Chicken N' Dumplings

My neighbors had a beautiful rooster last year. I haven't seen him, or heard him in a few weeks. My neighbor is also taking lessons to be a Chef and just bought a new heavy duty smoker grill. Hmmm. I wonder.
Seriously, I don't think any of that has to do with Rooster being gone. There are cats around here and I'm sure that's what happened to Mr. Chanticleer, or else he just flew away to a new roost.
When I was little, Mr. Willie had chickens. They laid brown eggs and you could find them almost anywhere in the yard as well as in the old World War 2 bunkers that were on Dewey Hill. There were three old shed like things that supposedly were either barracks or ordinance storage. They were cleared out and Mr. Willie made use of them to raise chickens. He had several and now and then he would ask me to gather the eggs for him when they were out of town on a weekend visiting his family in Olar, S.C. I made a quarter a day and that was a lot of money. I wasn't sure it was worth dodging his rooster though! I'd never been around a rooster but Mama told me about one that got her once when she was young. I had a fair respect for him because of that, and because he actually chased me once, and that scared me. Apparently the rooster chased Mr. Willie or one of the kids once too often because he came to visit us one morning to talk to Daddy. Something was mentioned about something being 'too tough' for anything but stew.  I wasn't sure what the plan was but later that day Mr. Willie came down to the house and he had the rooster with him, holding it by it's legs. It was squawking something fierce. I guess it didn't like riding upside down.  Daddy and Willie went across the street and off to the side of the house that the Cumbees used to live in. I was watching from the porch and I am sure I wasn't supposed to see it but I was more curious than any cat so I watched. There was a stump of a China Berry tree on the side of the house and Mr. Willie held the Rooster's legs and tried to put it on the stump, but it was wiggling too much so Daddy took hold of it's head and held it down and then took a hatchet and "Whack!".  Instantly Daddy let go of the head and Mr. Willie let go of the legs and that bird went running around and around and around that yard for about 15 seconds before it fell over on it's side. Daddy and Willie acted like this was perfectly normal but I was absolutely fascinated! I saw blood coming from the chicken's neck but never imagined anything could go anywhere without a head! But he did and from then on whenever someone said they were "Running around like a chicken with it's head cut off" I instantly get a visual of this! We had chicken and dumplings for dinner that evening and Mr. Willie and his family came to eat with us. I was too young to instantly figure that the chicken would be in the pot that same day and in fact, probably didn't even connect fried chicken or any other kind of chicken with what ran around in the neighbor's yard that day. However, once everyone was seated at the table and started passing around the pot of chicken and dumplings, I came to realize that this chicken was that rooster and I couldn't eat it.
Why Mama was delegated to make the chicken and dumplings was simple and easy - She made the BEST and everyone knew it. Cracker Barrel wishes it had her recipe!(Or would if they knew about it)

She made her dumplings from scratch, just like her biscuits and she seasoned the stew perfectly. I make a pretty good imitation of her recipe, and it takes me back to a time of simplicity, of awe, of sharing, and of everything that was good about growing up with less than most, but being all the more wealthy because of it.

Now, where did the neighbor's rooster get off to? ... I sure do wish I knew...I'm sure it's too tough for anything but stew...

Press 1 For English? This is America!!!

First off, I'm not going to be polite about this and if I offend you, I'm sorry, but suck it up or leave now if you're one of the liberals who think that it is alright for millions of Mexicans to step across the border, hundreds every day,  and suddenly have access to everything that -other- people have worked, paid, saved, died for, and contributed to - for most of our lives.

Those who have had their identity stolen and used will have their own arguments about the matters surrounding these immigrants.

When you look around and see Mexicans with the names of dead Americans on their fake drivers license, on their fake identification cards, think again about how 'nice and good and honest and hard working and deserving' they are of the opportunity to succeed in America. Maybe they're the ones who shot that poor rancher out in Arizona and then killed his dog. Are they the ones who snuck in carrying AK-47 rifles and who brought a stash of cocaine and marijuana? Maybe they brought some Typhus and some Tuberculosis, and some other diseases that we eradicated here in the U.S. We don't stop them and check them so we don't really know who they are, or what they bring... and what kind of criminal history some of them might have.

When you are behind them in line at the grocery store, after you have dug and scraped and borrowed a dollar to be able to buy a loaf of bread and they have three babies under 4 in their cart, aren't speaking a WORD of English to anyone, pull out W.I.C vouchers to pay for the two grocery carts full of food, I want you to think about people you probably know who are breaking their backs to make a living, dollar by dollar, who are paying taxes and social security and all the other little dividends that the government says we should pay for the liberty of having since we want to live here, and who can't always make ends meet. Think about those who can't get a little help from the Social Services department in the way of Food Stamps and Housing payment vouchers because they make a little too much to qualify since they actually work and pay taxes... Mexicans can, however, drop a baby 24 hours after being here, and the government doles out free medical care, food stamps, housing, and even some spending cash for diapers, etc to that "new citizen" and Momma. For free!

Take a ride through the numerous Habitat For Humanity developments in your neighborhood. The U.S. Government funds a large percentage of those houses. Take a ride through those neighborhoods that we built that were supposed to house poor people who can't afford to buy a home, who can't get credit, or who can't otherwise afford to live in a house without the government, and the generosity of Americans who want to see everyone living in a decent home... You'll have to look around the new SUVs, the King Cab work trucks , the Ford Expeditions, the nice family vans. Then look at who owns them - They aren't American citizens, I can assure you. You won't hear a word of English spoken.

Then go home and wonder how you're going to buy groceries, or gas for your 10 year old car, because the Goverment takes your tax dollars out before you ever see your whole paycheck, and Unlce Sam wants your money to pay for the Health Care that these illegal trespassers are going to need when they have their 7th baby at a local hospital without a dime of insurance!

Settle down on your sofa and watch the news about how a gang killed and robbed some poor elderly man. Read the news about the convicted criminal who slipped back across the border into the U.S. and stabbed and killed a college student, or the gangs who mark their turf so that other gangs who come across won't step into someone elses territory. We've already been claimed and 'owned' by someone, you see. Watch when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the worlds biggest racial instigators, agitators and motivators, jump up and down and start screaming about RACIAL PROFILING because Arizona has taken to taking matters into their hands to protect her legal citizens. I wonder what they're going to do when they realize that it was never about that but about protecting the U.S. and for the future of all of our kids, and grandkids. We're going broke because we have millions taking more than we taxpayers can put in!

It has NOTHING to do with race!

Al and Jesse love to cry about the unfairness to 'minorities' and they're obviously blind to the fact that they're about to lose that status...Of course with over 11 million illegal tresspassers already in the U.S. maybe they already have. Jes, Al, better teach those grandkids how to make Tamales! That's what might be left for them to do when they graduate college if you don't step up and back Arizona for doing something, for taking that first step, to conserve OUR country..

Watch when the other liberals want to go ahead and give them amnesty and fast track citizenship so they can pay taxes and vote... You have to wonder don't you, how this citizenship is going to make them pay taxes and stop working under the table... Employers hire them at cheaper rates, and they work cheaper and can afford to because they don't pay taxes. Then they live in houses, 15 or 20 to a place, split the rent that many ways, and send millions of American dollars to Mexico (and what happens to it there only they know... but it never comes back to America). Meanwhile We the People, we the Citizens of America,are forced to turn anything we buy over 3 times to find our instructions written in English at the bottom of the package. Someone said that English is the second language of almost every other country. It was said that it wouldn't hurt us to learn a second language like Spanish... That's fine and I don't care. If I go to Spain or to Mexico, I can speak enough to get by. However, if English was so readily taught in Mexico as a second language"  why are so many of them unable to speak any word other than "job" when they come across the border... It's America and we speak English here. The language they speak has NOTHING to do with the fact that they are an enormous drain on our system, education and financial, taking our jobs, creating a future where our children and grandchildren will be forced to work for pennies on the dollar to compete with so many who will work for so much less, and it is going to get worse...California is already broke and there are 2 million illegal (that they know of) there.

I am not talking about those who came here legally, and I would never deny them the chance to make a decent life and a better living. They speak some English, they work hard, they can show you their green card and proudly DO...They're not happy with the illgal trespassers either... It gives them a bad name.

