When it comes to southern wildlife, about the nastiest creature we have here is the possum. Most northern Yankee persons and other strange people I know call this thing an opossum, which is how it is spelled in the dictionary, but to pronounce O in the possum is about as stupid as pronouncing the g in the word gnat. But no matter how you pronounce him, the possum is one butt-ugly animal.

When it comes to worldwide thought on possums and how they relate to us southerners, most folks tend to think that we eat them, usually in pie form. Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies has seen to that. Of course Granny also ate gopher gravy, and pickled owl eggs, but I will tell y'all this much. If you want to get in more trouble than you can get out of in this lifetime, let the game warden catch you pickling an owl egg and see what happens to you.

Dear old Granny grossed out more than one city feller by feeding him possum pie on the fancy eating table and she also made a gorilla vomit once the time she feed him a bowl of possum broth and then pointed out that the white chunks floating in it were chopped up pieces of the possum's tail.

That's Hollywood's idea of southerners for you.

Here in the real south, we don't eat possums anymore. Well most of us don't anyway. Fact is, I've never met a living soul, southerner or otherwise, who ever claimed to have eaten a possum. Even people who've had to eat possum to survive won't admit it.

Even when that fad came around in the mid 90's where it was fashionable for southerners to put bumper stickers on their pickup trucks that read "Eat More Possum,' nobody ever did. And I can also tell you for a fact that I don't know of one single southerner who has ever had the guts to open up one of those cans of Potted Possum Meat they put in convenience stores on the interstate to sell to stupid Yankees.

Possums are so ugly and so nasty that no modern southerner would think of eating one.

And possums are as dumb as they are ugly. Any animal that waits beside the road so it can jump out in front of oncoming traffic and be run over is just plain dumb. The average southern driver runs over at least 900 possums in his driving lifetime and I am convinced that if Henry Ford hadn't invented the automobile in 1903 we would at this very moment be up to our southern armpits in possums.

And for all you folks who think evolution is real, here's one for you. If evolution was real, you'd think that by now, with over 100 years of running over and killing millions of stupid possums, that during that same time at least enough smart possums would have been born, even if by genetic accident, that would've killed off all the stupid ones and we'd have possum free highways.

That is if evolution was real. But it ain't.

Recently, however, I came across something that might help our possums to be more environmentally sound, help our economy, and improve north-south relations all at the same time.

This idea occurred to me about a month ago when I was told that a dear friend of mine, Linda Roberts, retired Gaston County School principal that she is, was recently sighted wearing a possum hair sweater. I had never heard of such a thing and I am told that this particular possum hair sweater was imported directly from New Zealand where they have plenty of possums as well.

And that got me to thinking. Our southern possums are just as good as any foreign possums, and we still have plenty of them to go around. So what we need to do is gather up all the dead possum's on the side of the road, shave them, and send all that possum hair to a factory that will knit it into sweaters. Then all we have to do is ship them up north where it is cold year round, and sell them to all the Yankees that still live there.

Not only will we be able clean up our southern highways, and make money off of cold Yankees all at the same time, but hopefully this will keep the northern Yankees warm enough so they'll stay up north and not move down here.

It's just a thought anyway.

(W. S. "Bill" Melton is a Southern humorist, writer, motivational speaker and good ol' boy. He lives at Mt. Holly.)