Thanksgiving 2010

We had dinner yesterday at my sister's house. Her youngest daughter, Jennifer, and her family, were all there as were James and Claudia - friends of Linda and Eddie.
There was too much food and not enough people, as usual. It seems like no matter how many people there are, there is far too much food for the event. I wonder if anyone ever truly gets the proportions right... besides people who cook by a ruler or something. You know, the kind who figure out that if the label says "1/2 pound per person", then they're going to buy just enough so that every person gets no more than the 1/2 pound that should be alloted to them. I see recipes that recommend a ratio of 1 potato per person for mashed potatoes. Please! Those people can't be from the South, nor have they ever eaten mashed potatoes prepared 'southern style'. One potato wouldn't have done nothing but tease them! Regardless, we follwed no rules and there was more than enough for everyone. Jennifer said we ought to invite 10 more people to dinner after we'd finished, and then we'd invite another 10, and by then we'd have made a pretty good dent in the food.
We had a very traditional dinner- Roasted turkey, baked ham, dressing, peas -n- dumplings, green beans with potatoes, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, sweet potatoe souffle, rolls, cranberry sauce, cran-apple sauce, and baked macaroni and cheese. Desserts were a pumpkin pie, a pumpkin cheesecake with praline pecan crust, real banana pudding, coconut cake and a chocolate eclair pie that Jennifer made. Holy cow was it good!!!

There's something to be said about the old fashioned Thanksgiving dinners... People put love into the things they cooked and you could honestly taste it in every bite. I suppose people might enjoy eating at a restaurant on Thanksgiving - but not me. Hopefully I will always have dinner with my family, in a house where it's still warm from baking a turkey all night, or a ham, and where you walk in and smell the cinnamon and cloves from the sweet potatoe pies and souffles, and where the cooks are all proud and ready to share a recipe, and where you're dining with people who love you and people that you love. I think THAT was the real seasoning in the Thanksgiving dishes we had yesterday.

Thanksgiving on Dewey Hill

Thanksgiving...

It was possibly more highly anticipated than Christmas in our house - IF you were only talking about the food. As kids, of course, nothing took the place of Christmas and NOTHING was more important than the sight of the tree on Christmas morning surrounded by glimmering chrome, shiny packages, gift tags with Santa's autograph... 

Thanksgiving meant turkey- Had Mama only served a turkey, Thanksgiving would have been complete, in my humble opinion. Why? Because my Mama searched the whole of the city for the biggest, fattest, and heaviest turkey she could find. It was a pilgrimage to be sure; a foray into Piggly-Wiggly, a trek over

to Red & White, a visit to Doscher's, and straight to turkeys we went. I don't think she ever served a turkey that weighed less than 27 or 28 pounds. It was huge! It was the star of the show and it certainly deserved to be. We didn't fry turkeys back then. We fried chicken and pork chops, fish, fatback, and bacon, and slices of ham too, for breakfast. Sometimes we even fried bologna, but never a turkey.  At the very least the idea of plunging such a magnificent feast into a kettle of boiling oil would have been met with great skepticism, and a raised brow that was an indication of questioning your sanity for suggesting such a thing. No, our turkey came out of the oven. It was sheer torture - not for the turkey, but for us. The turkey was usually a frozen one and for three days it sat in a pan in the refrigerator, thawing. The night before Thanksgiving, Mama took it out, and rinsed it. Shed took the giblets out, and set them aside. She took out sticks of margarine and stuffed one inside the turkey, and another was cut and massaged all over the bird. Salt and pepper were generously applied and then it was covered with aluminum foil and put into the oven on a low temperature. Probably no more than 225 I would guess, and it baked all night long. All night! And if you were unlucky enough to have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you had to pass through the kitchen, and Tom Turkey sent out a most intriguing reminder than he was in that oven. It was absolute misery to go back to sleep because the smell of buttery roasting turkey woke up the taste buds who screamed down to the stomach that something good was cooking and the stomach sent up a pretty hefty growl that it should just send some on down right now as an appetizer...

At some point Butterball and then other turkey farms began putting the little red pop up thermometers in the turkey breasts, but we never had them.

Mama knew when the turkey was done. I suppose that through the night she must have gotten up and checked it. The morning of Thanksgiving she removed the foil, basted it with some of the butter and drippings and sent it back into the oven to get golden brown.

