Living Through a Pandemic

 Although we do really miss traveling, that seems rather trivial compared to what some are suffering, so we try not to complain. When the Coronavirus pandemic began in the USA, experts advised that the only way to control the virus was to wear masks, socially distance, sanitize, and stay away from other people as much as possible.  For a few weeks, restaurants, bars, churches, theaters, and churches were all closed.  Politicians, realizing that this approach was difficult for the populace and might hurt the economy, began pushing for the country to open back up.  The experts advised that any opening should be done gradually in stages with strict compliance to guidelines.   

The populace then began taking sides.  Some listened to the experts and some listened to the politicians.  As a result, the country became divided.   

Here at our house, we listened to the experts.  Since the 1st of March, we have not eaten in restaurants, have not been in church, have seldom been in a store, doing most of our shopping online or ordering online for curbside pickup.  We have limited our personal contacts with close family and friends.  This summer we did a lot of socially distanced outside visiting.  We always wear masks when we go out and stay away from those who do not. 

I realize this was easier for us than some.  We are retired and do not have to go to work.  Our incomes were not affected.  But for the most part, we have adjusted.  It is difficult at times, but we believe that the stricter we are about following the advice of the experts, the sooner this will be over for all of us.  We believe in doing our part.   

One of the things we miss the most is traveling.  Since we retired, we have been doing two trips a year.  One in the spring and one in the fall.  As a matter of fact, we had just returned from a trip abroad a few weeks before the shutdown began in this country.  Normally, soon after returning from that trip and resting a bit, we would have started planning for our next trip. A big part of our lives was planning our trips, getting ready for a trip, or going on a trip.  

A Free Range Childhood

I had never been into kids very much until my oldest daughter was born, so I wasn’t paying much attention to other people’s kids. I didn’t know what the norm was for dressing babies so I just dressed her in what seemed sensible. 

Frilly little dresses didn’t seem sensible on a baby who couldn’t walk. She was born in the middle of winter and I thought her legs would be cold in dresses. So I mostly kept her in little sleepers or something practical. 

But Grandmother was of a different mind so there eventually were frilly dresses available. 

As soon as my daughter was old enough it was the frilly dresses she always wanted to wear. She was a cute little kid and it was fun to dress her up like that. I had always liked dolls, so I relented and let her be frilly. ‘Prissy’ her little sister and I came to call her. 

When the little sister came, her big sister and I had great fun dressing her up as our little doll. And as soon as she was old enough she too had her own mind. Frilly was never her style. When she was two years old she asked Santa Claus for a pair of blue jeans and an alligator. I managed to find her a little stuffed alligator that year for Christmas. 

 I still have that alligator somewhere. It’s a reminder that children are not our creations, but gifts.

My Creative Awakening

Early in my life, I discovered that I could draw. More specifically I could draw the Campbell's Soup Kids, those cute, round-faced cartoon characters used by the Campbell's Soup Company to advertise their products. When I learned I could reproduce those faces it was an ah-ha moment for me. Then I began to see if I could reproduce other objects.

I soon learned that Campbell's Soup Kids were easy to reproduce compared to other things. Just draw a circle and put the cute little eyes, nose and mouth on and you had a Campbell's Soup Kid. No worries about shading or perspective. Other things were a little more complicated.

These difficulties didn't stop me, however. I kept trying. Give me some pencils and a sketch pad and I was a happy kid. I even sought out books and materials to help me learn about shading and such. Then when I was about eleven or twelve I got a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw book. One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received. And I practiced and practiced and practiced using that book.

Over time, I got a little better. I never thought I was great. I just thought I loved drawing.

Achieving a Little Recognition....

When I was in high school, my school added art to the curriculum for the very first time. I signed up, of course, but so did many other students who had no interest in art but thought this would be an easy class. Our teacher, who was a novice at teaching, was a good instructor but not so good at controlling the students' behavior, so the class was often bedlam.

In spite of the bedlam, I still loved this class. I was learning about art.

Our poor teacher left teaching after that year, but at the end of the year before he left he sent in a recommendation for me to attend a workshop that was being offered at our state university during the summer break for art students with promise.

....and Failure

I was excited to attend this workshop that was being taught by a couple of award winning artists, but I was a shy little teenager and more than a little nervous about being there. I had been the best art student in my small high school, but I was in class with other 'best art students' from across the state. Right away, I began comparing myself to these other students and came out on the losing end.

By the time I left that workshop that summer I was asking myself, "Why did I think I was any good at art?" I decided I was wasting my time pursuing art. I quit drawing. It was one of the worst decisions I ever made. I still regret it.

