I walked into the kitchen after not enough sleep last night to find Miss Cathy sitting on one of the barstools with a hot comb in her hand straightening her hair.

While I made my coffee I was uncharacteristically engaged her in conversation. My usual morning M.O. is to make my coffee as discretely, and quietly as possible so I can escape to the balcony, the fresh morning air, time to journal and to write to you.

But no, for some strange reason I was filled with a need to “act civil” and engage my mother in a conversation. I told her that I’d been invited by my new friend, Greg, to a party on Saturday. She asked me to describe Greg and I got a little hung up trying to be diplomatic and not call him “chatty”. Noticing my fumbling she said that maybe one of her “old”, country colloquialisms” might fit. Then she launched into one of her long winded set ups about “terms I may not be used to”, “that they were old and southern”, blah, blah, blah-I made the rolling “let’s get to the punch line” gesture with my hands and said, “Spit it out!”

She popped out with,”Blook and a snag.”

Apparently my Aunt Dorothy (who I’m double related to-she’s my aunt on my mother’s side and cousin on my father’s-I know, country folk, it’s a wonder I wasn’t born my own brother). But, I digress, Dorothy, who still lives in Henderson, North Carolina was talking to Miss Cathy yesterday, gossiping about her cousin Mamie. Dorothy said that Mamie was acting like a “Blook and a snag”.

The rough translation for Northerners or anyone of a post-civil War generation is: uncouth or ignorant.

Through the years I’ve heard most of what I thought were all of Miss Cathy’s “colloquialisms” as she calls them but this was a new one. As the old people in Henderson would say, “I neva heard a such!”