PORCHES AND PEONIES

 I'm swinging on the porch at my grandparent's house, sitting with my cousins trying to remember all the words as we sing  "How Much is That Doggy in the Window".  A hot summer day and we begin here.

Later in the day, after supper, we gather again in this front yard to continue our play. Hide and seek this time.  Home base is the wide concrete steps on the front porch that stretches all the way across the house.  One by one we sneak home, sliding toward the steps and yelling, "Home free," trying to avoid Pa's peony bushes.

As the light fades, Granny switches on the  porch light and we change games, moving closer to the porch, playing Capture the Flag, maybe even getting some adults to join us, cautioning each other again not to run over Pa's peony bushes.

After we  finish playing, we gather around Pa's lilac bush while he hand-cranks the ice cream freezer, chipping ice off a huge block that he keeps covered in heavy tarpaulin.  I hear the ice  in the freezer sloshing and  the movements slowing, getting harder and harder  to crank.  The ice cream is finally ready, and I sit shivering while eating  it, even in the warm summer evening.

These are my memories.  This is my reality. I share this with my older sister, and,  like one of those commercials that interrupts itself, the sound grinding to a halt, she says, "You know, that ice cream was really hard to make.  Granny didn't like doing it, it was so much trouble.  They had to go all the way to town  to  get the ice.  Then she'd have to make up the ice cream  and you  know how Granny was so slow about  everything."

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So realities differ.  This is my memory of that time and that place.  All good.

Me and the UPS Man

I can sometimes be slow to accept change.  I'm of the opinion that not everything needs changing. I'm not into being trendy and the older I get the less trendy I want to be.  I only recently got a smart phone.And I didn't have a cellphone or answering machine until I met John and he bought them for me.

I’m not a big fan of the social media sites-- unless someone is posting pictures of one of my granddaughters.  I especially don’t like the internet slang and refuse to use the slang terms like LOL, OMG, or LMAO.

But computer and internet use in general I have always wholeheartedly embraced.  I think the internet is monumentally important in many ways.  

This time of year I’m especially interested in the advantages of internet shopping.  I’ve never been really fond of shopping the way some women are.  A good shopping trip for me was one with friends, where we oohed and aahed and discussed new decorating plans and then went to eat.  I never got much shopping done like that but it was fun.  

When I actually want to buy something on a shopping trip, I need to go alone and spend time looking and thinking and comparing prices.   And what better place to do this type of shopping than the internet.

Now that I live in the boonies where the nearest shopping center is miles away, I do most of my holiday shopping on the internet.  Then the UPS man gets to travel miles to get to my little country lane and bring his big brown truck up the winding driveway to my house in the woods.

I’ll still go to the mall some.  I actually enjoy the hustle and bustle of the crowds during the Christmas season, and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without a trip to the mall to hear ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘The Nutcracker’ playing in the stores—and then go out to eat.

But for actual shopping, I’ll do most of it online.  Me and the UPS man are becoming very familiar.  He’s here several times a week during the Christmas season.

Digging My Own Holes

When the Son of Sam, who was Jewish, was arrested, I heard a Jewish person tell about feeling shame, believing that the bad behavior of one of his own reflected poorly on him.  This is a common feeling among minorities and may explain, for example, why an African-American feels anger or shame toward an Uncle Tom.  It may also explain my feelings toward women who act helpless, believing this perpetuates the stereotype of women as the weaker sex.

So when a friend complained to me that her son-in-law would not help her daughter with landscaping chores by digging holes for her I said, “Well, tell her to dig her own holes.  That’s what I tell my daughters.”

I was a single mother of two daughters for a number of years and “digging our own holes” became our mantra.  One of my daughters later admitted, however, that she sometimes coquettishly asks her husband, “Will you dig my holes for me?”

When I met my husband I had been single for a number of years.  At the time we met I had just purchased some land and was getting ready to build a house, acting as my own contractor and doing some of the work myself.

John soon started joining me when I would go to work on my land.  It was in the country and a lovely place to visit.  After I got my building permit, we were there working one day when I picked up a shovel and said I was going to the bottom of the hill to put up the post for the building permit.
“May I join you,” he asked, “or do you need to dig your own hole?”

I said he was welcomed to come along, but, shovel in hand, when we got to the bottom of the hill, I began to dig.

This is a rural, sparsely populated area, so we were alone, working beside the road, John silently watching me dig.  The ground was very hard and I was about ready to let him dig when I looked up at him.

He was standing with his arms crossed over his chest, smiling at me.  “You know, if anyone comes along, I’m going to have to take that shovel out of your hand.”
He’s been helping me dig my holes ever since.

Blue Highways

In 1982 American travel writer and historian William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways: A Journey into America about his 13,000 mile journey across the United States, as much as possible on secondary roads, trying to avoid cities.

These secondary roads were called blue highways because on the old-style maps they were drawn in blue and the main roads drawn in red. 

Living out of his van, William Least Heat-Moon traveled these secondary roads to find places untouched by fast food chains and interstate highways, "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."

Interstate highways have made travel much easier in this country, but for this convenience we have paid a price.  Food chains and motels along the interstate are very similar in all states.  A Big Mac tastes much the same in Connecticut as it does in California.  We often see little of the local people, the local customs, the local food unless we get off the interstates.

I live very near what would have been a red highway on the old maps.  It was a main thoroughfare from points north to Florida not too many years ago.  Now it is seldom used by any except local traffic.