Not my Mom, but you get the idea...

When the legs began to fall away from the rest of the bird, she declared it ready for browning, and she was always right.

While all of this was going on she was making the giblet gravy, chopping the liver, gizzard, and onions, to boil. Flour, salt, pepper, and a chopped boiled egg was added and that was ready, too.

Mama always made her own dressing. Partridge Farms hadn't conceived the idea of bagging and boxing dried stuffing mix then. For weeks prior we saved stale bread, leftover cornbread, and biscuits in the freezer. This huge bag of stuff was soon mixed with turkey broth from the pan, butter, eggs, onions, sage, onion powder, salt and pepper, and chopped eggs, and sent into the oven to bake and brown - and to drive us crazy with hunger. She'd baked the sweet potato pies (from scratch - honest to goodness homemade pie crusts, and true boiled sweet potatoes) the day before she baked the turkey so that heavenly aroma of nutmeg and spices hovered over the entire house, adding to the longing and anticipation of the feast to come. We, my sister and I, were usually given the task of peeling potatoes for the mashed potatoes. They didn't come out of a box back then.  Green beans were set to cook with a fat piece of fatback, cranberry sauce was slipped out of the can and sliced, corn was cut off of the cob and simmered with a bit of butter, biscuits were made, and finally a fresh coconut cake, graced the kitchen counter. My Daddy loved coconut cake probably better than any other cake, and Mama would buy a big coconut, drive the ice pick through the three holes and drained the milk, then took a hammer to break up the shell. Jo Ann and I had to spend a bit of time carving the meat out of the shell, and Mama grated it.  The cake was made from scratch and baked. Before she lathered it with homemade icing, she poked holes in it and poured the coconut milk all through, and then sprinkled freshly grated coconut all over it.

It was a feast, indeed... There is nothing like it.

And of all things we had to be thankful for, I think Mama and Daddy were most thankful that their five children were gathered around the table, laughing, ladling gravy on dressing, scooping up mashed potatoes, marveling over the wonderful smell of sweet potato pies, yellow cake with chocolate icing, and coconut cake, nibbling this or that, staking claims on turkey drumsticks, breast meat or dark meat, finger-plucking the tasty golden brown skin of that huge bird, all of us swearing that we were starving to death, noisy and hungry, and that there was a son in law and two grand babies there with us, who were equally noisy and hungry (Debbie and Ricky), and all of us were healthy and happy, and home for dinner.

Sawhorses and Barrels

Being the tinkerer and the putterer that my Daddy was, one would confidently expect him to be a carpenter of sorts. One would be absolutely right, too.
Daddy worked hard for his paycheck. He also worked hard to have the things he wanted, even if it meant building it himself - like a boat.
My cousin, Carlene, grew up much the same way I did, and she knows that we kids took the opportunity to play whenever we could, and anything was fair game.
My Daddy built a boat in the backyard. That was the boring part. He laid a piece of plywood over a sawhorse, and he soaked it good with water. Then he put concrete blocks on the ends to bend the plywood... and this was a process that took days. He repeated it with more plywood and with regular planks of wood. He put two sawhorses together at one end and put his boards on it, wet them and then put bricks or concrete blocks on the end to keep them flat, and more blocks at the other end to force them to bend and curve. It turned out to be a handsome boat, and he painted it yellow and white. Many were the summers when the boat was launched at Huger or 4-Hole Swamp or Bushy Park and catfish, crappie, and bream graced the dinner table.

I was curious about the boat building. I helped wet the wood and helped put bricks on the boards. After the boat was built, I had a new use for the sawhorses. Daddy built his own so these were sturdy, and heavy duty - not these flimsy little plastic ones people buy in the big box do-it-yourself centers.

There were a few large boards left around the shop when he was through. One, notably, happened to be long enough for the purpose. The school I went to had teeter-totters, or see-saws as you might call them. I saw, during the course of building that boat, a very similar and acceptable substitute.  A two by ten piece of pine, and about 12 feet long was perfect, and although it had no handles to hold on to, my sister and I, and occasionally our friends, spent hours see-sawing out in the back yard. Two on an end, or two on one end and one poor screaming victim on the other, we laughed till our sides hurt, and we became addicted to the butterfly in our stomach when we were forced high and fast into the air followed by the sudden heart-stopping fall downward till our feet hit the ground and our butts absorbed the shock. Did we ever fall off? You bet! Did we have a moment of daring-do and stand up on the ends? You bet! Did we ever try our hardest to launch someone OFF of the flying end? You bet! Was it fun? You bet!!!

