My Grandmother is famous for many things. Like her bad habit of hiding Christmas presents around the house as she buys them throughout the year, only to forget about them in December and requesting that the family go on a scavenger hunt to find the lost items. 

Or the way she would drive pell-mell all over the counties of Mississippi, braking with her left foot and flooring it with her right, her small frame barely reaching over the giant steering wheel. My grandfather taught her to drive after they were married, and she never quite mastered the finer points of, let’s say, steering and stopping and turning. The story goes that one time she came home with only 3 out of the 4 hubcaps on her Pontiac. She insisted to everyone that she had no clue where the hubcap could have dropped off, while my grandfather insisted that she had to have hit something to knock it off. After several weeks, the missing hubcap was discovered by my grandfather next to a dented guardrail. He proudly brought it home and nailed it to a tree – a little monument to my grandmother’s driving skills that she had to see every time she looked out the kitchen window. 

Or the time she decided to serve tacos for our Christmas meal because she was tired of ham and turkey. 

Or how she would stick little sandwich bags of cash in the freezer for safe keeping. 

Or her many margarine dishes in the fridge that contained everything but margarine. 

But probably the thing she is most famous for, amongst all family members and at least three neighboring counties, are her biscuits. 

Handmade, crispy on the bottom, flaky on the top, melt in your mouth biscuits. 

“Biscuits in the well” is what she calls them and I can’t remember a day I didn’t love them. When I was a child visiting her house, I would wake up in the mornings to sounds of laughter and conversation floating from the kitchen. I would sit up from my lumpy pallet on the floor, crawl over all the twisted limbs and tangled heads of cousins sleeping next to me, and sniff the air greedily. Biscuits. 

Still half asleep, I would shuffle my feet on the dusty, tan linoleum floor and make my way to the kitchen. An oval wooden table with a dozen chairs, none matching, but somehow all looking like they belonged there, would greet me. And there would be my grandmother, standing in front of the sink, hands deep in flour and oil, rolling out biscuits. Her apron would be covered in grease stains and fresh flour. She would still be wearing her night dress. Aunts, uncles, neighbors and sometimes strangers would be sitting at the table. Newspapers were spread out, debates were in full swing, a dog would be barking, and a baby would be banging on the table with tiny fists. 

The biscuits would be baking on cast iron sheet pans, so heavy mere mortals could not lift them out of the oven. But somehow my Grandmother could do it. Probably because she is no mere mortal. 

As soon as a fresh batch would make it out of the oven, hands would grab for them. Eating them hot was always the best, but they tasted just fine when they were cold. Or even better crumbled up in a glass of milk for supper. 

Those biscuits fed babies and old men. They fed wanderers who were just sleeping over on their way to another destination. They fed good friends. They fed people who had grown up on that very soil in rural Mississippi and they fed internationals who had never stepped foot on American dirt before. They fed rich, poor, black, white, believers and doubters. They fed anyone who was invited to the table, which was exactly everyone. 

If I had to stop and guess, I think those biscuits made it into the hands of more people than can fit into the LSU stadium. I speculate that thousands of humans on this earth have enjoyed hot biscuits rolled by my Grandmother’s hands and plopped onto cast iron sheet pans.

Now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of 42, I’ve been thinking a lot about changing the world. What happened to that young girl who was so eager to make a difference? She was going to set out to do something BIG. What has she done at all to improve this place? Does a mortgage and a dented Mom Car count? 

And then I think about my Grandmother. Covered in flour and standing in front of a sink, wearing an old night dress and rolling biscuits by hand. 

She changed the world with a pan of biscuits. 

I’m sure she never set out to have her biscuits be life-changing. All she wanted was to provide a meal for the people she loved. But somewhere in those biscuits she discovered the secret for changing the world. And it’s been there the whole time, the secret staring at me, ready for me to discover it too. 

Maybe I don’t need to start a revolution. Maybe I don’t need to write the next great American novel or make millions. Maybe all the things I have been chasing don’t really matter at all. Maybe I’ve been too focused on all the wrong things.

Maybe all I need to do to change the world is to offer someone a seat at my table and a pan of biscuits.