A belted waist.

My maternal grandmother Ruby was a rotund, short, lady. She stood just under 5 feet, so any excess weight she had revealed itself quite readily. I only remember seeing her like this, and would imagine she became this way through her wonderful southern cooking and the lack of any exercise except working in her garden.

Even as a child, I thought it a bit odd that she was overweight when her own mother was so thin. Most of my grandmother’s sisters were also very short but much thinner, and my mother always had a thin, elegant figure. My grandmother Ruby’s average day was spent taking care of her cantankerous mother, Rosa and taking care of the old tin-roofed country home in Pembroke, Georgia because Rosa refused to live “in the city.”

Savannah was an hour’s drive from Pembroke, so we saw them often, especially on Sundays when grandmother would cook as if for a battalion. Although it was not a farm by any means, grandmother raised chickens for the table and sometimes sold the extra eggs to a neighbor.

Grandmother Ruby tended her own small garden, filled with the typical southern vegetables, most of which I despised. And on the porch railing, just outside the kitchen door, she had pots and pots of peppers she used in her cooking as well as served fresh, on the side. I was fascinated by these peppers which ran the scale from sweet to mild to hot to you’d-better-have-a-glass-of-milk-handy-fiery.

She would sometimes serve venison after it had been cured in the smokehouse out back after her brother, my Uncle Johnny, had been hunting. If she wanted a beef roast, she had to purchase it from the meat shop in town as cows were not allowed at Rosa’s home… I never found out why, they were just not there. But grandmother did have a small pig pen, and once a pig became of age, Uncle Johnny would kill it and smoke the pork along with the deer.

Knowing how much we all loved her fried chicken, on most Sundays, grandmother would wring the necks of two chickens and then fry them up crispy and moist. After collecting green beans from the garden, we’d sit on the front porch and snap them, ready for grandmother to cook them with pork fat of some type. She also used pork fat in the turnips and collard greens if she were serving them as well.

Her mashed potatoes were filled with real butter and sweet cream and her homemade biscuits were to die for. Alongside the fresh peppers, she would serve fresh sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, also from her garden. And she would usually bake two fruit pies as cakes were not her specialty. This was all prepared on an old gas burning stove, fueled by bottled propane.

Sunday dinner at grandmother Ruby’s was always served in the afternoon, giving us enough time to wash the dishes and then digest the heavy meal until it was time to return to Savannah by early evening. Many afternoons as the adults sat on the porch and talked, I was running around in the yard with a too large belt around my waist. Winter or summer, I had that belt on, as tight as I could get it in the extra holes punched in by Uncle Johnny. And it was well known why that belt was important to me; I didn’t want to get fat like my grandmother Ruby, and I was convinced the belt would prevent that from happening.

The first time I showed up wearing the belt, I was asked about it and when I blurted out my reason, my mother turned bright red, grabbed me by the arm, and spun me around to swipe at my bottom. But my grandmother laughed, told my mother it was fine and I had a right to my opinions. Uncle Johnny stood to the side, holding his stomach he was laughing so hard, as he was well aware of my reason when I asked him for one of his old belts. So, because my grandmother had a good sense of humor, I was allowed to wear the belt anytime I wanted to… and I wore it all the time when I was 5, 6, 7 and 8 years of age.

Why I eventually stopped wearing it, I don’t remember. But I do know that when I grew up, my waist remained at 17 ½ inches until I had my first child, and then it never got any smaller than 18 inches. Was the belt the reason my waist was so small, or was I just immune to my grandmother’s meals? My mother cooked much the same way as her mother, so I was exposed to traditional southern cooking continually. Did I simply inherit the genes of my great-grandmother Rose and my own mother, bypassing my grandmother Ruby?

When I was a young adult in the 60s, hip-huggers became very popular and I, of course, wore them like everyone else. Then, one day, I heard on the radio that a study had been done about the history of women’s waists and their sizes. It seems that when women wore bustles (remember Scarlett and how she would get trussed up daily?), they had very small waists, and when they wore loose clothing, their waists expanded exponentially. That did it for me, I was convinced that the belt had been my savior and never wore the hip-huggers again.

I know this little tale is exposing my vanity, or at least the vanity I had in my 20s and 30s, but by the time I hit my 40s, I had learned that beauty is more important on the inside than on the outside. This is something my grandmother Ruby had told me, but I hadn’t always been an agreeable listener: beauty is as beauty does and that’s the way I’ve tried to live my life since.

Now, I’m 69 and, although I don’t have an 18 inch waist anymore, I do contribute to the doctrine of Dr. Oz and others who say our waist should be no more than twice our height for health reasons. I care about my health, but during Christmas holidays, it’s awfully hard not to want to get out that old belt and wear it for a month or two.

Jane