We chanted as we teetered and tottered and see-sawed.



See Saw Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,
Because he can't work any faster.





Now, after the boat was built, and during the construction of it, daddy had a large old 55 gallon drum that he burned wood scraps in. In the winter he burned wood in it to stay warm while he worked on the boat. When the boat was finished, it was spring. It was warm. He didn't need the barrel. We did. We'd seen movies on television where kids were rolling the barrels around. Occasionally a kid would be inside the barrel. We'd seen clowns on television walking on the barrels, rolling them around. We'd seen movies of logging men, walking on rolling logs in the river... and that barrel became the dare all and do all for the moment.

We dumped out the ashes, and my brother was the first to do the barrel walk across the back yard. We all took turns and managed to roll it a few feet before we fell. After awhile it was easy. We managed to take turns being inside the barrel too, and being rolled down the slight slope in our back yard was like a crazy ride at the fair, although much dirtier, I must say. We hadn't thought to rinse out the barrel, you see. We were smudged with soot and dirt and ash... but we were exhausted and tired and our little bellies had had all the fun a kid could stand for a day when the sun went down.
It was good, hard, honest fun. Sleep came fast and easy after a day of barrel rolling and barrel walking. Dreams of flying came true as we perched on the plank in our back yard, and our screams of victory over gravity were tinged with hilarious, sometimes nervous laughter as it seemed we might accidentally launch ourselves into the atmosphere...


This is the scientific equation for happiness:

                                                1 sawhorse
                                                +
                                                1 plank
                                                +
                                                1 55 gallon barrel
                                                __________

                                               = Hours of fun and a Lifetime of Memories

A Simpler Time

I was driving home today, and I can't explain it, but it began when I watched a young black woman walking across the grass to her car. A little boy was following her and taking turns studying his feet as they moved and looking up to make sure he wasn't being left behind. She had a grocery sack, , possibly from one of the local grocery stores and it was full of something that looked like clothes, or perhaps something, else but clearly obvious that she was taking something somewhere.
I think the moment caught me and sent me back to a time when I had nothing to worry about except follow my Mama through the grocery store, or out to the clothes line to help her get the clothes in. I wish I could go back.
Things I remember about hot summer days:

Iced tea in tall glasses that sweated and left rings of water when you left them sitting somewhere , and how that sweated glass provided instant cooling when you ran it across your forehead or along your cheek.

Grasshoppers; They were fun to catch and we chased the poor creatures mercilessly. We all wondered if it was true and although we caught them with every intention of trying to find out, none of us were brave enough to follow through . The myth or the truth; a grasshopper will spit tobacco in your eye if you hold it near your face.
It seems a bit ridiculous  (okay, it seems a LOT ridiculous) to think a grasshopper would chew tobacco and hold a wad of it in it's mouth ready to aim and fire at some poor hapless kid who didn't know better. BUT... they did spit something into our hands... At least I hope it was spit...

The clothesline: I had two jobs - handing her the clothespins as she hung our clothes out to dry, and then after the clothes were dried I had the job of taking the clothespins that Mama handed me and putting them in the bucket. She made me fold the towels too, and the washcloths (we called them washrags, by the way). I loved the way the clothes smelled!!! There is no fabric softener out there today that smells as warm and clean as clothes that were washed in Tide and dried in the sunshine.  We lived fairly close to a marshy area so the mosquitoes ate our legs up.  Slapping skeeters and picking up clothespins...Have  you ever heard that the state bird of S.C is the mosquito? It's true.  Almost.

The clothesline was the perfect place to ask the "what if", "But why" and "Can we" questions... I wish I had known then how absolutely precious those moments with her were.

Dragonflies- aka 'helicopter bugs'. We chased them and they chased us and everyone was happy. They looked like green and blue jewels with diamond wings flitting across the backyard. It was as if we had been kissed by the lips of Mother Nature herself when, if you held still for a long enough time, one would actually land on your finger. If you were steady enough, you could actually walk around for a minute with one perched on the top of a forefinger.

