It’s from the late North Carolina poet and novelist Reynolds Price, who has the spunky pepper pot of a title character say this in the novel Kate Vaiden, a raspy word picture that quietly screams of an innocent but almost animal attraction and drips with an authentic and steely Southern female swagger.

“Strength just comes in one brand – you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.”

Remind you of anyone? Me too. To capture such a feisty Southern heroine, this writer must have met some of the same women we’ve been lucky enough to know.

Do yourself a favor: grant yourself some time to think of and be grateful for women who knew you better than you knew yourself, for the strength and smile that came along at just the right time, for the steel magnolias of your youth, for the thick-skinned, wise, and lively women of our lives.

Mrs. Slate did the work of a half-dozen people at Slate’s on Main Street, where she fried eggs and fish while her husband sold appliances. You could literally get up from the booth where Mrs. Slate had sat down your plate lunches, walk 20 or so feet to a Maytag, get Mr. Slate to show it to you while you chewed, then work out an installment plan after you’d cleaned your plate.

I was so lucky I could hardly get out of my yard without bumping into wall-to-wall nuggets of female gold. Next door in the house of 12-plus were Maudine and Martha Lou and Luna Faye and Muh and Ann and … an embarrassment of riches, women who could grow a garden, can it, change a flat, milk a cow, teach Sunday school, and dress like either a farmhand or a princess, depending on the needs of the day.