Moving On

During this period of my life, though, I was dealing with interests other than art. Besides dealing with the normal teenage angst about dating and fitting in, I was returning to high school to finish my senior year and begin thinking about college. And there were other high school classes besides art that appealed to me.

I may be biased about this, but it seems to me the best high school teachers are often the English teachers. That was certainly true in my case. My English teacher, Mrs. Fraim, was a pleasant, intelligent, long-time teacher with a genuine love of literature, the English language, and her students. Some students complained because she could also be quite demanding in her requirements. One of her requirements was that we write a paper almost every week while in her class.

Mrs. Fraim's requirements never seemed demanding to me. I took to the writing the same way I had taken to art. It was definitely more fun than conjugating verbs. And if Mrs. Fraim liked your writing, she was good aboout singing your praises. That always helps.

I suppose it was good there were no summer workshops for writing students in our universities because this enjoyment of writing stayed with me and served me well all through my university years. I even liked the essay tests in college that most students complained about.

The culmination of my writing career in college was the Advanced Composition course my last semester before graduation. Our professor in this class audaciously asked us to take the articles from The Atlantic magazine and see if we could improve them based on the principles he was illustrating. I loved it.

I Need to Be Alone

I was 2 1/2 years old when my younger sister was born and knew nothing about what was going on. During my mom's delivery of the baby, I went to stay with Granny who lived just up the road from us.

After the baby was born, they brought me back home, and I was very surprised to find this small unknown creature in bed with my mom.  So, sitting there beside them I began to cry and told my mom, "I want to go back to Granny's house". 

I didn't return to Granny's house, and eventually adjusted to this new creature who had joined out family. I learned, not just how to tolerate her, but also how to help her out. Since she had a limited vocabulary, I would often have to talk for her and to tell other family members what she wanted, like another cookie. 

As a result of my talking for her, she was a little later in talking than I and my siblings had been. But she eventually learned to talk for herself, and we remained close throughout our childhood. We also had two cousins living nearby who were close to us in age. There were four of us. I was the oldest of the four, and my younger sister was the youngest, so there was always someone around to play with. Loneliness was not something I experienced very often. If no one else was around there was always little sister Ann to play with. There were times, however, when I just wanted to be alone.

One day when Ann and I were out playing in the woods beside our house, I decided I wanted to climb the tree beside the area in the woods where we were playing house. We had made us a little house there at the bottom of the tree.

The tree was a tulip poplar tree with limbs close together making it easy to climb. Even though I was small, hiking my foot up to the bottom limb was easy enough. We had climber this tree so often that the bottom limb was broken off leaving just enough room to place my barefoot. All the limbs up the tree were close enough together that I could reach them easily.

When I got to the top of the tree, I held on to the trunk as the wind blew the trunk back and forth. 

I was holding on to the trunk and enjoying the thrill the tree was providing when I heard my little sister whining for me to come down. 

I can still remember many years later, the thrill of the sway of that tree and my annoyance at my little sister whining.

I learned that day that I can be very close to people but still value my independence.

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?”

Tooling to Tula

When I was a child, my father liked to take us on imaginary trips.  “We’ll get up in the morning,” he’d begin, then describe in detail our whole day, from where we’d stop for breakfast to where we’d spend the night.  

My father loved to travel but never had the opportunity to do much of it.  These imaginary trips may have been some consolation for him, and they instilled in me at an early age a love for travel.  That may be the reason I still love a road trip.

My husband and I travel frequently now, and because we have a family member who works for an airline, we usually fly.  That, too, can be exciting.  But when we booked a cruise out of New Orleans recently, I suggested we drive to New Orleans from our home in Tennessee even though we could have flown for free.  We planned to visit Oxford, Mississippi on our way there.

Both of us had been English majors in college; my husband had taught English for about forty years, and had completed a dissertation on William Faulkner;  both of us have been life-long readers.  So Oxford, Faulkner’s home, was a logical stop for us.

Besides Faulkner, Oxford has been the home of several other renowned writers, among them one of my favorite writers, Larry Brown.  

Brown is best known for his novels and short stories, but he also wrote a couple of acclaimed non-fiction books.  One of them is called Billy Ray’s Farm.  It is a collection of essays, one of which is about his son Billy Ray’s attempts to begin farming on the family farm near Tula, Mississippi which is just outside of Oxford.

So I loaded a recent biography of Brown and Billy Ray’s Farm on to my Kindle and off we went.

We planned to visit New Orleans and the Western Caribbean, but I suspected that Tula, Mississippi might be the highlight of my trip.

