Faith, Folklore, and Friends

A few weeks ago, Hub and I went to an outdoor concert in middle Tennessee.  It was a beautiful, balmy evening with just enough breeze to keep us comfortable.  We were early, so I had time to sit and listen to the people around me talking.  This is what I heard. "Yeah, I know him.  He's a curious fellow.  They moved into the old Barton place 'bout twenty years ago.  They stayed to themselves most of the time.  I'd throw up my hand when I passed, and sometimes, they would wave back but most of the time, they just ignored me.  Ever' time you seen them out, they would be bundled up like it was the middle of winter. Heard they came from Michigan or New York, one of them cold places. I was up one morning fixin' me some breakfast and he just showed up at the door. He said, 'Looks like my boy is going to marry your girl, so I thought we need to get acquainted.'  I told him to come on in and I fixed him a couple of eggs for breakfast. He was ...

I birthed two babies on this day, three years apart. Probably every parent who is honest will admit they did a few things wrong and wish they could go back and change it. Personally, there are many, many things that I wish I could do over. We won't talk about the things I did wrong, but I did a few things right. The best thing I did was instill in them a love for the written word. They still love books, although they can't sit on my lap while I read to them.   Both of them turned out just fine, thank you very much, in spite of the things I did or didn't do. Happy birthday to my baby boys who turn 42 and 39 today. You are such blessings to your Dad and me.

The garden, like the summer, is growing old, and I am going to miss them both when they are gone. We still have peas (Hub's favorite) and okra. We usually have lots of peppers by now, but this year, the pepper plants never recovered from the hot, dry days of June and have withered away. The tomatoes have dried up and gone, but they have produced well. I have canned tomatoes, canned tomato juice, sun-dried tomatoes, frozen tomatoes, and spicy green tomato pickles.  Tomatoes are our favorites, but we have eaten so many by now that I'm not too sorry to see them go. If you look closely at the exposed dirt, you can see tiny turnip greens and kale coming up, in addition to approximately ten thousand tomato plants that have reseeded themselves.  Hub also planted fall squash and cucumbers that are just ready to start blooming. The basil plants have gone to seed.  Gold finch love the seed, so the basil will stay as long as it lives.  Th...

I posted this blog about morning glories about this time last year. This morning, as I wandered in the backyard, checking to see what had changed overnight, my Grandma Gean was heavy on my mind. Would she smile at my feeble attempts? Morning Glories may be the flower I have known and loved the longest. My maternal grandmother, Mrs. Georgia Gean, was a great lover of morning glories. She lived in a little four-room house that had been converted from an old church/school house. The front porch, with boards for the floor and tin on the roof, was built across the front of the house, which faced directly west. Grandma had dug up beds running parallel with the porch, on each side of the front door. Each spring, she would plant these beds with morning glory seed she ordered from a seed catalog. Long before the little plants were ready to send out tendrils, she built a trellis for them to climb on. Grandma knew what days in early spring would yield the highest sap, and that...

Anybody wondering where I've been? Listening to a lot of pickin' and doing a lot of grinnin'.

Anyone who lived during the depression learned to be frugal and remained that way, even after the economy recovered and there was extra spending money. My grandparents had a hard time, struggling to keep their family together.  Mama remembered eating canned garden peas three times a day during one especially hard winter, a winter when they couldn't go to school because they had no shoes.  Having lived through this, Grandma considered it a serious sin to waste money.   She loved her hats, she did, and allowed herself one new hat a year.  They were always small and black.  It was totally acceptable to wear black hats all year long, but wearing a white hat during the winter would have been considered just plain crazy.  Grandma's new black hat was always purchased in time for decoration day, where it made its first appearance sitting on her gray bun and held in place with a lethal-looking hatpin. Grandma wore a hat to decoration day eve...

He says, Be still, and know that I am God;      I will be exalted among the nations,     I will be exalted in the earth. Psalm 46:10

In a time when there was little opportunity for women to show off their cooking skills, Decoration Day was their time to shine.  This meal was just as important, maybe more so, than Christmas dinner.  Although it was called "dinner on the ground", it was actually served on some rough lumber tables that had the gray patina of ancient artifacts but remained sturdy enough to hold a fine meal. The lemonade, chocolate cake, apple pies, and oatmeal cookies could be prepared on Saturday and packed in baskets to get a head start on Sunday's chores. Rising with Sunday's sun, Grandma caught, killed, dressed, and fried three chickens. She boiled green beans and peas, both fresh from the garden. She fried squash with onions, then a bowl of battered okra slices. Corn, both creamed and on the cob, were wrapped and packed with corn bread and biscuits. Grandma always packed some peanut butter and crackers, just in case somebody couldn't eat the rich food offered.  Her...