Faith, Folklore, and Friends

One of my favorite things about the south is the Spanish moss that grows everywhere near the Gulf Coast and the southern Atlantic coast. The photo above is from Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia.   Spanish moss doesn't grow here in Northwest Alabama, but traveling south through Alabama, you can begin to see it long before you get to the coast. The photos below were made at Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama. I was totally fascinated by Spanish moss the first time I saw it on a trip to Florida. At a rest stop, I collected a handful of it, hoping to start some on our trees when we got home.  I stored it carefully in a zip-lock bag.  When we got back home and unpacked it, the bag was full of tiny bugs, which brings me to this story. One of our tour guides in Savannah told us that the origin of the saying, don't let the bedbugs bite , came from people stuffing their mattresses with Spanish moss back in the day before we bought mattresses.  I c...

Southern Living says that Savannah has the most beautiful streets in the South.  The streets of Charleston and St. Augustine and New Orleans are all unbelievable, but  after walking these streets in Savannah a few weeks ago, I'm thinking Southern Living may be right.

James Oglethorpe must have been having a good day when he laid out the plans for the new city of Savannah, Georgia.  He designed the houses and businesses around a series of twenty-four public squares.  There are twenty-two now; all different, all beautiful.   These squares provide the perfect resting place on a hot day when you are walking and gawking like a tourist for hours. 

Cherry Mansion was built on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River in Savannah, Tennessee.  During the Battle of Shiloh, it served as Union Headquarters for General Grant and his staff. General Grant and his staff stayed at Cherry Mansion before and after the Battle of Shiloh.  The story goes that they were eating breakfast on the morning of April 6, 1862, when they heard cannons from Shiloh, seven miles up the river. They boarded a steamboat and traveled to the battle site that would become known as one of the bloodiest battles in American history.  Cherry Mansion is privately owned at this time.

It was the seventies. We lived near Savannah, Tennessee, a small town full of factories. They made uniforms, women's clothing, and shoes. All of the factories are long gone now, moved with NAFTA to places far removed from that sleepy little river town. But in the seventies, the factories hummed with women (and a few men) who didn't need a career, but money to buy groceries. Scraps of fabric left after cutting out the garments were thrown away, or given to employees if they wanted them. Friends and relatives collected them, sometimes filling the trunks of their cars when they finished the day, bone-weary but glad they had made another day, another punch of the time clock that meant more money on Friday. Some didn't sew at all, but having been raised by depression-era parents who threw nothing away, they collected the scraps to share. Sometimes, they gave them to me! It was thought that I wouldn't ever amount to much, because I 'kept my nose in a book' m...