Butterbeans remind me of my grandmother. She lived on a farm and tended a big vegetable garden. It was behind the old white farmhouse, at the rear of the smokehouse, and had a wire fence around it. A hydrangea bush stood at the gate, zinnias grew at the ends of vegetable rows, and morning glories and pink roses climbed the fence.

Summers, when the garden came in, Grandma pulled on her brown scuffed work boots and a faded, pink-flowered bonnet, took a few pails, and went out early to pick dew-kissed squash, pole beans, okra, cucumbers, field peas, tomatoes, and butterbeans.

Then she sat in a wide green rocking chair on the front porch, a white enamelware pan in her lap, and shelled the butterbeans in slow, methodical rhythm with the rocker's movement. Sometimes I sat beside her and helped. I stuck my thumbnail into the rounded outside edge of the hull and opened it. A few butterbeans popped loose and fell into the pan, one by one. They added up fast, and after a while, there was a whole pile of them. I loved the look and feel of those fleshy, heart-shaped butterbeans. Sometimes I'd slide my hands under the pile, gather some in each hand, lift them up, then let them fall between my spread fingers back into the pan. Then I'd do it again.

Grandma cooked some of the beans for the noon meal and served a steaming, soupy, buttered bowlful with hot skillet cornbread. Then she canned the rest of them and set the jars on a shelf in the pantry. By the end of harvest, jars were lined up one after the other on narrow shelves that went from floor to ceiling. During winter months, she'd pull out a jar and serve those lush, plump butterbeans, fresh and warm with a taste of the earth and summer sun.

The 50 essays in this book are like that, too--fresh, warm, and picked from a southern garden. Delightful servings that hold the essence of the land, the land that is so much a part of me, the land called Hill Country, home of my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfathers. Land that I now own. It's that land and everything around it--red clay dirt, fresh cool spring water that trickles under oaks and chinquapins and muscadine vines into a grassy pasture, brown-needled paths under tall pines, and fields of cotton, corn, peanuts and broomstraw.

And it's the land called Delta, my home, that evocative black land, with its relentless heat, its interminable rows of white cotton, its flatness, mile after mile as far as you can see, all the way to the horizon, and its complexities and hidden secrets and haunting mysteries--you can feel it and sense it all around you, and it comes up and sits on your skin.

It's all this that makes the South a character in its own right. And it's from all this that I pull up out of myself the deepest thoughts and feelings and experiences that make me who I am. I place them before you--stories from the heart of a southern woman--like a serving of those heart-shaped butterbeans. It's good to sample them fresh, then pull them out later and savor them again and again. "Pink Butterbeans sums up the style of your essays,"Currie said. "Heartfelt and unpretentious."