Crawfish and Crawfishing

please take note i wrote CRAWFISH not crayfish. i'm from the south and i don't say crayfish--that sounds a bit too proper. i say it a certain way also, sort of slow and drawn out like craaaaww fish.

I talked to my son on Sunday and he said, "Mom, I tried a new food and I LOVE IT!!" He then asked me to guess what it was. Knowing my son and how picky he is/was, I wasn't very successful cause I don't really think of him being an adventurous eater! So he ended up having to tell me he ate crawfish.



and he loved them!! he played with them. he named them. then he tore their tails off, and ate the meat. last but not least he sucked their heads. and it was good. no, not quite right---they were delicious!! this made me laugh so much. i can see my goofy and all grown up, but still my baby boy playing with crawfish and naming them and then eating them.

ugghh! can't say i care to indulge in his newly acquired food choice. his bride seemed to have more of what i feel would be my reaction to eating them. she didn't like them. i loved her description of them. she said the underneath side when cooked looked like a roach. DISGUSTING!!! can't say that i want to eat roaches.

so my son has come a long way in expanding his diet and he quite literally shocked me with this current food. i don't think i will join him in eating them though cause....

i have amazingly wonderful memories of crawfishing with my mama. you could call me a farm girl. i didn't grow up with many indulgences, but i didn't do without either if that makes any sense. here's my story that i shared at her memorial service:

I think some of my fondest memories with my mom involve the simplest things. She took delight in the small things in life. I remember her teaching me how to go crawfishing. For those of you that don’t know what a crawfish is—they are scary little crustaceans with beady little eyes and scary pinchers like lobsters.



We would go to the ditch in front of our house after a rain and we would see their piles of dirt around the hole to their house. Mom would put some salt pork or a little raw bacon on a string with a little horseshoe nail for a weight and she would drop it into the hole just a little bit. A crawfish just might slowly crawl to the top, grab the pork with their pinchers and then try to pull it back further into their hole, but then of course we would pull them out of the hole while they were still attached to the string. I would usually scream and mom would tell me to be quiet and put the crayfish in the big bucket we had brought with us. I might try to do it, but I couldn’t ever grab them though because I was terrified the pinchers would grab me. So in the end it was always Mom who put them in the bucket. We could do this for a long time and she would delight in how they scared me, but would still try to touch me with one. I remember once it rained and rained and the pasture flooded and King’s Creek overflowed. We took a long walk with our bucket and caught tons of crawfish-well maybe not tons but it looked like it to a little girl. Now you may wonder what we did with all these crawfish. Did we cook’em and eat’em? Are you kidding? Now maybe my dad and mom had eaten them at some point, but we never did. We kept them in the bucket with some water and mud for a while and then we released them and the little creatures with their beady eyes and scary pinchers would scurry happily away.

***today i can still see my mama with her rolled up pants, sleeveless button down the front white shirt, and barefeet. we're walking with our big bucket, hoping to catch some crawfish.