I’d like a pickup load of manure to put on my potatoes.” Cudn Vernon, of whom it must be said knew an ace when dealt one, replied with a grin, “Absolutely, Mr. Mayor, but I prefer butter, sour cream, and chives on mine!”
On another such occasion, a fine Brooks resident named Travis Hardy drove his own truck to Cudn Vernon’s to get a load for his crops. He said Cudn Vernon hopped onto his tractor, scooped up a heaping helping of goo in its bucket, and turned to unload it in the back of Mr. Travis’s truck. A farm hand called out to Cudn Vernon just then, and Cudn Vernon turned down the tractor’s throttle in order to hear him. He forgot, however, to halt the bucket’s hydraulic rise.
Listen to Mr. Travis finish the tale. “That bucket kept going up and up till it got right over Vernon’s head, then it dumped that whole load directly on top of him. Vernon jumped off that tractor and ran to a nearby standpipe to rinse himself off. We couldn’t help laughing and you know Vernon never has cussed a lick in his life. All he said that day was, ‘Durn the old purple dog!’ whatever that may mean.”
So here’s to the old purple dog, as well as to cousins everywhere.