As for the rest, I say - This is America. Press 1 for English or Press 2 to contact your local Immigration Office for a one way ticket home.-

UFO Sightings

I was watching the History Channel last night and the program was a discussion of intelligent life on other planets inside and outside of our Universe. There were several discussions about UFO sightings -Unidentified Flying Objects- dating back as far as history is recorded.  There is a lot of speculation on what the visitors wanted then, and what they might want should they ever decide to drop in and make themselves at home here on Earth. I know that there is a lot of disbelief in UFO's and the Government tries desperately to poo-poo any seemingly valid sighting. They've come up with very inventive reasons to explain things that people see.
I suppose religious people might raise a brow about intelligent life on other planets as well - supposedly God created Earth and everything on it. The Bible does not mention any other life anywhere. I don't know. I don't care. I saw a UFO with my mother, my brother and my little sister standing around me.
It was in the early 60's. We lived on Dewey Hill, which was a little plot of land off of Virginia Avenue. Virginia Avenue ended at Remound Road on one end and continued into North Charleston at the other end. At Virginia and Remount, there was an old Army Depot, and off to the right, over the small inlet running into the intracoastal waterway and the marsh, there was the papermill, aka Westvaco. Westvaco ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the smell was somewhere between the odor of boiling cabbage and boiled gym shoes... Fragrant to say the least. In fact, we had a Navy Hospital turned Military prison over in North Charleston and for a time, Manuel Noriega was incarcerated there. He made the claim that attempts were being made on his life via poison gasses. It was determined that on super warm days, when the breeze was slight, the odor of Westvaco drifted across the town of North Charleston and into Mr. Noriega's cell.
I digress.
It was, as I said, in the early 60's and I was probably 8 years old. My mother worked hard to keep our clothes clean, and sometimes that meant washing them late in the evening and hanging them out so that the warm summer air could dry them while we slept. We didn't have a dryer and for a time I remember we had a wringer washer on the back porch. One evening, well after dusk, Mama was hanging out a load of clothes on the back porch. She'd run a line there so that the dew wouldn't settle on the clothes and wet them all over again. I suppose we were in the living room watching television. Daddy went to bed with the chickens so he was already in bed. Doors and windows were open to catch the breezes if there were any, so we could hear her on the back porch, singing one of her favorite Kitty Wells songs, and suddenly she went through the alphabet of kids names, calling us all till she narrowed it down to the three who were home - "Linda! Dean! Thomas! Sue! Jo Ann!" Kids!" "Sue, Jo, Thomas! Come here! Quick! Hurry!" There was definite alarm in her voice and we scrambled to get outside, running pell mell through the kitchen, banging into each other to squeeze through the narrow bathroom door and the smaller still back door leading onto the porch. She was standing by the railing, the garment she was going to hang draped over her arm, a clothespin pinched in her fingers of her hand and with that she was pointing out over the mile or two to the old Depot at the end of Remount and Virginia Avenue. "Look!", she told us and we did - and saw it instantly.

(This is not the UFO we saw but very similar without the bright lights!)






Two miles away what we saw was about as big as a fly, though up close I am sure it was a LOT bigger. It hovered, a bright blue, and morphed into a deep violet and then into a blue again. It blinked in a cycle of colors, red, blue, orange, violet, white, for several long seconds - probably a full minute actually, and all the while we were asking her and each other, " What is that?"! She shushed us, as if she thought it could hear us, and we hushed! We watched and it drew further away, still elongated like a cigar, and continued to change colors, slowly and then speeding up, and suddenly it went white, and shot straight up, then away off to the left and back and out of sight.  I believe she called my sister Linda and told her about that but no one else. Ordinary citizens didn't call the Air Force, or at least she didn't think to do that. We never saw it again and I don't think it was ever reported in the paper. But we saw it. We talked about it for days! Over time it went to the back of our minds, and we didn't discuss it any more. But one night Mama was standing in the kitchen talking to Linda, my oldest sister, about something to do with church or whatever, and suddenly it felt really weird in the house. Weird as if the house were in a vaccuum, and there was no sounds outside, and no sounds inside but for the sound we made breathing and our heartbeats.... I felt it and Mama felt it, and I heard Mama say that it felt like the power of God had enveloped the house. I wasn't so sure what happened but I ran into the bathroom, the smallest room in the house and I crouched down between the toilet and the tub. She thought I was praying. I was, for my life!!! I was scared to death! I don't know what happened that night. I'm older now, and I don't think it had anything to do with the power of God. I think that UFO might have just popped back into the neighborhood, hovered over us a minute (seconds actually) and then cruised on off. The sensation was completely strange, I had chills, and Mama had chills, the hair stood up on my arms and back of my neck, and I was terrified of something I could not see, could not hear, could not feel but of something that was all around, something that could suck the sounds of crickets and all other sounds of insects right out of existence.  Oh yes.

In 1995 my daughter came flying home from work, up the highway, and  into the yard.  We lived outside of Goose Creek, in a very rural area, and she was obviously scared and excited as she came into the door to tell me to come out and look! She'd seen something on her way home, something that struck her as strange and frightening, and feeling a little trepidation I stepped out onto the front porch with her and watched as 3 lights in a triangular pattern slowly moved just over the tops of the pine trees, off in the distance but heading our way..

(The one we saw did not have the red light in the center)







I am sure it was much higher than it seemed but we both thought it had to be brushing the tops of the trees. You could barely make out a black mass behind these lights, but it was never a clear outline. It moved closer to us, closer to the trees, and was finally directly overhead and absolutely soundless!! In fact, it brought to mind that night when I hid in the bathroom. There was no sounds around us, at all! It was summer and there should have been crickets and cicadas, and frogs ribbeting... But no. It was deathly quiet and the air was absolutely still. There was no way to judge how high up it was. It was overhead against a backdrop of star riddled black sky and the only way you knew that something held the lights up was the fact that it blacked out the stars in that triangular shape. We both decided that it was probably not a good thing to be standing outside, under a UFO that was moving overhead, so we went into the house - and to the back door where we looked up to see if we could see it, but it was gone. Gone! Oh yes, they are out there... Her future husband at that time told us later that he and a friend of his had once seen a UFO and he described what they had seen - and it was exaclty what we had seen, although not the same night... He and his friend had actually followed it as well as they could along a hightway till it went across the highway and across the woods. He also said it appeared to be hovering just over the treetops but at the distance he was at, there was no way to really tell.

They are out there. I don't doubt that at all. I think they have been visiting us for hundreds of thousands of years... They're probably from some solar system further out in the galaxy than we will ever be able to go, in my lifetime, or yours, or possibly anyone living today.

They've crashed here - I know someone whose father was in New Mexico when that ship crashed.  The story he told me was that his father was one of the early responders to the crash site and one of the little aliens was actually walking around, hurt. The other two were dead.  This is the same story you hear on any of the documentaries regarding the Roswell incident. What he told me, and what you don't hear, is that the ship was sent to school us and teach us.Something malfunctioned and the crashed. The black boxes they wore were translators. The three on board were going to do something very much like what our astronauts do on the space station. They would stay here for a number of months or years, and then more would come to replace them and the cycle would continue. Maybe that's all malarky - but maybe it isn't.
Our computers went from the size of a small house to the size of a file cabinet, and then to the size of a postage stamp, and smaller still. Technology went into warp speed after the crash in Roswell... And no one can really explain how we learned so much, so fast, and how we continue to make leaps and bounds in technology that make the discoveries and revelations of today almost obsolete within a month. I hope they are here to teach us.
I hope we're smart enough to learn.

Telephone Remake

Push-ups

The temperature is sending tendrils along the thermometer to reach into the 80s here and that's just plain old hot... and then you stick 75% humidity to that and plain old hot turns into maddeningly miserable. I know our summers were hot when I was a kid... After all, I did live on planet Earth and so I'm not from some pleasantly cool planet out in some other solar system ( since we're pretty sure there isn't another planet with intelligent life on it in ours ... That's presuming I am intelligent, too.) Summers were equally hot and I've already written about not having air conditioning. Somehow, though, it was more bearable, and I'd like to give credit to the source of some of the relief. First, there was the water hose. We called it a hose pipe. We did so until we realized that people thought that was hilarious and laughed. " Hose pipe! Hahaha! Oh my God! Where are you from!?" Okay, water hose! But as a kid, hose pipe worked just fine! It didn't matter how high the temperature got outside. The kids weren't allowed to sit around inside the house unless it was pouring rain. Sometimes we wanted to be outside IN the pouring rain. It felt good. In winter we hovered around the oil stove in the living room just long enough to warm our backsides (no central heating and air) and then we dressed and headed outside. But summers were the most awesome. There was no school, and from sunup to sunrise and beyond we played outside. We rode our bikes up and down front street and took a break from there to hit the hose, suck down some cold water (and you could pay $50.00 a bottle for water but it can't touch how good that water tasted that came through 25 feet of Goodyear rubber!)  A good dousing from head to toe and a dash through the shade of the giant Oak tree and we were good for another hour or two at least.  It was heaven to ride with your clothes soaked through. Our tops were little sun tops that Mama sewed for us. She made most of our clothes. Summer was shorts and pedal pushers, sunsuits and now and then we even went topless! We were brown as berries my Aunt Mattie used to say. 
Sometime during the afternoon we'd gather at the corner of Third Street and Front Street because we could hear it as clearly as a Siren's song. It was the call of the Ice Cream Man... Tinkling bells rang out My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean - My Bonnie Lies Over The Sea... We clustered around the truck like bees around a honeycomb. Same concept, right? He'd stop the truck, the song would change to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and while the ones in front of us made their ice cream orders, we hummed along and while our feet were burning on the pavement we'd  kind of do some sort of little ice cream dance while we waited. He handed out Nutty Buddy's, Banana Popsicles, Cherry Popsicles, Ice Cream cups with the little wooden spoons, Fudgecicles, Brown Cows, and then it came my turn. I dug down for my 10 cents, and stepped up to place my order for a Push Up.

There was nothing as refreshing as that tube full of orange sherbet surrounding the creamy center of vanilla ice cream. The little wooden spindle too soon pushed the cardboard base up to my mouth and the treat was finished. This really was a treat, because we didn't get to get ice cream every day. Some days we listened as the little truck trundled down the road behind our house to go to the Black Village - They had to have a seperate neighborhood.  Mama sometimes bought a box of Banana popsicles but not too often. Now and then we'd get the Freeze Pops but nothing tasted as good as those Push Ups from the truck. You couldn't buy them in stores. You could get almost anything else he sold but not those.