Living on the Hill

I've owned this little plot of land I live on since 1998.  I was in the area when I was planning and working on my daughter's wedding.  She was living in Nashville and planning to have her wedding in a little Methodist church outside of Nashville.  My friend who was living in Bowling Green, Ky. was helping us with the wedding.  One day after my daughter left for work, I was driving from Nashville to Bowling Green and decided to make a slight detour and come by a couple of places where I had once lived. 

When I was in high school my father had been the pastor at a little Methodist church near where I now live and my family had lived in a parsonage there.  I always called it the pink house because the brick on the house had a pinkish cast.  But it was a place where our family had been happy.  It was the last house we lived in where we were all under one roof. 

Before we lived in this little pink parsonage we had lived in Kentucky, not too far away.

After I left the pink house I decided to go through the country to the place in Kentucky where we had previously lived near my grandparents' farm.  I took the back road, a short cut thru I knew from living here previously. 

For several years I had been debating the idea of finding a place in the country.  I had not lived in the country since I had left this area.  I had lived primarily in Nashville and then for the 30 years prior to this day, in Chattanooga.  But I was getting ready to retire and, in planning my life after retirement, I had thought I would like to find a little place in the country.  I had been thinking about this for several years before this time and reading books about living in the country.  It greatly appealed to me.  Still does.

So when I saw the real estate sign for this property, I made a slight detour to look at it from my car.  From there I drove on to my friend's house in Bowling Green.  It so happened that she was a real estate agent.  She made inquiries for me about the property and before too many weeks passed I had gone to see the property and purchased it. 

Then I had to decide what I wanted to do with it, and that has been the story of my life ever since.  I brought it as a whim, but it has become a passion.  There is seldom a day when I'm not working on this land and house in some way to make it a more desirable and inviting place to live. 

Becoming Leonardo

Once when my six-year old granddaughter was visiting us, she announced she had decided to live in the country and be a writer. 

Later I mentioned this to her.  "No," she asserted.  "That’s not what I’m going to do.  I’m going to be Leonardo da Vinci."

Interesting, I thought.

Later I shared this little story with her mother who said she had told her she was going to be ‘The Queen.’

When her mother told her becoming the Queen might be difficult she confidently assured her mother she knew it would be a lot of hard work, but she thought she could do it.

Who knows how many things she will dream about before she must actually make these decisions about which directions her life will take.  Now, I just enjoy listening to the dreams.

There is one job that I hope she has one day, though, and that is being a grandmother.  It’s one of the most delightful things I have done thus far.

Things Are Getting Better All the Time

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/goshortfilmfest/

I suppose I’m an optimist by nature, but I usually feel annoyed when I hear people say things like, “Things are worse than they’ve ever been”, “What’s this generation coming to”?

You know the refrain.  It’s always negative.  Things are getting worse and worse all the time.  Every generation seems to say this.

I always think when I hear this kind of talk “No, they’re not.  Things are actually getting better.  We don’t have slaves in this country any more.  We aren’t killing off the natives so we can have their land.  We don’t skin people alive or burn them at the stake.” 

We are far from perfect, but it seems to me we are moving in the right direction.  I was reminded this week again of the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

I suppose it takes faith to believe this, but that’s what I believe, so I was pleased this morning to see a couple of my relatives share a link on facebook to a presentation by Bill and Melinda Gates titled “9 Reasons the World is Better than Ever”.  http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/12-ways-the-world-is-better-than-ever-according-to-bill-and

I also loved the low-tech method they used to present their topic.

Reading Little House Books

Photo Source: Shella Scarborough, Flickr,

perceptivetravel.com/blog/2011/01/20/literary-travel-visi...

I first read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about growing up on the prairie when I was a child.  When my daughters were growing up I read them to them.

Now, I’m reading these books to my granddaughters and enjoying them all over again.  I never did like the TV series much, though.  I thought it was too sappy.

What I enjoyed about these books were the stories of survival on the prairie.  In the book I am reading at present to my two oldest granddaughters, Pa is building a house for the family.  In order to do this, he had to drive his wagon down to the creek, cut down some trees for logs, haul them back to the site, and, just with the help of his wife, place all of those logs, hoist them up as he’s building, cut shakes for the roof, haul rocks for the fireplace and construct it by himself.  Nothing sappy about that.

I’m a great admirer of that type of self-sufficiency.  That may be one of the reasons I’m living in the country now and why I’m forever tackling projects around our little plot of land. 

Directions to My Home

Source:: ://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalm http apcenter/

There are several routes to use to come to my house, but, if I can, I like to direct people here by way of Pea Ridge.  I think the scenery is nicer that way.  And I like the name.

Turn off the main highway at a little red brick country church with a shelter built outside for potluck dinners, Decoration Day celebrations, or homecomings.  The narrow road takes you up through the woods to what we now call Billy Goat Hill because there’s a goat farm there.

