Below, courtesy of the woman herself, the poem that Jo Carson read at my wedding, which, as said, became the only thing that people wanted to talk about afterwards.

From Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet:

The day I married, my mother

had one piece of wedding advice:

“Don’t make good potato salad,”

she told me, “it’s too hard to make

and you’ll have to take something

every time you get invited somewhere.

Just cook up beans; people eat them too.”

My mother was good at potato salad

and part of the memories of my childhood

have to do with endless batches made

for family get-togethers, church picnics,

Civitan suppers, Democratic party fund raisers,

whatever event called for potato salad.

I’d peel the hard boiled eggs.

My mother would pack

her big red plastic picnic bowl

high with yellow potato salad

(she used mustard)

and it would sit proud on endless tables

and come home empty.

What my mother might and could have said is

Choose carefully what you get good at

’cause you’ll spend the rest of your life doing it.

But I didn’t hear that.

I was young and anxious to please

and I knew her potato salad secrets.

And the thousand other duties

given to daughters by mothers,

and sometimes I envy those women

who get by with pots of beans.

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