The heat of the day lasted throughout the night in our house. The fan brought some relief but not much really.  The cooler breeze it brought also brought the humidity into the house, and as cheaply built as they were, I'm almost positive there was no moisture barrier under them and no insulation in the walls - BUT- that was a good thing! My sister and I shared a double bed when we were little. One side of the bed was along the bedroom wall - with a clearance of about 2 inches. I always liked that side of the bed even though the other side offered the convenience of being able to get up for the bathroom without crawling over the other, and for getting up to get a drink of water in the middle of the night. Nope- none of that mattered in the summer because I could sleep in nothing but panties and I could press my back against the wall. Our humidity here is usually high in the summer and back then it made the walls inside the house 'sweat'. In the middle of the night when it felt like you were glued to the hot sheets because you'd sweated and sweltered, there was nothing that felt as good, and cooled me off so quickly and lastingly as pressing my back against the bedroom wall for that tiny little cool water bath that condensed on the wall.  It was easy too, to fall asleep with my cheek pressed against the wall as well...

I went to Food Lion the other day after working out in the yard all afternoon. The temperature had been in the low 80's and the humidity was high enough to keep a constant sheen of persperation on my face... It was hot. I wanted something cold, and sweet, and passing by the Frozen Food section, I saw my old favorite on the shelf. They've renamed it, given it a proper and fitting name: Dreamsicle. Oh yes, it is the stuff that dreams are made of. Tell me, what is more refreshing than that chilling orange sherbet and more satisfying than the creamy sweet goodness of vanilla ice cream? Nothing!
But if you can't get one, taking the hose pipe water hose to the top of your head and then taking a good long swallow under the shade of the oak tree comes pretty close.

Blackberries, Wild Cherries and Wine

I saw blackberry bushes in bloom on the way to work this morning. The bright green leaves lead up to a cluster of snowy white flowers, and as kids we marked the location of the patches just like that - knowing where you'd seen the flowers and going back to them. The dewberry that grows close to the ground is a sweet, fat and juicy berry too, and we must've picked gallons of them as kids, but the real blackberries grow and stand up on thorny canes, a bush if you will. These were the real blackberry bushes.They'll be ripe in a couple of weeks or so. I won't get to them before the birds and the neighborhood kids do but that'll be alright. I can say that I picked my share when I was a kid. Mama used to send us out with bowls to pick the dewberries and we'd eat as many as we could and take home as many as we couldn't eat which was never a lot, but enough to make a berry cobbler usually. You can't beat the taste of a blackberry cobbler when the berries are fresh enough that you have to wash the sugar ants off of them before using them. We didn't have that luxury when we were out picking them and more than once the taste of the berry was spiced by the sting of an ant on our tongues... Still, they were sweet and we could hardly wait to go out along the railroad tracks to get the berries.
We had a wild cherry tree beside our house, and we could climb it, and that meant we could get the clusters of the sweet black wild cherries. They're only about as big as a pea but full of a delicious purple juice. It took a mouthful to get a good swallow, and then you had to sift through the seeds, but every drop was worth it.
I have a wild cherry tree beside my house now, and the fruits drop onto my deck. I don't love the purple juice so much when it leaves dime sized purple stains on the wood. The birds make a mess with them, too, but I won't begrudge them the fruits. I know how tasty it is.
Occasionally Mama would have leftover berries from our foraging and after the cobbler was made, she would take down her cookie jar - It was a large red apple and the lid was the stem of the apple. She would pour the washed berries into the cookie jar and cover them with sugar and then the lid would go back on and the jar would go up on the top shelf in the cabinet for a week or two. I didn't understand why she thought that was a good idea - they went sour in the jar!!
One summer she packed us all into the car, we picked up my sister, Linda, and her kids, and we all headed up to my Uncle Harry's house. There was a huge pine forest between his land and the road and there must have been acres of blackberry bushes in there. We were all given a bucket and instructions to be careful not to step on snakes, and to only pick the ripe black berry.  We were out there most of the day and we all filled up our buckets more than once, and our bellies too, and suffered more than a few ants on the tongue and thorns in our fingers and our forearms. We were scratched and pricked head to toe but came home with enough berries to make a huge cobbler, several quarts to freeze,  and then some got  put some into the cookie jar. Occasionally she would take it down and we'd all peer inside to see what was happening. It had a sour, sweet smell, and she'd put a little more sugar into it, then put it away again. After a few weeks we got a taste (a tiny sip) of it, and it was pretty good, but not as good as the fresh berry juice that squirted out onto our tongues when we bit into the fat, juicy berries. Years later Mama bought Mogan David blackberry wine and we got a taste of it. Instantly I knew what she had made in the cookie jar. It was a perfect little distillery and she'd made some sweet wine in that jar.
She didn't make it often, but the memories are vivid of that apple cookie jar coming down from the top shelf in the cabinet, sugar getting poured into it, and then getting put up again. Hot summer, juicy berries, cookie jars and homemade wine. I'm promising you that if the Gods drink blackberry nectar, they brew it in a cookie jar on the top shelf in the cabinet - after the cobblers are made of course.

Don't Bug Me Bug!

I was outside watering my flower beds this afternoon, and feeling like a walking portable buffet for the gnats and mosquitoes. I realized that Summer is barreling toward us, and although we've had a slight reprieve from the heat for the last two days, soon the temperatures will be skyrocketing toward the 90s and life will be miserable out of doors. As a kid growing up in the 60s (I was born in 1956) we didn't have air conditioning. The best we could do to relieve the heat was a large fan in the window at the back of the house, and all of the other windows left open. This afforded a rather nice nighttime breeze and kept the house from becoming an oven during the day. We kids didn't know it was hot inside although I am sure Mama knew it, and Daddy too. Of course leaving the windows open meant that you took a chance of having unwelcome visitors in the house if you had a tiny hole in any of the screens. The mosquito, (aka the state bird), availed herself of the most minute tear in any screen, and we often woke the next morning with a red bump on an arm or a leg, or most irritating, on the back of the shoulder just out of hands reach. I say that it was a her because typically the males do not feed on blood but feed on the sap of plants. The females, however, aren't shy about inviting themselves to dinner, mind you, and you're the main course.
If the mosquitoes weren't lucky enough to find a hole in the screen, the midges didn't need one... A midge is known as a "no-see-um" here in the South. You -can- see them, but they are miniscule. Sharpen a pencil really good and make a dot on paper, or you could poke a hole in a piece of paper with a pin...That's the size of a midge. They have a nickname here- Flying Teeth.
They bite and it isn't painful, per se but it doesn't feel good, either. It's an instant stinging itch. They leave tiny red dots where they've been, and those are usually surrounded by a slightly pale ring. Surprisingly, other than being a painful nusiance to people, the no-see-um isn't listed as a pest that warrants any kind of pest control because they carry no diseases. This little bit of knowledge is no comfort when you are sitting in your car at the drive-thru and suddenly your scalp feels like a buffet and everyone's dining at once... There aren't enough hands on a typical human to battle them.
Fire ants were a problem too, when I was little, but not like they are today. That is not to say that we didn't know of them and what they were, and what they could do. For the most part they were usually out in the fields and far from anywhere that we played.
There were the huge black carpenter ants, too. They shared our oak tree that we played under and sometimes they took shortcuts across our ankles and arms. I was never bitten by one but they have huge mandibles and they will bite.
What was different about then compared to now? I still have the same skin (just more of it - quite a lot more of it, actually). The mosquitoes and midges are the same- I think, as are ants, yet each bite now feels as if they've begun to carry ice picks, pickaxes, and pocket knives to stab with! I'm reminded of the gold digger in Rudolf The Red-nosed Reindeer when he swings his pickaxe and tastes the snow for gold. I can almost hear their little lips smacking!
I can't take the heat now, either. I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and it's hotter, or if I've just become so accustomed to air conditioning. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if I had continued to live like I did as a child. Mama and Daddy kept the window unit in the dining room even after the kids were all grown and moved out of the house - and they only used it sparingly. They depended for the most part on the window unit in the back room of the house - and I can't remember either of them ever having a cold. In fact, I can't remember, as a child,  ever having a cold either!
Heat, bugs, summer - it was a package deal when I was young and there was no escaping any of it! Although now and then, we'd take an uncommonly long time getting ice cubes out of the freezer, or getting a glass of tea from the refridgerator...
Now we just crank the air down a bit, slather on some Off or some SSS from Avon... and we dodge the heat and the bugs if we are able.
As kids we ignored these things for the most part. We itched and we scratched. We played, carrying a picnicking "skeeter" now and then, too. When we went camping, the insects knew we were on the way, and set up welcoming committees. I'm pretty sure if we had looked closely, we'd have seen tiny signs posted all around our chosen campsite like the South of the Border signs lining I-95... "Free Buffet" "Come on In", "Dine Here" "No Shirt =Easy Dining" and finally,  "Eat Here!" We lived through it.
Somehow. Not now.