Lady Bugs: lady bug, lady bug, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are all gone...  I have no idea where that little ditty came from or why it was deemed appropriate to sing that to a Lady Bug... They never believed us because they didn't immediately fly away. We used to catch them, and let them crawl all over us. At certain times of the year they were everywhere! We had Four 'O clocks and Lantana beside our house and they loved those plants. Little did we know that they were actually eating the aphids that also loved the plants. Who would've thought that such a cute little polka dotted bug with a sweet name was also a carnivore... The Tyrannosaurus Rex of the insect world.

Lizards: Oh my - we loved lizards!!!! The green one, the Carolina Anole (thanks Michelle for finding that out for me) was the most common. When they were on the side of my Daddy's workshop, they were brown. When they were near the grass they were green. When they were anywhere near where I could catch them, they were earrings. Often I could only find one. Sometimes I found two. Regardless, I wore a lizard earring anytime I could find them. They clamped right on my earlobe and didn't come off till they were pulled off. After about 15 minutes I was ready for them to come off. Those little jaws have some pinch pressure - don't be fooled. But they are harmless and won't hurt you.

China Berries - Fun to fight with... Round, soft, marble sized fruits made a significant sting when you fired them from a slingshot and we did. Years later some clever people boiled the skin and pulp away and made beautiful necklaces from the seeds.

And some people made helmets out of buckets...

This is me, and my sweet Mama, out in our backyard after we'd finished hanging out the clothes.

These were simple days and simple pleasures. We incorporated nature into our play, and were rewarded with stories to tell and memories to make blogs out of.

I want to go back there. When I die, don't bother praying for me to go to heaven. Let me go back to Dewey Hill, to play with the ghosts of my childhood.

Lord, it's hot...

High summer means high temperatures. It means finding any way possible to cool off. Of course nowadays for most that means coming in from outside and into a nice air conditioned house. It might mean heading to the fridge for a cold drink of water or maybe a beer if you like one, or two. Some of us might head for the iced tea pitcher, and if you're from the south, the really, really southern south, it's going to be sweet... 1 cup of sugar or more per gallon. Yep, sweet tea. If it ain't -sweet- tea, it ain't good tea. Southern creed and words to live by. (For all you Northern visitors who want to be bonifide southerners while you're here).

As a kid we didn't have air conditioning. The closest thing we could come to for having a cold breeze blowing in your face was to open the refrigerator and stand there with your face planted in there for a few minutes. If you were super hot, you opened the freezer and stood there until your face hurt. That stood to get you through a couple more hours outside in the heat. Mama wasn't appreciative of our inventiveness for cooling off. I can hear her yelling at me or Jo to "Shut that refrigerator door right now if you don't want a switchin'!" The door was shut. Instantly. Until she went back outside or into another room. I'd steal another gasp of icy air and hit the back door, ready to face the onslaught of heat and humidity.

I bought an Orange Nehi the other day. I walked into the EZ mart, went to the glass doors at the back of the store and chose my drink from the shelf after debating between that, and the grape Nehi. I carried it to the front, and paid the cashier 1.49 for it. I have to say that Orange and Grape Nehi taste the same that they always did. Most things do not but those soda drinks haven't changed. They taste the same as they did back when I was a kid, living on Dewey Hill and the pallet plant across Front Street had a soda machine that we used to fund readily whenever we could.  Glass bottles. Twelve cent for the soda. It was work to get those drinks, let me tell you! Allowance was .25 cent a week. That was enough for two sodas. If we collected bottles and turned them in to Piggly Wiggly we could get 2 cent a bottle. Our neighborhood NEVER had empty soda bottles laying around. It was a chore to collect them and hot work but oh the reward.

Now we weren't supposed to have those drinks. Not because we weren't allowed to have sodas but that pallet plant had a gate in front and it was chained and that meant NO VISITORS - after hours.  The gates didn't quite close however and there was enough wiggle room for smallish kids to wriggle through, and wriggle we did. A dime and two pennies went into the machine and then we could open the door and pull one bottle out by the neck. Each machine had an opener under the coin slot and you had to be careful where you stepped there to open it because some of the tops fell out instead of into the collection cup and landed with the points up. Many of us hobbled around with a ring of tiny punctures on the soles of our feet because you just didn't give a dang about such caution when there was a cold soda to be had. Besides, there was a cure to the pain. Those bottles were icy cold - literally- sometimes. Occasionally there would be a plug of ice right at the neck of the bottle. Getting one of those was akin to finding the buried treasure of soda-dom. It was better than gold. That drink was extra cold and extra good. If we had any patience we'd rub the frosty bottle over our sweaty faces. If we had a bottle cap insignia on the sole of our foot, rubbing the cold bottle over that was an instant cure... and a good swallow of cold, sugar sweet, soda pop cured anything else that ailed you.

