For the price of a stick of butter...

Freewriting from BWP that wants to be a poem.

Thank you Paula Deen
for giving women the courage
to use butter.

A pound of oleo
required in any dish adds
moisture, flavor, and fat grams.

"It's just like Granny did it,"
you'd say. Or maybe, "It's so good,
you'd slap yore granny, y'all!"

Tell me how one takes brown bags
from the Coastal Empire and recycles them
into a Financial Empire?

Perhaps its your blue eyes.
Without them, you look like most of us,
round in places children want to hug, gray on top.

Or perhaps it is because those Yankees
watching on Food Network can't get enough
of your "Howdy" and "Y'alls."

No one really uses that much flavor
in their speech. You aren't a pretender,
but you don't really talk that way, do you.

People save their pennies to eat at the Lady,
a highlight of any Savannah trip,
but I know the truth.

The same food on the buffet in the evening
appears cheaper at lunch.
Same butter, same flavor, different price.

When I cook your recipes at home,
they taste better than your meals at the Lady.
Maybe they lose something in the multiplication.

You should try smaller pots.
Come for Sunday lunch; according to my husband,
the casserole and cake are fine eatin'.

So, thank you Paula, for teaching me
that the only ingredient I really need
is the stick in my refrigerator door.

Just don't step on a scale, y'all.