Strange Weather

The weather today is weird. It's windy and a wee bit cool but not too cool to enjoy it... Still, it makes you look out of the window when you hear a stronger gust of wind... It made me think of a day similar to this when I was little. I was probably 7, maybe younger, but I remember it as vividly as if it were just yesterday.
I was occupying myself by cutting out paper dolls on the front porch of the house on Dewey Hill.  We had super thick catalogs from Sears and Penney's. They were free back then and you could get one whenever you went to the store. Mama always got one and after she'd finished browsing them, we could have them. We spent HOURS flipping through the pages of the women's clothing sections. We'd find a pretty lady and cut her out of the page. Then we'd flip back to the dresses and such, and try to find one that would fit her... in the same pose that she used. Very difficult, let me tell you and in fact, we never found any that matched the cut-outs at all. But we managed to have fun doing it. We didn't have the money to go and just buy something like that - even though the paper doll books probably only cost .29 cent then... or less. This was much more fun and we used to spend days and days playing with the catalogs.
This particular day was a stormy day. It hadn't started raining but the sky was dark and the wind was blowing. I was busy taping a reasonable copy cut out of cardboard to the back of my doll when the lightning flashed.  Then a few seconds later the thunder boomed loud overhead. Another flash of lightning followed almost instantly and the thunder rumbled overhead much sooner the second time. I was mesmerized by the sudden blustery winds that accompanied the storm and sat up to look outside. The porch was screened in top to bottom so I had an unobstructed view of the house and trees across the street. The Cumbee's lived across from us and there was a fairly large China Berry tree at the corner of their house.  The wind was whipping it all around, and the sky was dark but eerily bright at the same time. Today you might say we were in the center of a storm cell and the conditions were prime for a tornado. I was blissfully unaware of anything like that, so I sat, awed by the sounds and the flashing lightning. I stared at the tree and suddenly, the sky lit up brighter than I had ever seen it, the China Berry tree lit up too, and down from the top of the tree and across the yard, rolled a ball of fire. It was as big around as a large beach ball and white bright!!  It rolled right up to the edge of the yard,  and disappeared! There was not a sound from it, and no smoke either. It was just as if the sky had tossed a ball of lighting down into the tree and it rolled down the trunk and across the yard. I will say that I was worried it was going to roll on across the little strip of sand that we called a road separating the houses, and pop through the screen.
That was all it took for me to decide I should not be on the front porch protected by screen wire and nothing else... I left paper and scissors to fate and ran in the house. I told Mama I had seen a ball of fire rolling across the yard at the Cumbee's house and she believed me! I found out later that those are rather rare occurences - One is all I need to see but I count myself extremely lucky to have seen something unique like this - And then there was the time we watched a UFO from the back porch when I was little. But thats another story.

You Can't Be Serious About Eating That!

Oh but they were! I guess that the first, and the weirdest thing, I remember seeing someone eat was something that the family that lived in front of us ate. Tooter (I can't tell you why they called him that... I think his real name was Donald), his wife Billie, and their kids, were good people. Donald used to Doodlebug with Jo Ann and I and Tina was a little doll baby with black hair and huge brown eyes. She was too young to hang out with us older 6 year old kids...Later Miss Billie had a baby girl and named her Patty Jo. I loved that baby!! So much so that I snuck into the bedroom one day and climbed over the edge of the crib and took her out and held her for a long time. Miss Billie was furious that I had done that but I couldn't help myself. I had to hold her. I think Miss Billie wasn't really mad but she scared me so that I never did that again. I always asked and she always let me hold her. One summer morning, eager to get started on the days hunt for Doodlebugs, Jo Ann and I went to get Donald who was just about to sit down to breakfast. Not wanting to be rude, Miss Billie asked us if we wanted to have some eggs and grits too. Of course we did because you know food always tasted better when it was next door and shared with your friends! We sat down and waited while she fried all of us an egg, and laid it over the creamy, steaming hot and buttered grits. We all liked our eggs with the yellow runny so we set to smashing the egg into the grits. I was just about to shovel a spoonful into my mouth when Miss Billie set the bottle of ketchup in front of Donald - who immediately opened it and poured a great glop of the red stuff right in the middle of his perfectly good grits! My gosh! That was almost against the law! No one put ketchup on eggs and NOBODY in their right mind would mix it with grits if they did! But he did... and Miss Billie must have found the looks on mine and Jo Ann's faces amusing because she started laughing and told us we should try it. We declined. However, curiosity got the better of us, and we tipped a tiny taste of ketchup right onto the edge of our grits, and stirred... and cautiously tasted, and I remember thinking that I had never eaten anything that tasted quite that good in my whole life - besides peach ice cream or something. Holy cow, that was good! Once in a while at home I'd get brave and douse my grits with ketchup, ignorning the sceptical looks of Mama and Daddy... They probably knew I would grow out of it, and I did. Sometimes I think I want to try it again... and I always talk myself out of it. I can't bear to think that it might taste as bad as I once thought it would and I will have ruined a perfectly delicious plate of grits.

The second oddest thing I remember seeing someone eat was when I had lunch one day at my neighbor's house, the Kennedys. All morning I had played with Louise and Sherry (I had outgrown Donald and doodlebugging). We played in their back yard and in ours and occasionally a delicious aroma would cross on a breeze and I thought I would starve! Miss Florence called the girls in to eat and as I was with them, she invited me too. I couldnn't wait to have some of whatever she'd cooked. Soon we were sitting around the table and in the center was a big silver pot, steaming, and a plate of soft white bread. Mr. Wilbur took the first ladle of what was in the pot and when I saw what he put onto his plate, I suddenly was not very hungry. He'd dished out a fish in clear broth, and that wasn't the problem, even though I didn't like fish... This fish was whole. The head was still on, as was the fins and the tail. It had been gutted, thank goodness, but that was about as good as I can say about that fish. The ladle went around, Miss Florence got her fish, Marsha got hers, and Tammy got her soup too. I was handed the handle and reached over to take out a little broth and to hopefully break the fish in half because I knew I could not eat it. I did manage to do so and spooned it into my plate. I took the smalled piece of fish I could. Miss Florence thought I hadn't meant to and I had to hurriedly assure her that I had as much as I could possibly ever eat, and reached for some of the loaf bread. I didn't know, but soon found out, that the eyeballs and fish heads were a delicacy that the Kennedy's prized! My refusal to take the head of the fish instigated a fight between Sherry and Louise over who would get the eyeballs from my fish... I could not believe that they ate them, and was horrified when Louise popped one into her mouth and crunched down. I heard a squishy pop... I hastily forced down a few bites of the white meat of the fish, swallowed some bread behind it, drank my tea and thanked them for having me for lunch. I convinced myself that I was needed at home right away and excused myself. I never ate with them again unless I knew what we were having beforehand. Once it was fried chicken legs and loaf bread sandwiches. Pure heaven!

One last thing that stood out as weird was a chocolate gravy that Willese Carroll cooked for breakfast for her kids. We often got a ride to school and we walked down to their house to wait for Miss Willese to get ready to take us. Some mornings she'd just be finishing up breakfast and we'd get a bite of something before we left. She had biscuits usually and a pot of bubbling cocoa syrup on the stove. I don't know how she made it but Jo Ann loved it!  Anyway, occasionally Miss Willese would call early in the morning and Jo Ann would run down the path to her house to get a biscuit with chocolate gravy... It was really cocoa, sugar, butter, milk and it was cooked down to a thick brown sweet gravy. I don't think it was a hit with me.

Watching the fight for fish eyeballs had cured me of taking a shine to anything out of the ordinary.

Maybe it's boring but I prefer my grits with butter and no ketchup, I like butter and honey, or sausage gravy on my biscuits... and if anything I'm being served has eyeballs, I think I hear my Mama calling.

Coleslaw and Hushpuppies- A staple of the South

Growing up, Coleslaw and Hushpuppies were not as appealing as, say, hearty roast beef and a decadent 7 layer chocolate cake - but we didn't always have a choice, and a 7 layer cake of any flavor was never seen in our house. Roast beef, yes - occasionally - but the cheaper cut with lots of fat (and flavor, actually).

This blog is about the foods we ate growing up.