When I travel in our country I still like to get off the main highways, to taste the local food and see the local culture.

Quote is from Blue Highways

My Two Favorite Sports: Golf and Football

Actually, I’ve never been on a golf course, except to stroll on one I once lived beside.  I’ve never tried to play the game.  And I don’t remember the last time I watched a football game of any kind.  If we’re talking about all the way through, maybe never.  My daughters and I, when they were young teenagers, did try to watch the Super Bowl once.  Everyone else was doing it.  So we had ourselves a little Super Bowl party.  But my younger daughter and I fell asleep.  My oldest daughter was so disgusted with us.

So why do I like these sports so much?  To be more precise, the football would have to be Vanderbilt football—and Vanderbilt basketball.    These are the sports I like because they’re my husband’s sports.  He plays golf at least once a week and has season’s tickets to all of Vanderbilt’s home games, both football and basketball.  So it keeps him out of the house.

This in no way means that I don’t like my husband’s company.  I enjoy it very much.  I had been divorced a number of years when I met him and had no plans to remarry.  But we clicked right away and have been very happy ever since.  When we met, we were living in different cities and would communicate, often, by phone and emails.  He still reminds me that in one of the first emails I sent him I told him I was the type of person who needed a lot of time alone.  Somehow, I thought that was something he should know about me.  

I was a member of a large family as a child and had many cousins and siblings to play with.  I was especially close to my younger sister, and we played together every day, all day.  One day we were playing together in the woods surrounding our home when I slipped away from her and climbed a large poplar tree, all the way to the top.  I closed my eyes and let the wind sway me back and forth, enjoying the solitude.  I was quite annoyed when my little sister kept calling for me to come down.

I still sometimes just yearn for solitude.  One of the things I appreciate most about my husband is that he has always accepted and respected this personality trait.  And I really try to listen politely when he tells me about his golf game.

Harvesting Black Walnuts

Fall is beginning to come here on our hill in Tennessee.  Leaves are falling already, and our woodpiles are stocked.  So it's about time to start picking up walnuts.  We've done this every year since we moved here.  Most people don't fool with picking up walnuts, so there is an abundance every year left for the squirrels.  It's an activity that we enjoy doing together each year though. 

We have a few walnuts trees on our property but the easiest place for us to find them is down at the end of Buck Graves Road.  There are several walnut trees growing on the right of way there, so we usually walk down and pick up sacks full of them.  We leave the sacks lying there on the ground and stop and pick them up when we're there with one of our vehicles.  No one has ever bothered them lying there.  Most people don't even bother to steal black walnuts.  Perhaps because they are a little difficult to hull. 

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To hull the walnuts we crush the outer green husks and remove it with our hands.  It is important to use good gloves to do this because they will stains your hands if you don't do this.  Black walnuts were used by early settlers for dying.  They are still used if a natural dye is preferred. 

After we hull the walnuts, we spread them out to dry.  After they've dried a couple of weeks we crack the nuts with our nutcracker that's designed to crack hard nuts.  We bought this nutcracker the first year we moved here and it's really been a good investment.  It would be very hard to crack these without this type of nutcracker. 

After we crack the nuts we store them in the freezer and use them for cooking all through the year.

How Do We Get to Wadovice?

About a year after the death of John Paul II, my husband and I spent a few months in Warsaw, Poland.  We spoke little English, but in the Warsaw train station there was an English speaking office where we could purchase our tickets, with a discount for seniors, for train travel.  So on weekends when we weren’t working, we’d often get on the train and visit a different part of Poland.  It was a wonderful experience. 

Not long before we left Poland, we spent about a week working in Krakow.  While there we wanted to travel to some of the areas around Krakow, but in this train station there were very few employees who spoke much English.  Since I was a little better at the pronunciation of Polish words than my husband, it fell to me to communicate with personnel at the train station.  To do this I would take the train schedule and write down “Krakow > Czestochowa”. 

This worked well until we wanted to go visit Wadowice, the home of John Paul II.  When I wrote down “Krakow > Wadowice”, the woman at the desk kept shaking her head “no”, and saying something about a bus.  So we left without a ticket. 

“But it’s on the schedule”, I kept telling my husband.   It was just a communication problem, I decided.  Not one to give up, we went back the next morning.  The woman who had told us “no” the day before was not there, and when I wrote down “Krakow > Wadowice”, we got a ticket.  The employee on the previous day, I decided, had not known what she was talking about.

 So we headed out on the train to Wadowice, a distance of a little over 30 miles.  When we were out of Krakow a few miles, though, the train stopped and everyone except me and my husband were getting off the train.  Since we had not arrived in Wadowice and we had tickets to Wadowice, my husband and I just sat there—until the conductor, who spoke little English and saw that we spoke little Polish, came to tell us something about a bus.  So we exited the train and saw all the other passengers getting on a bus and the train tracks being worked on.  Could this have been what the woman at the train station was trying to tell us the previous day? 

It was a lovely drive through the countryside of Poland, though, that ended in Wadowice.  And we visited the home of John Paul II as we had planned.  After visiting the museum, we went to a local café for lunch—the Paradise Café.  We’re from Tennessee and we’re sitting by the window in the Paradise Café overlooking the square of the small town in Poland that was the birthplace of John Paul II.  There was music playing during our lunch, but we paid little attention to it until we heard the strands of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette.  I don’t know if John Paul would have approved or not, but we found it very amusing.  Then we looked at each other and said, “Now, how do we get back to Krakow?”