After we had our drinks it was time for a good game of hide and seek among the pallets. I shudder today to think of the danger but back then it was adventure. The scent of pine was like an invisble lure, pulling us to the piles of stacked pallets. 10, 15, 20 high... rows and rows and rows of them, and carpeting the cement floors where they were stacked in the open sheds was a fine layer of saw dust. We climbed and scrambled over the pallets like miniature mountain climbers. Splinters were a common threat to grasping fingers seeking the next pallet on the climb to the top. Grubby fingers tugged out what we could, and what we couldn't, a pair of tweezers took care of once we got home, but never did it cut short the game of who would be the first to reach the top of the tower, and survey the kingdom of sawdust some 10-12 feet down. They wobbled, those pallets, and I can think of how seriously I might have been hurt if I'd fallen from the top, now. Then, of course, I was invincible.

Once, several of us were playing when we heard a truck door, and the chain rattling. We were scrambling all over the stacks and I peered over the edge of the pile I was climbing on. The man drove through the open gate and then he got out. He looked at the piles of pallets and frowned. Then he started calling for us to come down, to get out of there... to come down right now and to get off of the property because it was private and we could get hurt. No one moved. To this day I don't know if someone told him kids were playing in there or if he came back to get something and saw one of us, or what. We waited and it seemed like it was forever before he went into the office and then came out and left. We left too. The next day a huge new gate was installed and it did close all the way, tightly, and ruined our games of hide and seek. We occasionally did go across the street during the day and bought sodas from them and they were alright with that. Now and then one of the men would come out and buy us a drink before we could get our money into the machine.

Nothing tasted better than those cold Grape Nehi drinks, and nothing sounded more refreshing than to hear the glass bottles clinking down into place when one was removed, ready for the next thirsty traveler from across the street.

I remember those days and working where I do, in a lumber yard, I can walk through our warehouse and smell the scent of pine boards, see the empty pallets that we've stacked up that freight came on, and taste those Nehi drinks... and I can go back to summer in 1963 for just a few minutes. It's a trip back in time, a trip to carefree happiness and bliss for a mere 12 cent, a rusty loose chain and fence,  and the risk of a splinter or two. Weighing the cost against the reward, it was a small price to pay.

Huger (Prounounced Hu-Gee) Recreational Area

I want to go camping. I want to go back to Huger and camp there. I want to go back, period; back to being a kid, back to being a pain in my parent's backsides occasionally, back to having nothing to worry about besides what time the Ice Cream man was coming and how many more days were left before summer vacation started. Vacations meant camping and travel and fun, and swimming and picnics...

We spent a LOT of time at Huger. From the time that I can remember, we camped here on the weekends, frequently.

The picture above is borrowed from

www.scgreatoutdoors.com/park-hugerrecreational...

There is another photograph on that site of the picnic tables that dot the recreational area. The one above however brings back so many memories and that is where we are going today. This is Huger and what you see is the boat landing. There is a concrete ramp that extends probably 5 or 6 feet past the edge of the pilings that you see. The water in the picture is brown, and when I was little, the water was brown, and that is because of the tannins in the water, leached from oak leaves and other decaying plant life in the bottom of this creek. You can't see it here, and it might not be here any longer because if it were I think we could see it in the upper left area of the photograph, but the Boyscouts decided to build a bridge across the creek. One weekend there was nothing, and the next, a rather shaky, improvised facsimile of a suspended bridge was strung between the trees. Cross it?  Thank you, no- I'll stay on solid ground. I wish it were still there though.

 I guess it would have been impossible to keep it since I am sure that even the best of rope bridges rot away over time. They re-built the bridge, further up the creek however, and this is the picture of it. You can get a good idea of how

wide the creek was (not)... and how beautiful the area is.