It's strange how taste buds change as we mature. Foods that I had growing up weren't exciting. No one said they had to be, but when you're looking at a plate of big butter beans (aka giant Lima beans) with rice, and cornbread and a slice of fried fatback and a nice fresh green onion on the side, you crave a juicy hot dog, some french fries, and a soda. That other food, while actually healthier and probably tastier, was 'old fashioned-old people' food... It could not have been meant for kids. We wanted corn dogs, cheeseburgers from McDonalds,, pizza from Pizza Hut...
Unfortunately, or maybe not, we didn't get those things very often. In fact, I can't ever remember getting a cheeseburger from anywhere except the Crystal burgers we used to get when we went camping through the mountains in the summer. I don't remember ever going out to eat at a restaurant when I was little. When I was a little older, Mama babysat a little girl whose grandmother owned the Hoof and Horn on Spruill avenue and we were invited to eat there a couple of times for free. That was delicious food! Roast beef, prime rib, Hamburger steak, french fried potatoes, beans corn, cabbage, rolls... Absolutely delicious food, and I think that it simply tasted so wonderful was because the dining room tables had white linen tableclothes, waitresses brought us glasses of ice water and tea and then cleaned up after us. No dishes to wash...
As I have grown I find myself wanting to eat in Mama's kitchen again. Not the restaurant, not the Crystal Burger - Not the Bantam Chef where we ate on Sundays after church sometime (Those burgers taught Burger King about the two hands to hold a whopper idea - they were huge! As big as a small dinner plate, Daddy said, and he was right)
I want Mama's beef stew...which wasn't beef "stew" at all. It was more like a vegetable beef soup. She cut up roasts, fat and all, potatoes, onions, tomatoes from the garden usually, okra from the garden, lima beans from the garden, sometimes carrots from the store, and good old salt and pepper.  She made cornbread - not the sweet kind because that isn't cornbread - that's cornmeal cake as fas as I am concerned. Try as I might I cannot get that same taste that it had when it came out of her large stew pot. I can get close but not -there-... I am almost sure that it is psychological - It's not our old kitchen table in Mama's sunny yellow kitchen with the window open to catch the breezes that came through thanks to the huge fan in the back bedroom window. I didn't see Mama cutting the roast beef  and I didn't have to cry while chopping the onions. Somehow all of that added to the taste, I am sure.
Now, as we were rather poor by the standards of the day, we often ate fish that Daddy caught. We had catfish, Crappie, Bass, Spot (caught in the Intercoastal Waterway that drowned our neighbor), Bream (Brim), and occasionally Flounder. I hated fish! I didn't like the bones, I didn't like the flavor! Most of my meal consisted of the hushpuppies and the coleslaw that completed the meal.
You hear a lot of theories as to why these small round balls of fried cornmeal are called Hush puppies. I wondered myself. I have heard that hunters used to fry up corncakes and would throw the remnants to the dogs to hush them up so as not to scare the deer, etc. But that doesn't make sense because hunters want the dogs to be hungry when they hunt so they are more keen on tracking the 'food'. Some have it that hushpuppies were tossed out of the back door of plantation kitchens to shut the dogs up when they'd whine around the back doors for food. But that doesn't make sense either... Dogs were kept in the house if they were pets, and kept in pens if they were hunting dogs. Hushpuppies were made for one reason. Slaves who were planning to run would take cornmeal and mix it with water and fry up small round nuggets to take along with them. When they crossed plantations, or came across the pens of the dogs that plantation owners kept, the dogs would bark, alerting the owners. Slaves would toss them these fried corncake balls with the admoniton to "Hush, puppies!" The dogs would forget the running slaves, and chow down. 
Through the years, it became Hushpuppies, and took a place on the tables of Southern folk because cornmeal was readily available, cheaper than flour, and it tasted good fried. 
Mama made hers with yellow cornmeal, buttermilk, a handful of flour, an egg or two, chopped onions and a pinch of salt.  We couldn't afford cooking oil so Mama fried everything in lard.There is nothing like that taste in anything you buy today.
We made our own coleslaw too. I want to laugh everytime I go past the packaged salads in the stores today. That is NOT coleslaw, people. Coleslaw is grated cabbage, not sliced or shredded... Chopped onions, salt, pepper, Duke's Mayonnaise, a teaspoon of sugar, and apple cider vinegar. You have to grate the cabbage with a hand held grater ( and a food processor does work) and there aren't any carrots or purple cabbages in it either. Mix it up, serve it and enjoy it!
Today I love fish - I still don't like Bream or Bass. I will eat any fish from the sea, and will eat my weight in Crappie and Catfish. But I don't want any of them if I can't have Hushpuppies and Coleslaw. To think that I disliked this growing up is absolutely incredible. I had food that was fit for Kings and I didn't really appreciate it.
Homemade ice cream- Blue Bell gets close. There is nothing, nowhere, no matter what they claim, that comes close to cooking milk and sugar and vanilla with egg yolk into a creamy liquid custard,  taking it out onto the back porch, pouring it in the canister, surrounding it with rock salt, and then cranking that handle for a good half hour or more. Sometimes, when the ice cream is almost 'ice cream' you could open the lid and pour in canned peaches that had been chopped up, or strawberries, or some canned chopped pineapple. I promise you, and those of you who came from backgrounds similar to mine will agree, that nothing tastes better than this sweet concoction. I will grant you that part of the delicious appeal of homemade ice cream is the anticipation... There is nothing more incredibly apt to whet the appetite or to hone the tastebud as anticipation.
My older sister, Carolyn, made Peanut butter cookies. She was the Popcorn cook too in our household. Nobody makes better peanut butter cookies than she did and lard was the key I am sure. We popped popcorn in two tablespoons of lard... and nothing compares to it, today.
I watch a cooking show and occasionally they wrap a chunk of some kind of meat in something called "Lardo" and I'm pretty sure it is nothing but a thin slice of pure fat - exactly what lard is rendered from... The dish usually gets rave reviews... and I'd bet if you ordered it in a restaurant it would be a specialty and carry an exhorbitant price.
Sweet potatoe pies - my Mama was the master! She perfected the recipe for them. She made her own crusts for years! She baked and peeled her own sweet potatoes for years! I would give anything for one of them. My little sister Jo makes a very acceptable version, though, so when I crave one, I can coax her into making on for me.
There is nothing better than childhood in the 60's. I would not trade the years of my youth for what kids have today. I would much rather spend Saturday mornings building villages out of sand in the back yard, taking fronds from Mimosa trees for Palm Trees, taking the clusters of colorful Lantana (the wild variety) for small rose bushes to adorn the little houses and mud fences, and I would trade nothing for the sight of Daddy taking the ice cream churn out of the shed and setting it up on the back porch, and running into the kitchen to see Mama opening cans of evaporated milk and measuring out sugar... I lived in paradise, I tasted the heaven that is real homemade ice cream, and the memories are golden.
Today I will trade you any steak for a plate of good Hushpuppies, some southern coleslaw and a dish or peach ice cream from the churn. But I won't trade those memories for anything.

Willie Carroll

Some days you're just bone-tired, dragging feet weary.  Today is that kind of day; the kind of day when all you can think about is being at home, resting, relaxing, worry-free until the alarm clock buzzes in the morning...  But this made me think about an incident that happened in the early '60s. My Daddy worked at Garco - aka Raybestos Manhattan- and we lived in the Mill village of Dewey Hill. All of the residents worked at the Mill so it only made sense that the men, and women (very few) were not only co-workers, but neighbors and friends as well. Daddy had two good friends- Willie Carroll and Guy White. The three of them often fished together - none of them were hunters. Daddy had a boat that he built, and Mr. Guy had a boat, and they took turns taking one of them out on fishing trips. Daddy was supposed to go fishing with Mr. Guy one day but for some reason he did not go. Mr. Guy and some other friend went instead. I remember it got later and later in the afternoon and when Mr. Guy didn't come home his wife was getting really worried, and so were the rest of the grownups. Someone, I don't remember who, went to where he usually put the boat in, but it was capsized. They were never sure if a big wave turned them over or if it was something else... but both men drowned, and they didn't find them for a week or so. It was scary and I think I have always kept a great respect for water since then. Daddy and Willie went fishing months later in the same place and Daddy's boat, the Sue Ellen, sank. Daddy and Willie managed to hang on long enough to be rescued, but that section of the Intercoastal Waterway almost claimed them too. I think this strengthened the bond between Daddy and Willie. I know Daddy loved him like a brother and I think Willie felt the same way about him. Willie got extremely sick one day... he had a major heart attack.  This was devestating news back then because there was no unemployment, and I am sure there was a waiting period for any kind of temporary disability to kick in. When you make less than 60.00 a week, every penny has a place to go and not working for weeks has a huge negative impact on a family. There were 4 people in Willie's family. His wife, a son, and a daughter, and himself. It was terrible to hear his wife crying in our kitchen, worrying about how to pay bills, how to buy food - there was no government assistance, no food stamps - Not that we knew about, anyway. Daddy just went to bed a little earlier than usual and the next day, came home 3 hours later than he usually did. And every day for the rest of that week, he worked 3 hours longer. When he got his paycheck, and Mama went to the Mill to pick it up, he told her to cash the check like she always did, to take his 65.00 out, and to take the rest of it to Willie. For 4 weeks Daddy worked like that and gave every penny of overtime to Mr. Willie... and if he hadn't, I can't imagine what would have happened. I'm sure the Mill saw what Daddy was doing and knew why and so they authorized it. But that was the kind of man my Daddy was - If I tend to make a hero out of him, it's because he was. Mr. Willie recuperated and went back to work for awhile but eventually had to retire because his heart was so bad.
10 years later Willie had another heart attack and the doctors thought they could do open heart surgery and repair the valves in his heart, but sadly he died on the operating table. That was November, 1974.
Daddy got sick in February of 1984. It was cancer of the lung - caused by asbestos. In June I had a dream. I dreamed that I was visiting my parents and when I drove up to the house, I saw Willie's old Sea Green Ford pickup truck parked out front. I thought that was weird because the truck looked brand new, and I knew in my dream that Willie was dead. But I went on inside and Daddy was in his chair and Willie was sitting in Mama's chair and they were talking and laughing like they always did. Between them, on the floor, was a large trunk. I asked Daddy what was in the trunk - I'd never seen it. He told me that he had a few things he wanted to take along. I asked him where he was going... and he said that Willie and he were going on a trip -  that he was going to go off with Willie. I asked him where he was going, but he said he didn't know, and Willie was silent and smiling, and never spoke to me. I asked how long he would be gone, and he didn't know. I told him I would go into the kitchen and fix them some lunch - as if they were going fishing together again... but Daddy told me not to, that they wouldn't need lunch... and I accepted that. I told him to be safe and to enjoy himself and I must've woke up. I told people about that dream because it was one that seemed haunting somehow - it had a strangeness to it that clung to me and never let go. Well, Daddy died on a November morning and after things settled down some, we were sitting in the living room when Willie's widow came through the front door. Someone had called her to tell her of Daddy's passing. When she came in the living room, she looked strange and was crying, and was oddly excited... She grabbed my Mama and hugged her and then said " Helen, do you know what today is?" and my Mama shook her head no, she wasn't sure what importance the day held... and Willese (that was Willie's wife's name) said " Today is ten years to the day that Willie died... He's been dead ten years today, Helen... and he came back to get Tucker!"  I was sitting, and it's a good thing. I felt ice water run through the muscles in my legs and arms... Willie sure enough had come to get Daddy, in his Sea Green Ford, and they'd gone on together.