At the top of the hill, a sharp left turn takes you winding through the countryside to the other side of the ridge on a narrow blacktop road with several right angle turns, by isolated country homes where families have lived for a long time.  Not farm houses, because there seems to be little farming going on.  Just country living, out of the city, the noise, the traffic, with trailers and ranch style brick houses and ponds and quiet.

Then it’s down the hill and across the little creek as the road straightens out and becomes a tree shaded lane, with the trees overhanging the road, making a tunnel to drive through—a tunnel that changes with the seasons.

Just the drive to my house sometimes still gives me a thrill.

The Mouse That's Missing from My Christmas Tree

When it comes to Christmas, I am all about tradition, so my Christmas tree has looked the same for many years now, decorated with ornaments I have collected for years.

The ornaments included the little red Santa from the small tabletop tree I had in my first apartment.  The drummer boy we purchased the first year we got a ‘real’ tree, who sat lonely in the middle of the big tree because we didn’t have many ornaments to accompany him.  It became a tradition to begin the decorating with the little drummer boy as we played Emily Lou Harris’s rendition of that song.

The tree also included the hand-made ornaments from a few years later.  The Disney ornaments I painted with my oldest daughter when she was two years old.

I also collected ornaments when we traveled and have one from each trip representing countries all over the world, even from places like Nepal and China, where you might not expect to find a lot of Christmas ornaments.

And then there was the little mouse that was given to my youngest daughter when she was three because she had an imaginary friend who was a mouse.  Every year when I decorated our tree I remembered again all of the times I had to lift that imaginary mouse into the car as we were getting ready to go someplace.

So decorating our tree each year gave me a chance to revisit those events in my life.  Very rewarding, all warm and fuzzy.  But the thing about it was, the tree was never very attractive.  That conglomeration of ornaments never fit together quite right.

Through the years, I always admired some of my friends’ trees that looked so beautifully decorated, with everything matching and orderly and splendid looking.  I had especially admired a solid white tree at a friend’s house with all white ornaments, many hand made.  It was very splendid.  And I always wanted one.

So this year I got a white tree with matching ornaments and left all of the memories in storage.  I did pull them out and look through them.  The memories are still there.

I Know Where the Elves Live

Source: Jack Flanagan, Flickr, https://farm9.staticflickr.com

No really.  And it’s not the North Pole—at least not exclusively.  I saw them last year.

Not far from my home here in northern Tennessee there’s another home high on a hill.  I’ve been there before for political functions.  It’s quite an elaborate spread.  At the foot of the hill there’s another house (maybe a caretaker’s house?), a rather nice, ancient two-story brick house.

Leading in to this whole estate is a wonderful wooden covered bridge over a small stream.  Every year at Christmas the wooden bridge is lined with Christmas lights of all sorts—angels, reindeer, Santas, snowmen, and lights, lights galore, all glowing in the dark.

One year my two oldest granddaughters were visiting for the weekend to make a gingerbread house.  One night we drove them down to see the lights.  We went over the wooden bridge and they oohed and ahhed at the lights.  We stopped to turn around just in front of the house at the bottom of the hill.  In the upstairs window we could see a person sitting in front of the window.  Just the shadowy outline.  Without any prompting one of the granddaughters whispered, “I think that’s one of Santa’s elves.”  The other agreed it had to be.

I know where they live now, and if you come here some December night you might be able to see them.

Getting My Friday Night Fix

Much of my television watching involves watching the news.  I don’t care for the cable news networks that have 24 hour coverage and not much substantive journalism, but I do usually watch a nightly news program.  I especially like the PBS News Hour because of their in depth coverage and lack of sensationalism.

Every Friday night on the News Hour they have a special segment that I religiously watch called Shields and Brooks, that’s Washington Post columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.  I have been watching this segment on the News Hour since before they were Shields and Brooks.  They were Gergen and Shields when I began watching it.

In this segment the columnists engage in a succinct and substantive analysis of the week’s major news stories.  Mark Shields is a more liberal columnist and David Brooks a more conservative columnist.  I especially enjoy this segment because I want to hear both sides of the issues.

I read an article online once called 'Can We Agree to Disagree in a Nice Way'.   For a lesson in how to disagree in a nice way, this segment on the News Hour is a perfect example of how to do just that.

Mark Shields and David Brooks often take opposite sides of an issue, but they are never disagreeable.  They state their opinions in polite, civil ways, and show remarkably  good will and respect toward each other.  They also have an in depth knowledge of the subjects they are discussing.

Their discussions are very different from many political discussions one might hear on cable news shows, and it’s an example many of us might try to emulate.