(Thank you  www.gorp.com/parks-guide/travel-ta-francis-ma... for the use of the picture)

Still, it provided hours and even days of imaginative " What if?" scenarios. What if a band of pirates lived in the woods over there? What if no pirates lived over there but what if they buried treasure over there? What if some prehistoric dinosaurs lived over there in the land that time forgot? What if some spooky old cemetery was over on the other side and ghosts roamed in the shade of the thickly draped mossy oaks... Thinking back on that, it was a prelude of sorts to the movie Bridge to Terabithia... Pure imagination running wild, indeed. What if? We played all over this recreation area, my little sister and I. My brother was 7 years older and he went fishing with Daddy. Jo and I swam in the creek, never venturing to the edge of the concrete ramp because there was a deep dropoff at the end of it. We had enough fun there, however. After we'd spent the day splashing and playing, we'd hobble, dotted with  "Ouch!", "Ow", "Eep!" our way across the graveled road for about 30 yards and head over to our tent for lunch. Vienna Sausage on white bread with a good coating of Duke's Mayonnaise tasted like heaven! Sometimes we'd get potted meat sandwiches, or bologna, and now and then peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches too. Mama always mixed them together - it tastes better and spreads easier and today I still like mine just like that.
After lunch it was back down to the water for some more swimming and waiting for Daddy and Thomas to come back from fishing. One afternoon they puttered up after fishing and had a stringer full of little Bream and Redbreast, and a couple of small catfish. I wanted to fish when I saw all of that. There was nothing that would satisfy me but to fish. While Daddy went over to the camp area to clean the fish, Thomas set me up with a cane pole, a worm, and a "bobber" and I fished right off of the little dock area, right in the corner you see in the picture. The creek had a little current and twice my hook got caught on a little stump or something under the water. I'm sure my brother was frustrated at having to free the hook and re-bait but he had patience and didn't complain. The third time I dropped the bait into the water it landed almost right straight down from where I was fishing. The water was brown, as I said, and even though the water was rather shallow there, I couldn't see the bottom. The bobber went down, and came back up. Down again, and then back up, and then down. I pulled it but I couldn't get the hook free. I was surely hung on a log. My brother said "Sucee (susie but with the c sound), that's a fish!" I didn't agree. " I'm hung!" He put his pole down, (he was fishing too) and came over. "You caught a fish," he said. "Pull it over to the side of the railing and you'll see..." So I did, playing tug of war it seemed, gradually making my way further over and finally around the little rail (It was not as high or as long as it is in the current picture). Now I could see and the water was a little shallower and clearer and sure enough there was a fish on the line. It looked as big as a boat to me and my brother had to remind me not to let go of the pole because I surely would have, in my excitement and eagerness to go and get Daddy to show him. Thomas helped me pull it out of the water and guessed that it weighed about 5 pounds. For a 7 year old girl, that is a HUGE fish.

I got to help clean it, and was chief overseer as Mama battered it in flour and cornmeal, salt and pepper, and then fried it. Hushpuppies were made of the left-over batter, mixed with some buttermilk and egg, and deep fried to a golden brown goodness. No sugar in them, people. If you eat a hushpuppy and it's sweet, it ain't southern. Mama made coleslaw too. No packaged stuff - no one had invented that yet. We had to help with that. We grated the cabbage, grated the onions, mixed in the apple cider vinegar and the mayonnaise, added salt and pepper and a teaspoon of sugar. We dined like kings that night on paper plates, drinking Piggly Wiggly soda out of paper cups, and using our real silverware from home because nothing was more frustrating than trying to eat and having your plastic fork snap off.

You're not supposed to camp there, now. Sad. We spent at least a couple of weekends there every year.

One weekend we were camping there and when we woke up on a Sunday morning and stepped out of our camper (we'd graduated to a little pop-up camper from the giant gold tent we used to have), we were greeted by about 6 sailors who had slept in sleeping bags all around us.  Mama fixed breakfast for all of us, and we learned their names, and where they were from. They were on shore leave and had decided to go camping. Dennis Davidson, Hoyt, Hank Degraffenried, Little John, Big John Faulkner, and Harry. John Faulkner was from Michigan, Little John was from New York, Dennis was from Georgia, Harry was from Oklahoma, Hoyt was from Florida, and I can't remember where Hank was from. As the day went on it was time to pack up and head home. The guys were planning to hitchhike back, just like they'd got there, but Daddy wouldn't hear of that. We packed all of us into the station wagon and dropped the guys off at the gate to the Navy Base - just a couple of miles from our house. We went back and picked them up for church later that night, and from then on I had a bunch of new brothers.