I'm not so tired now when I think about how hard Daddy worked, how tired he must have been and how he found a little more of himself to give, not just for his family, but for his best friend...

Balls and Bats

Summer cometh - I don't think there is anything more pleasant than this transition between Spring and Summer... unless you count the smooth, subtle, submission of Summer into Fall. We'll get to that one another time because right now I'm thinking of evenings spent playing up on First Street, or as we called it "Front Street" ... Our neighborhood, as I said in an earlier post, was a mill village. It was laid out in somewhat of a capital B laid sideways. There was one long, main street that was paved, that ran the length of the neighborhood and ended at any one of several businesses that took up residence there. Off of this main road, ran two sandy dirt streets, forming the cup of the B and that was intersected by another sandy road. We lived on 3rd street, or to be postally correct, Collier Avenue. The street between us and First Street, or Lincoln Avenue (Postally correct) was called 2nd Street. The other half of the neighborhood probably also had its own postally christened names but we never thought to ask what they were. All that mattered was that our friends lived either on our side, or on that side, and nothing but a huge field of grass lay between the two sections of the neighborhood.  Front Street was paved, gray pebbly asphalt providing a rather rough surface for skates, but a marvelous hiss for bicycle tires. Across the street from the houses was a pallet manufacturing facility, and woods. There were street lights too. And where there are woods, and street lights, there are going to be moths and bugs that fly at night, and where those are, there are going to be bats. Evenings like this, after homework was done, and supper had been had, when the heat of the day was but a memory and a warmth that was embedded in the pavement, we kids would gather up on Front Street and we'd play ball. Not ordinary ball, but a ball that was a half of a rubber ball. We didn't intend that, but we weren't wealthy either, and when a rubber ball had lived a long full life as a round thing, it often seperated, and left two halves. Thanks to the pallet manufacturer, and a gap in the fence that acted as a barrier for would be adventurers (us), we never lacked for wood slats to pop that half ball all over that street. There was never any rule, no one kept score, and we didn't really have teams. Rita, Danny, Jo, Louise, Sherry, Tammy, myself, Thomas, occasionally Marsha, and one or two others from the neighborhood came out and faced off with one intent - fun.  We sort of divided up, yes, but before the game was over, we were just all over the street, whacking the ball, laughing, falling down, doubled over with laughter when the ball managed to hop on edge and go zinging off in some crazy fashion into one of the players. And when we were finally too tired to swing a pine slat, and when no one wanted to go into the empty lot to get the ball because of the stickers (sand spurs), we'd sit along the edge of the road in the soft sand and we'd watch the bats who'd come out when the street lights came on and the moths flew like winged acrobats around the lights. They swooped, and the bats swooped. They spiraled and the bats zipped and zoomed right up after them. It was an incredible aerial show, and we never tired of watching them. You could hear tiny squeaks, but you never heard the wings. Occasionally we'd toss a small rock up high enough to get the attention of a bat flying by, and it would dive at it, but even without being able to see it, it knew it wasn't something to eat and the pebble would fall back to the ground. Times were so simple then. I guess that kids today reading something like this would find it incredibly boring and they'd wonder how in the world we managed to grow up without a computer, or video games, or motorized scooters, 4-wheelers, and all of the 'toys' kids have today. We grew up with skinned knees, mosquito bites, bruised elbows and noses, and our two wheelers were powered by two feet. We grew up knowing how to entertain ourselves because we had to. And we learned about the world around us, in a personal, hands-on kind of way. And when the day was finished and we were tired, we'd hear Mama calling from the front porch for us to come home and take a bath and get ready for bed... I wouldn't take anything for the memories of a group of kids, playing  under streetlights, savoring every second of this magic called twilight when we chased half rubber balls while overhead tiny bats chased their supper... Ah, childhood!!

Doodle Bugging

I was walking up to the front door today and noticed that I had a new little neighbor in the sandy patch near the front door. Mr. Ant Lion, or maybe Ms. Ant Lion, has moved into the neighborhood of the front steps under the shady umbrella of the oak tree.  For years, -years-, I never knew these creatures had any other name than "Doodle Bug".  But they do, and they are ant lions because they feed on ants which they trap in those soft sand funnels they build. Patiently, they wait at the bottom, covered in a very fine layer of sand... and when the hapless ant stumbles across the edge of the little hole, he disturbs a few grains of sand. The ant lion, or doodle bug, senses this. His body is covered with fine hairs which apparently are sensitive to the smallest disruption of the tiniest grain of sand. He waits and if the ant hasn't fallen in, or if he has begun a slide to the bottom but seems to be on his way to getting a foothold in the sand, and therefore out, the ant lion kicks up sand from the bottom, throwing sand at the ant until he dislodges it. The ant slides to the bottom, and the ant lion snatches it up. Yummy! But as kids, we didn't care about this interesting fact, and this clever little hunter beneath the sand. We liked holding the Doodle Bug because it walked backwards in our hands and tickled! Jo Ann, Donald Cumbee and myself spent hours under the edge of the house, hunting Doodle bugs. You didn't just scoop up any pocket of sand where you thought they were. That was no challenge.  We knew enough to know that the journey was often as much fun as the destination... So we took tiny sticks, or pine straws, and tried to trick the Doodle Bug into giving up it's hiding place. We tickled the edge of the sand, and when a small sand volcano erupted, we knew Doodle Bug was home, and we scooped him up. We collected several, held them in our hands until we grew tired of the tickling, and we let them go. Occasionally we would find a real ant, drop it into the jaws of death, and felt we'd re-imbursed the Doodle Bug for any inconvenience we'd caused him or her. I am sure there are lady Doodle Bugs too. One day I was Doodle Bugging all by myself and I had located a really deep funnel  - and was sure that the king of Doodle Bugs lived at the bottom. I followed all of the necessary steps to insure that Mr or Mrs Bug was at home. I disturbed the sand, and sure enough saw movement under the sand.  I didn't see the customary sand kicking however, and should have been more cautious... but living dangerously was all the rage when you were 7... so I scooped up the sand funnel and felt wiggly tickling in my palm and then out of the sand, erupting like some gigantic furry monster, up popped a giant trapdoor spider! He'd taken advantage of the empty funnel - or maybe he had eaten the occupant... From that day onward I never scooped the sand out of the funnels... I flicked sand in, and flicked sand out, and only when I saw the Doodle Bug did I pick it up...
Doodle Bugs are fun, and they are incredibly clever... When my kids were little showed them how to find Doodle Bugs... From there they went on to finding the brown crickets that lived deep in the grass... and from there they went on to stuffing a cricket up the nose of the defenseless neighbor... Oh well.

The Hell of The Holocaust

Today in Charleston, survivors of the Holocaust were gathered for a memorial service downtown. It made me think of a story that my Mama told me when I was a young girl and had checked out The Diary Of Anne Frank from the library at school. I don't know why I chose that book but I couldn't put it down and felt terrible for the young girl who had to live in cellars and attics and to depend on the kindness of others to bring food and water because going out to get it herself would almost certainly mean capture and death for her and her family.
But I digress and this is not a book report. Mama and I talked about life in Germany for the Jews and I almost couldn't believe any human could be hunted down and killed just for being what you were, born to whomever, were your parents. I must have seemed doubtful so she told me that when she was younger, before I was born, not much before, there was a neighbor from Germany and she was a Jewish girl.  She told my Mom that her grandfather had been killed and that later her grandmother, mother, and herself were taken to one of the gas camps. Somehow, I am not sure of this part, she and her parents were freed and she came to the U.S after marrying a soldier. Her grandfather was the first to be killed she said. Apparently the Germans found him out in his fields, working. When they determined he was a Jew, they dragged him back to his barn and nailed him to the front of it. His screams brought her grandmother out and they stripped his flesh from him while she watched. Her grandmother was never the same after that, and I can believe that. I can't fathom what goes on in the mind of the fiends who devise tortures and terrors to inflict on the innocent...
That made it all real to me, however, and I found a new appreciation for the Diary of Anne Frank...

The Flying Jenny

What kid has not ever wished for a carnival ride right in their own backyard? I can remember going to the carnival when I was young and riding the ferris wheel and the Merry-Go-Round. At school there was a fantastic thing that seemed to spin wildly fast and you had to hang on for dear life but it was great fun and quite popular. I don't know what it was called, still don't as a matter of fact, but I wanted one. I wanted the Ferris Wheel too. And the Merry-Go-Round.

On our way to school, North Charleston Elementary, every day we passed a house on the corner that had a small train track all the way around the edge of the yard and the owners had the little engine, passenger car and the caboose train too! A couple of times on a weekend or something we would have to pass that house and the train would be going around and around the yard, an elderly fellow watching and walking alongside of it and there would be two little kids in the train having the time of their lives - You just knew that. I wanted to ride so badly but we never stopped and asked. I am sure he would have let us ride... Who could say no to big blue eyes and beguiling smiles flavored with a few "please, mister?" inquiries.

Well, anyway, we never got to ride and I am sure we (my sister and I) must have tormented Mama and Daddy with the ceaseless whining about wanting a train, a Ferris Wheel, a Merry-Go-Round, or anything that was more fun than our typical old everyday, everybody-has-one, boring old swing set.

