DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997                TAG: 9703300069

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA 

SOURCE: PAUL SOUTH

                                            LENGTH:   60 lines

PORCHES AND PUDDING: RECALLING CHILDHOOD EASTERS

A few months back, my sister and I were riding along a north Birmingham street, near the 70-year-old white frame house my grandparents used to call home.

A young couple lives there now. As we passed the house, we noticed work crews banging away.

``They're fixing the porch,'' my sister said flatly. I said nothing, but took a long, lingering look at the workers, who were sawing and hammering and drilling like beavers working on a dam.

For the next 20 minutes, I could think of nothing else but that porch.

Some may wonder what my grandparents' porch has to do with Easter Sunday.

Let me explain.

My grandmother, Mary Louise, was a woman who loved to cook big meals, especially for the holidays. And for each and every Sunday until I was well into my 30s, she prepared enough food to feed the Green Bay Packers. Ham, green beans, fried chicken, collards, tomatoes, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, banana pudding, strawberry shortcake, and an ocean's worth of sweet tea.

I never actually saw my grandmother sit down to one of these meals herself. She was too busy serving everyone else. And she had a standard rule of thumb - if every person at the table didn't eat at least two helpings of everything, the meal was ``not fit to eat.''

There was something special about her Easter meal. The menu was much the same. But Mama always took great pleasure in inviting to her home for Easter dinner folks who had nowhere else to go. For at least 15 Easters, her cousins Theron and Merle came to dinner, an invitation that came after the death of their only son.

``As long as I'm able,'' she'd tell them, ``you all come for Easter dinner.''

And so it was.

And after a morning in church, where she sang those marvelous hymns like ``He Lives'' and ``How Great Thou Art,'' and a lunch that would stuff the tummies of a pretty good chunk of the 5,000 hungry folks the New Testament talks about, we would retire to the porch.

Sitting in a white wooden swing, next to a white blooming bush I named ``The Snowball Tree,'' my family would sit and talk, as my kid sister romped through the yard searching every hole in every tree for well-camouflaged Easter eggs.

On that same porch, in younger years, I would sit on my grandfather's lap, to admire his gold pocketwatch. A railroad man, Jack South's watch kept perfect time. Like the trains, he was always on time.

The hours passed quickly. And as the sun gave way to the gathering dark, we gathered on the porch and said our goodbyes. And as if on cue, one by one we gave thanks to our grandmother.

``Thank you for a nice Easter, Mama.''

``As long as I'm able, we'll have Easter here,'' she promised.

Thinking about snowball trees and Sunday dinners, and hymns and Mama's porch may not seem to have much to do with Easter baskets and bunnies, or a stone rolled away from a tomb in a Judean garden.

But when I think of Easter celebrated today, and of the Passover, which will be celebrated in about a month, I think of promises kept.

Just like those on Mama's porch.

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