They came to visit often, and we adopted them happily. They slept on blankets with pillows all over our floors in the house and they played ball with us, told us about their families back home and we knew that they missed their homes and families. But for that whole summer we were their family and over the next three years, whenever their ships were docked in the Charleston Navy base, our 'brothers' were home and we had them with us whenever we could.  One day they arrived and whoever had driven them to the house got out of the car and opened the trunk of his car. The boys carted in bag after bag of groceries. In a whole year I had never seen so many groceries! Gallons of milk, not one, or two but at least 6, packages of bacon, sausage, hamburger, roasts, cans of beans, bags of rice and sugar, boxes of tea bags, at least 5 loaves of bread, 4 or 5 dozen eggs... I thought they'd robbed a grocery store. They'd actually pooled their money they told us, around 100.00 or so, and had been to the grocery store because they wanted to repay us for all of the many meals Mama had cooked and fed them. In 1968 can you imagine how many groceries $100.00 would buy? Daddy did not make $65.00 a week! This was 6 months worth of grocery money at least!

We kept in touch with all of them for years. Harry married someone from the church we went to, Dennis Davidson ended up in Georgia and wrote to tell us of a man he had met in the church there, and had thought it was my Daddy, Tucker Christopher. When he was introduced to him he found out that it was Daddy's brother, Robert Christopher.  Little John went back to New York and John Faulkner stayed in Charleston for awhile, dating a girl he met in church, and when they broke up he went back home I guess. We lost track of them all over time. I hope they were all happy, and that they're all grandpa many times over. I hope they think of us as often as I think of them.

Huger holds special memories for me. Like the time I was swimming and my brother started screaming at Jo and I "Don't move! Don't move! Be still!" And so scared were we that we didn't move, even when he ran back over to the rail of the dock there, and aimed a pistol at us. Then he fired it! Then we DID move and began to cry as we ran out of the water. A water moccasin (cotton mouth) was swimming right for us, less than 10 feet from my back, and surely would have gone under and possibly bitten one of us if he had not killed it. I'm glad he was a good shot! Otherwise you wouldn't be reading about coleslaw, hushpuppies, sailors and camping at Huger Recreational Park in Huger, S.C.

Jackie the Jay

It's Sunday morning. It's raining. I was on Facebook reading about some baby Wrens that a friend had found and was raising. It reminded me, as I am so often, of a baby Bluejay that I rescued when I was a very young girl.

At one time on Dewey Hill, before the Carroll family moved in, the Thigpens lived down beside the old Army Bunkers that Willie later used for his chicken coops. Joey and Debbie Thigpen were great playmates and we spent many happy hours doodle-bugging, climbing the giant oak tree in the 'circle' and playing in the 3 inches of swamp behind their house. It wasn't the swamp with alligators and other nefarious critters apt to attack, and devour unsuspecting children who frollicked amongst the saplings and stumps. Unfortunately this swamp was nothing more than a low, sandy swale, kept 3 to 4 inches deep in water that was fed by a freshwater spring. Tadpoles galore, little darting minnows that would never grow bigger than an inch long, and tall, slender trees that were easily bent over  provided a suitable, springy (and notably underfed) rendition of a galloping horse if you didn't mind losing control occasionally and getting tossed into the "river".

There was a tall oak on the left side of the Thigpen's house, draped in moss, and unfriendly to climbers since no branches were lower than the roof of the house. We spent hours in the shade there, our backs to the cool shadow above as we labored diligently to sift the elusive ant lion from it's snare.

After a long afternoon doing just such, my sister Jo and I wandered home to the call of "Sue Ellen! Jo Ann! Supper!!" yelled temptingly from the back door of our house.

