Corn suppers.

Peppers, tomatoes, onions, squash, peas, carrots--the list could go on and on. All of these and more comprised the backyard gardens I remember from my childhood on Magruder Street, the street housing most of Mississippi State's faculty families. Everyone knew, or at least discovered upon moving there, that with each house came an allotted garden plot. That plot didn't necessarily abut the yard to that house, but rest assured, each knew--or soon learned--where his ended and the other's began. On lightning-bug-lit summer evenings after supper, when outside was far cooler than inside, most folks would head to their gardens to hoe, water, or harvest.

Daddy had a little bit of everything in our garden, two or three rows of each: strawberries, peas (a transplanted Yankee, he grew English peas instead of the usual field peas everybody else raised), tomatoes, lettuce, carrots (if the rabbits didn't get them first), watermelons, squash, even a row or two for Mama's spicy-smelling, whiskery-stemmed zinnias to brighten the house, and he always allowed at least three or four furrows for sweet yellow corn.

Now, not many folks had a freezer then; in fact, our faithful little Frigidaire barely had room for its two regular ice trays plus the one we kept full of Kool-Aid Popsicles, so garden pickings had to be consumed as they ripened. Since everyone else had a garden and grew pretty much the same vegetables as we (except for those darn English peas), giving them away wasn't an option.

So we ate them. All of them. Even for breakfast. Each vegetable variety would last a few weeks, overlapping the others, and our table groaned with an assortment of truly garden-fresh foods: Mama's wilted-lettuce salads, dripping with bacon and fat; buttery fried squash; luscious red tomatoes whose taste no grocery store variety could ever duplicate. Our stove always had a pot on top cooking something from the garden. Daddy even tried raising rhubarb one year, I recall.

But it was the corn we really loved--sweet, tender, boiled, and rolled in butter. We lived for its arrival. When all the corn came in, we'd have corn suppers. Nothing else on the plate to pollute the butter and salt we'd roll those golden ears in. Butter dripping down our chins, we'd forgo any talk and just eat, nothing distracting us but the crunching. Occasionally Mama might comment, "Why, Hon, I believe this is the sweetest corn you've ever grown!" or someone else would say, "Mmm-mmm, this is good," but normal mealtime conversations we put aside.

One year, our cousin Joan's visit coincided with the ripening corn. Joan lived in Alabama and frequently came for a couple of weeks each summer. But Joan was a farm girl, used to meat with every meal--bacon, ham, chicken, beef. When she came in to supper the night Mama had deemed the "special" one, she took her seat and stared. "Where's the fried chicken?"

"Not any," Mama answered. "We're eating corn tonight." And Mama, lifting the platter of corn, started it around the table.

"We always have fried chicken with our corn," Joan said, her eyes still showing her dismay, "and some kind of bread!" But she gamely took an ear of corn when the platter arrived, dug into the butter, and began to eat.

Sister and I had glanced at each other in amazement at Joan's question. We couldn't fathom anyone being disappointed in this meal. Now, I adored fried chicken, had always ordered that for my birthday supper. And we all loved our housekeeper Lottie's melt-in-your-mouth yeast rolls. Lottie had no written recipe, and no matter how many folks were coming to dinner, whether 10 or 40, she made the same number of rolls each time. So sometimes we'd have pans of yeast rolls rising on every kitchen counter and almost as many left over to feast upon--breakfast, dinner, and supper. But fried chicken and yeast rolls could be made any time, and backyard corn grew only once a year, so corn suppers were truly special. We didn't need or want anything spoiling the purity of that corn.

I've since learned that the sugar in corn begins immediately to convert to starch, a sensible reason for our backyard garden variety's special sweetness. Doesn't matter. We knew that it was better than anything else around, knew that we'd be foolish to wait to partner it with other meals.

Poor Joan. We teased her unmercifully for years about her fried chicken demand at a corn supper. Unfortunately, after Daddy's knee forced him to retire as a backyard gardener, we had to learn to survive without corn suppers ourselves, had to buy our corn from the supermarket, and those suppers became only a memory--to laugh about, certainly, but also to dream about.

Kathryn Hamilton grew up as a "faculty brat" on the Mississippi State University campus, graduated from MSU, is married with two adult children, and now resides in Columbus, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor of English at Columbus State University.