Of course we didn't have that kind of money to buy anything like that but we had Daddy and Daddy was always pondering and piddling, he said. "Whatcha doin' Daddy?" " Oh, just piddlin'" .. I didn't know what piddlin' was but it had something to do with whatever he was building or doing in the wood shop behind the house, or in the garden down by the back fence. It didn't look fun all of the time, but it looked interesting for at least a few minutes.

One day Daddy was 'piddlin' with a deep hole he was digging out in the back yard. It was about 3 feet round, and seemed to be forever deep... In truth it was probably 2-3 feet deep. He started with post hole diggers and worked his way up to shoveling later on that afternoon. He had certainly piqued our interest and Jo Ann and I stood by attentively, watching, and waiting to see what happened with the hole. Fat earthworms wriggled in the clumps of dirt, and he was definitely a fisherman, but digging for earthworms this deep was - extreme- and even we knew that. But worms came and went and he paid them no mind. We did, and gathered several to take to the worm box for him and along the way became distracted with the caterpillars and Mimosa fronds and left Daddy to piddle with the hole. The next day our inspection of the hole was of immediate concern but there was no hole. Instead what was there was a large round pole, thick and sturdy, that was buried in a big round metal barrel. We'd spent many hours rolling that barrel, let me tell you! We knew it was hollow, but now it wasn't. Ingenious was Daddy's middle name. Somehow he had anchored the wheels and axle of some old automobile in concrete inside of that barrel. So that pole, innocuous laying flat, proved all kinds of interesting standing up. Now we asked him what it was because this was not an ordinary 'piddlin' he was doing, no Siree! He was bolting and soldering crossbars on the top axle while we watched. "It's a Flying Jenny." he said. I'm sure we must have seemed perplexed. "What does it do?" "You'll see" was the gist of the conversation. It seemed forever to find out what Jenny did. But one morning we were carted off to the store, or somewhere, and when we came home Flying Jenny was complete. What Daddy had built was essentially a smaller, 4 seated version of the flying swings that are so popular at the Fair. Instantly we attached our butts to the swings and my brother was the one to pull the rope that got us spinning. Rather like the magneto on a lawnmower pulley, he wrapped a rope around it and gave it a hard pull, and we spun 'round slowly and then faster. The rope pulling was a bit hard on anyone's hands after a bit and before the day was over we'd figured it was easier for someone to stand under the bars in the center and push them, and so Thomas, my brother, did. And we learned why Daddy called it the Flying Jenny. We flew. Our backyard became the neighborhood Fair and we never lacked for friends to push and take turn swinging. This marvelous toy was people powered and we learned fast that in order to make it work we needed friends and we needed to take turns, and somehow from that day forward, I no longer envied the children who trundled slowly around the edge of their Grandpa's yard in the tiny train. I knew that our Flying Jenny was the best ride in all of 'Kiddom'. Those were some of the best summers of my life - pushing, swinging, laughing, taking turns with our friends getting dizzy going 'round and

round staring up at the blue sky and knowing all the while that my Daddy was the most incredible 'piddler' in the whole wide world.

Easter by the penny and Duke's Mayonnaise Jars

I grew up in a time of -NOT- plenty. We had enough, I guess, but we never had more than what we needed to pay bills, eat, and keep gas in the car. Not that I knew about all of that but you know how it is. We had the necessities...usually.  We lived in the housing that belonged to the Mill, Garco- or Raybestos-Manhattan. Asbestos, regardless of what you call it. Anyway, the "village" we lived in was called the "Little Village", Dewey Hill. Closer to North Charleston, and the Mill, was "the "Big Village" where most of the higher paid workers lived. I guess some of the supervisors and plant managers, etc, lived there. We always went Trick or Treating there... They had the BEST candy. Anyway, the houses in our village were little wooden clapboard houses. There were three bedrooms, one bath, one living room and one kitchen. The front porch was a tiny little thing and the backporch ran the length of the house, save for a storage closet at one end of it and the other end gave way to the back door, which exited through the bathroom. Rent for the house was $7.00 a month. $1.00 per room and a $1.00 for something else. That doesn't seem like much; we lose $7.00 a month in the sofa cushions sometimes. But in 1963, it was almost a fortune. Daddy was making $1.60 an hour. The company took the rent out of his check. I remember going grocery shopping with Mama on Thursdays after she went to get his check. We went to Piggly Wiggly to get some things because they had better prices. And we went to Doscher's Red And White for other things because they had sales on other things. Mama would usually go to Doscher's first because she wanted to get the meats last, at Piggly Wiggly. So we'd go through the store, and she would buy dry beans, bread, detergent, canned goods like pork and beans, and fresh vegetables like collards, cabbage, onions and potatoes.  She'd cash Daddy's check, and from the $65.00, she would get around $40.00 back. Then we'd go to Piggly Wiggly and she would get fatback, hamburger, round steak (and this was not tenderized meat) maybe a roast, and chicken. She bought 1/2 gallon of milk and a box of powdered milk. She always bought several cans of condensed milk as well and we ate that, thinned with water, in our cornflakes. We didn't get the frosted flakes and the sugar coated cereals. There were 4 of us kids(two teenagers and my baby sister and I) living at home and the money was better spent putting real, decent, filling food on the table. Once in a while, if she had budgeted well and didn't have to buy something she had from the week before, she would buy ice milk, NOT to be confused with ICE CREAM. I don't even know if you can buy Ice Milk anymore... But it tasted like heaven to us and silly kids that we were, we thought it was better than that old homeade ice cream that we spent hours churning on the back porch sometimes. Even then we knew the sweetness of convenience...how special it was to buy something that we could make ourselves... What I would not give today for one bite of that heavenly homemade peach icecream. Nothing compares. Blue Bell comes close.
Anyway, when holidays rolled around, I know Mama had to worry. Out of 40.00 left from groceries, she had to pay electric bills, phone bills, water bills, car insurance, lunch money for 3 kids, and put aside a couple of dollars if she could for vacation. Daddy always worked extra hours for that, though.However, sometime after Christmas, on the mantle, two Duke's mayonnaise jars would appear. The labels were soaked off but the yellow band was unmistakeable. A hole was cut in the lids and after shopping, the coin change was divided equally, and dropped in the jars. One was mine and the other was Jo Ann's, my little sister. We wanted so badly to count that money! But we couldn't. All we could do was watch as little by little, day by day, it seemed, the jars began to fill up. Now and then we'd see a whole dollar in there! And we would get so excited because we knew that soon we'd take the jars, Mama would count the money, put it in rolls and in her purse, and we would go shopping. The week before Easter was the magic date. We had $5.00 in bills and another $3 or 4 in coins. We never had more than $12.00 or so in them, but it was enough to go out and buy the beatiful white or black patent leather Easter shoes we'd been dreaming of. Mama usually made our dresses but now and then, somehow, we'd get a store bought one if the shoe sale was good enough. I can only guess  how much money she had to put aside to afford the Easter baskets, and all of the candy that went in them. We never had a pre-packed basket. Mama put it all together. We'd dye eggs the night before and on Easter morning we'd pack them up, take our baskets and head over to Hanahan to the Waterworks, where they had a park, and we would hide the eggs in the thick clumps of grass. It was a magical place because it seemed that someone had decorated the trees for Easter. We didn't know that they kept the coat of white paint around the lower portion of the tree trunks to discourange insects... They looked dressed up and "Eastery" to me. We'd have a picnic, eat boiled eggs, gather with family and generally make a day of it. By the end of the day the chocolate was eaten, the candy eggs were safe for another day and the jelly beans were sticking to the green grass in the baskets. It wasn't the plastic grass of today. It was more like a papery straw grass...It dyed the candy eggs green if it was even a little damp... and sweaty hands delving into the basket to find that last grape jelly bean or that squashed chocolate egg made sure that happened.
Those were wonderful days. I'm sure kids today will have their own memories of Easter, but I'm sitting here thinking about how easy it is for parents to spend on just the basket alone what it took us months to save to buy just a pair of shoes.  But it's more fun to think about how that jar filled up and how I could lay in bed at night sometimes and hear coins clinking into the mayonnaise jar... tink, tink... tinkle.  Wonderful memories,absolutely priceless, dropped into a glass jar in the form of pennies, nickels, quarters and dimes.