After supper the excited call of my name from Debbie and Joey lured me out onto the front step (literally one step) to see what news they'd come to share. It was garbled at best but I could make out "baby bird" and did I want to come see it. Of course I did. I'd seen baby birds before and knew you weren't supposed to touch them with your hands because the mama bird wouldn't want to take care of it if it smelled like people. Along the way I found out that the baby was just under the big oak tree, wobbling in the sand, and that it didn't have any feathers or anthing. Absolutely new born!! So we ran, and finally out of breath we came to the side of the house and settled in a tight circle around the baby. Joey and Debbie had been warned by their mother not to touch the bird. Even as small as we were we knew the little thing didn't stand a chance down on the ground without it's mother and we knew it couldn't fly because it had no feathers at all. We wondered what to do. Finally Debbie, and then Joey, said " Why don't you take it to your house?" Well, why DIDN'T I? I hadn't been told not to touch it, after all. And I knew I didn't want it to die. So I gently lifted it up and cradled it in my hands and walked home, all the while assuring the baby that all would be well and that I'd take good care of him.

Mama didn't seem to mind that I'd rescued a wild bird. It was so tiny we had no idea of what kind of bird it was. We found a shoe box and I shredded some newspaper for the bottom and then grabbed a handful of soft grass from the side yard. I had no idea what to feed this little thing so Mama suggested I soak a peice of bread in water and feed it. I did and he ate it! A day or two later it came to me that the bird might eat bugs. Some did, I knew. "The Early Bird Gets The Worm" ...

My Daddy had gotten wise in how to save money he might be giving to the tackle shops and the bait stores and he had an old iron bathtub in the backyard that he raised the little red wrigler fishing worms in. It was nasty business but I went out and took one of the worms from the bed. Mama let me have an old butterknife and I diced the worm into half inch segments which I offered to my little baby bird. He gobbled them down, and ate a little more of the watered bread too, and then slept, all cozy and snug in his little nest. Over the days to follow, little spikes (pinfeathers) began to sprout and he looked like a tiny porcupine with a big yellow cave for a mouth. It was cute! A week went by and he was doing great. I had to go to school but I would always chop up a worm before I went so that Mama could feed him while I was at school. After a few more days he began looking more like a bird than anything and it was no time at all before his colors came and I knew I had a baby Bluejay, and it was a male. I named him Jackie.

Jackie was about 3 weeks old when he decided I was his mother. He wobbled behind me anywhere I went in the house and yelled at me when he was hungry. He slept in his shoe box until someone gave me a little bird cage for him. Day after day he grew, and I knew it was time to let him go because he had all of his feathers.  He didn't know how to fly, however. It was my job to teach him this, and after putting if off (no Mother wants her baby to leave the nest) as long as I could, I took Jackie outside one afternoon and gently tossed him into the air. After a few attempts and failures, he flew! He flew over to the Crepe Myrtle tree and perched on the limb a moment. Then he hopped off and flew over to me, landing on my head and grooming my hair by pulling through his beak. I lifted him off and tossed him to the air again and he flew up and around the backyard and landed in the Chinaberry tree beside the back porch.  I turned to walk into the house and he followed me, landing on my shoulder, screaming at me, I would guess, to stop tossing him up into the air. Once more I did, and once more he came back to me. He wasn't going to leave. After that I never tried to make him fly away. He went outside with me, and came inside with me. While I was at school he was my Mama's companion. While she swept the floor he would fly up and ride the tip of the broom handle. I came home from school one day and Mama was napping on the sofa. Sitting snugly on her chest, napping also, was Jackie.

I think Mama loved that bird as much as I did. And I think he loved us in turn. He was popular with the neighborhood kids, and Joey and Debbie Thigpen visited often, offerings ready in the way of a cricket, or a furry caterpillar or a piece of bologna now and then. Jackie loved all of it, as well as the attention.

I had him for a little over a year, and I think there couldn't have been a happier, more loved Bluejay in all the world.  At night Jackie slept in his cage on the front porch. One morning he was lying in the bottom of the cage. I don't know the life span of wild birds like Jackie. I don't know if it was his time to die or if he had gotten sick overnight. I will never know. I know that I have a special fondness for the Bluejays in spite of their reputation for being a rather mean and aggressive bird because I also know that they are intensely affectionate and are loyal little feathered friends if you raise them.

I can say that I honestly tried to set him free. He chose me.

We buried him in his little shoe box, wrapped in soft paper towels and an old washcloth.

I just glanced out of my window... and what do I see? A beautiful, large, male Bluejay!!! Wow... talk about coincidence! Or... is it?

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.