BY MARY WANJIRU

Spring in the south has a way of sneak ing up on you

With  every thing not with the clean break of seasons they talk about up north, but as a slow unfurling. The dogwoods light up like lanterns, the air hums thick with yellow pollen, and the farmers’ markets begin to whisper their invitations: strawberries, early peas, tender greens. It’s the time of year when kitchens open their windows and people remember what fresh tastes like.

For me, spring has always been the season that wakes the appetite and the memory together. The garden rows behind my grandmother’s house in Alabama would come alive with collards and mustard greens, and she’d send me out to pick what she called “the tender ones — the ones just brave enough to face the sun.” She never measured her cooking by recipe. She cooked by memory, by scent,and love by the way her mother had shown her, and by the rhythm of the season itself.

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Those meals — cornbread still hissing in the skillet, beans cooked down with a little fatback, greens tangy with vinegar — were more than food. They were maps of migration and endurance. http://they told the story of people who made do who carried seeds in their pockets when they left home, who built flavor out of what was left after the best had been taken away.

The Geography of Taste

Southern food, more than most cuisines, is a geography lesson. It stretches from the red clay of Georgia to the bayous of Louisiana, from the Appalachian hollers to the coastal plains. Yet wherever you go, you find the same alchemy: a table that turns scarcity into celebration.

In North Carolina, I once met a woman at a roadside stand who sold chowchow and scuppernong jelly. She told me she learned her canning from her great-grandmother, who was born enslaved. “This ain’t just food,” she said. “This is keeping.”

That word — keeping — stayed with me. To keep is to preserve, to hold onto what’s worth saving. Every jar of jam, every crock of pickles, is an act of faith that the sweetness of summer can be remembered in winter and winter can be remembered in summer. Southern kitchens have always been places of keeping — recipes, stories, grief, and joy folded together like biscuit dough.

Migration and Memory

My own family moved north when the mills closed, chasing jobs that never quite paid what they promised. Yet the South came with us — in the mason jars of chowchow my grandmother packed in newspaper, in the frozen ziplock bags of okra, in the iron skillet that somehow always fit into the trunk.

In the gray winters of Cincinnati, she’d thaw a bag of those okra pods and fry them up, the kitchen filling with the familiar scent of cornmeal and oil. For a few minutes, you could close your eyes and be home again — wherever “home” really was.

Food was her way of staying rooted while everything else was in motion. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now: she wasn’t just cooking. She was building continuity, defying erasure.

The Great Migration scattered Southern families across the country, but it couldn’t scatter their kitchens. You can trace the diaspora by the presence of hot sauce bottles in midwestern diners, or by the way collard greens show up on Chicago tables. The South, it turns out, travels well.

A Season of Return

Every spring, I find myself drawn back — if not in body, then in spirit — to those southern kitchens. I watch as farmers in small Alabama towns bring their first strawberries to market, and I think about how every fruit is a story of soil and care.

When I cook now, I still hear my grandmother’s voice — telling me to taste before seasoning, to trust my hands, to never waste a thing. I’ve come to realize that what she taught wasn’t just cooking. It was a theology of attention and love. The act of preparing food was a prayer, a recognition of the earth’s abundance and its fragility.

There’s a holiness to Southern food that isn’t about grandeur or precision. It’s in the quiet acts — shelling peas on a porch, stirring a pot with love and patience, offering seconds to a guest before taking firsts yourself.

The Future Table

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what the Southern table will look like for the next generation. Climate change is rewriting the seasons. The farmers who once relied on predictable cycles now plant with uncertainty. Yet the spirit of adaptation — the same ingenuity that birthed gumbo and hoppin’ John— endures.

Across the region, young chefs are reviving heirloom grains, turning to indigenous practices, and building sustainable foodways that honor both tradition and innovation. At a pop-up in Birmingham last spring, I tasted a cornbread made with nixtamalized corn and local sorghum — ancient methods meeting modern hands. It tasted like the past and the future all at once.

That’s the paradox of Southern food: it never stands still. It’s memory in motion. Every bite carries both loss and renewal.

What We Keep

When I think of spring now, I think of what we keep — the recipes, the rituals,the love,the smells that root us even when we move. I think of the way my grandmother’s hands looked, slick with cornmeal, or the sound of a skillet meeting oil. I think of how each meal was a gathering, not just of people, but of histories and love.

The South is a place that remembers through taste. It remembers through the hush of frying, through the sweetness of sorghum on hot bread, through the quiet insistence of gardens that return each spring despite the odds.

So when the first tender greens show up at the market and the light shifts just so, I start cooking again. I open the windows. I let the smell of collards drift out into the street. Somewhere, I imagine, another kitchen answers.

And maybe that’s what keeps us connected — not nostalgia, but nourishment. The kind that feeds the body and the story at once.the kind that feed the body and the story

marriewanjiru10@gmail.com