Black Dogs and Black Widows

I think of this every time I see a black dog... Like most everyone, there are keys that turn on memories sometimes... A cologne, a certain feel to the time of day, a moment in time when you can smell or taste something from the past... Weird, yes. I guess so. However, it happens.
I don't remember being afraid of the dogs. I was too young.  But my Mama told me the story so often that I almost think I do remember being afraid of them. There was no reason to fear them. And I only screamed, terrified, when I saw a black dog. It didn't have to be a big dog, it didn't have to be near me... and I had night terrors about them, too. But scared of them I was.
When we moved over to Amboy street, as I mentioned earlier, I was very young. But I was old enough to be scared to DEATH of black dogs.  My mom said that one day she went out of the front door and was out in the front yard doing something. She might have been talking to the neighbor. I, Miss Adventure, or misadventure, came right out behind her and was playing on the front porch.  I guess I didn't want to go down the steps, and playing on the porch was good enough for me. She knew I was there because she heard the screen door shut. She glanced back now and then to make sure I was alright, which I was.  Then a few minutes later, she said, I was screaming my lungs out.  Now our porch was small and consisted of railings and pickets so that you couldn't readily see the porch without being close enough to peer between the pickets, or balusters if you will. But between my screams, and her running to see what was wrong, she said she heard a strange, low growling. She got to the bottom step and over in the corner where the porch joined to the house, there stood a huge black dog. She had never seen the dog before, and had not seen it come onto the porch. When the dog saw her he ( she determined later that it was a boy) whined in his throat and wagged his tail, so she knew he wasn't a threat to me or to her.  I was standing just a few feet from him, obviously petrified, and when I saw my mom, I apparently moved just enough to make the dog step to the side just a bit but keeping me away from his corner. And he growled. Mama came onto the porch and picked me up and the dog stood still, wagging and whining. He didn't want to come away from the corner but she finally coaxed him to come to her and made me pet the dog on his head. When I realized he wasn't going to eat me, she said, I calmed down. And when the dog moved over closer, behind him, sitting in a neat, tight little web with her pretty red hourglass showing in the most tempting fashion to lure tiny fingers to it, was a huge black widow spider. Mama said that dog was barring me from getting near that corner of the porch and I surely would have touched that shiny black bug with the pretty red spot and would certainly have been bitten and been in a lot of trouble. From that day on I never feared black dogs again. I don't remember if she ever found out where that dog came from or where it went after it saved my life that day. I hope it lived a fine, happy life.

So why the unexplained fear of the black dogs? Who knows? But I think things happen for a reason and I think that the fear of the dogs was the key to my being safe from that spider that day. Mama said she was born with a 'caul' over her face - which was rumored to give the person an extra sight, or sense...( It did, too) And though I didn't have that, there was something - something that told of a future instance where my unreasonable fear of man's best friend would save my life... Do I love dogs? You bet! 

The Earliest Years (That I can remember)

I guess I was born in George Legare Homes on Eden Avenue. I don't remember anything about it. Not too surprising that, yet I am sure I must have liked it there.

I do remember being a baby however. Its only one memory but it stuck with me and, as insignificant as it is, I count myself among very few who can recall anything prior to being a toddler.  I remember being in my crib and having to hold on to the sides to stand. I was alone in the room and had my bottle (back in the day they were glass, and heavy). I must have wanted some company. I don't think I cried at first but I managed to heave my bottle a good way across the room. I don't know why that seemed like a good idea but I did it. And I think I must have regretted it soon after because I remember reaching for it and wanting it back in my hand. Of course it did not come to me. I stared at it, laying against the baseboard on the rose flowered linoleum, half full, and I cried. And I cried... until my brother came in the room and figured out why I was crying and fetched the bottle back to me.

I don't remember anything else of my early, early years.

And then we moved. We moved over to Amboy Street off of Remount Road in North Charleston. Remount was off of Rivers avenue at 10 Mile Hill. We didn't call it Rivers Avenue. We didn't call it Highway 52. We called it Dual Lane. Why? Because it was the only dual laned highway in Charleston. It was huge ( by the standards of the day). Two lanes going West and two lanes going East.  Just past 10 Mile Hill ( I can't tell you why that is called that), the road narrowed to one lane.

On the Remount Road side there was a Piggly Wiggly and across from that, on the East bound side, there was a Eagles 5 & 10. And toys. Now, being only 3 or so, I hadn't had the opportunity, nor the wherewithall to avail myself of a proper ladie's purse. However I had a pair of cotton panties and a nickel that I had found and the front of my panties served quite well as pocketbook, for I was going shopping! I do remember this.  We lived on a dead end sandy street. At the end, the land sloped down and past a rather formidable jungle of pine and oak, it gave way to The Sand Pit. The other end of the street opened on to Remount Road. And there was one little side street that went from Amboy to Dual Lane (Rivers Avenue) through the side yard of the Binghams house. I must have paid close attention to shopping trips to Piggly Wiggly and indeed even over to Eagle's 5 & 10 store because I made up my mind  and went off on my own. I suppose everyone thought the other one was watching me. I was supposed to be playing with my friend, Cheryl, who lived across the street. But my good fortune had it that no one was watching me, and I had no reason to tell them that I was off to do some marketing. A nickel seemed like a large sum of money but it didn't weigh the purse down like I thought it should, so a couple of good handfuls of sand went in for good measure and off I went. My memory is sketchy about the trip through the yard and out to Rivers Avenue, but I made it. I wonder what people must have thought to see a toddler, 3 or 4 years old, barefooted, a load of sand in her drawers, purposefully making her way through the parking lot and to the edge of a busy highway. I remember standing on the side of the road, knowing not to cross it while traffic was coming. That did not stop me from yelling at the 18 wheel trucks to "Stop!" because I needed to get over to the dime store. I offered them my nickel several times, to no avail.  It seemed like forever but apparently somehow I made it to Eagles.  By then my family was frantic to find me...I am not clear on what happened but I seem to remember something about one of the truck drivers actually stopping, picking me up and taking me over to Eagles.  I am sure I could tell my name but not much more. The lady at Eagles called the police. My mother called the police.  The police then asked my mother if she was missing a blonde curly haired, blue eyed little girl. When she told them yes, they told her that they and I were over at Eagles, I was having candy or something and they came and took me home.  In writing this I am forced to think of how things have changed since then. A child, hardly more than a toddler, makes her way out of the yard, across a major highway and into a dime store to spend a nickel she found. The police are called, the parents come and get the child, and that was the end of it. No Department of Social Services, no charges of neglect or child endangerment...  and I am sure that I must have been spanked or scolded after the hugs and kisses for being found safe...Whatever happened, it cured me from wandering out of the yard from then on. I think they might have confiscated my nickel too... 

I have to thank my cousin Carlene for my re-awakened awareness of my blog page! Her blog, Horseshoe Bend, reminded me that I also have stories to share. Thank you, Carlene.
I am sure that most of these posts will bore some or all of you to tears. Some will evoke nostalgia. Some will evoke the "Holy crap! I can't believe that she told that!" response... and some, occasionally, will just bring on the head-shaking tsk-tsking "what is she thinking?" mindset. I'm 53. I don't care. I own that right, bought and paid for by years of meek, sweet, mouth-shut niceness.
So read at your own risk. This is coleslaw and hushpuppies. Plenty of fiber, mixed and shredded, a bit innocuous at first glance, but flavored with salt, pepper, vinegar, and creamy goodness.You didn't have coleslaw without hushpuppies in our house ... so it comes in small, neat littel round packages -  deep fried, loaded with cornmeal, onions, buttermilk, and served up hot and fresh - all told,  a grainy goodness, full of good, wholesome, if grainy, truth. Settle back with the sweet tea or your glass of buttermilk and a spoon and spend a few minutes here, going back there, for the most part.

Go Cindy!

I've got to say that the woman has guts. She's got moxie. She's also got my vote. You can only admire this woman's drive and devotion to righting a serious wrong; namely, the death of her son, Casey. And the question she begged George Bush to answer, " Why?", is one that seems to be a very popular one now, amongst millions of Americans, and I'd wager that even some of you Bush supporters who said she was crazy and an attention seeker, are echoing her sentiments. Maybe your son or daughter was killed in Bush's war to gain control of the oil, amongst other things, and you finally woke up to the fact that this war should -never- have been entered into in the first place. It's too sad and too bad and I'm sorry your loved one is among the thousands of dead soldiers who died 'fighting terrorism' on foreign soil. My thought is that if you'd backed Cindy then, your child might have been brought home alive, along with the other thousands of boys and girls, men and women, sitting out there waiting for the next sniper to take a bead on them.
If you aren't a suppoter or sympathizer of Cindy, then I hope you remember this when you get that knock on your door... because it will surely come.
Cindy has decided to take on the biggest beast threatening our servicemen and women. It isn't terrorists. It is our own greedy government. It's George W. Bush, and Nancy Pelosi. It's Dick Cheny. It's Condoleeza Rice. It's any member of Congress, any member of our governing body who has not moved to Impeach George Bush for lying his way into taking America to war to fight a terrorist whose father was in business with his father...
Aren't you wondering why we could find Saddam Hussien in a spider hole and we can't find a man who still leads his armies of terrorists... Come on. Please give us credit for having some intelligence... We can see a license plate from space, we can tell if it's screwed on with a phillips or a slotted screw... We have night vision this and that and we can't find Osama?! We don't -want- to find Osama because he isn't really the object of this war. The object is setting up permanent bases in the oil rich country, initializing our form of government there, perhaps making ourselves comfortable enough that we manage to get control of the oil... How did our oild get under their sand, anyway? Right?
If Cindy's son died for a good reason, I want to know what it is. If terrorism is the real reason we are fighting over there, then why in God's name aren't we securing our border with Mexico? Why are we pardoning Scooter Libbey and locking up men who did their jobs attempting to stop a -known- drug dealer who was trying to enter America from Mexico, illegally!?
Why aren't we putting more stringent enforcement on our imports from China, who obviously, is not at all concerned with the quality of food and other merchandise that they send to America. If Bush and his cronies, and Pelosi is one of them, now, are so enamoured of keeping America safe, hadn't they ought to bring these men and women home and give them jobs protecting our borders, and inspecting the billions of dollars worth of food and goods that we receive from China? Shouldn't protection start at home? Bush's brand of fighting terrorism is akin to protecting against STD's by washing hands -after- sex with the infected individual.
It's insane, and this isn't my last blog.
Go Cindy! I'm voting for you!