On a lighter note...

You know you're from the South when one of the first things your brother has to do to get your dad's farmhouse ready for post-funeral visitors is to get rid of the machine gun parts (non-working, don't worry) and moonshine (unfortunately we fear that may have been working just fine) sitting on the kitchen counter.

I love my family. And I love my l'il bro for handling the details.

Smellin' Coffee and DANCING!

Yeah Boy! I don't know where this is, but I want to go there and do this. The short version says it's clogging. The long version says it tap dancing. It looks like a combination of tap dancing, clogging, AND line dancing. I have a quest.

Southernness...

I used to joke that the Lord could send me anywhere in the world and I'd be happy, as long as anywhere didn't include the North. I've always loved being from the South.

Southern. It's not just a regional adjective; it's a family name. My mom's maiden name is Southern. As in railroad, only not. If we were Southern Railroad people, I'm betting there'd be money in the family. In our family there isn't any money; we do have an abundance of antique beds, though. I don't know why.

I've decided that even if I didn't get my Granny's gift for tatting, I did get her affinity for painting furniture. Wood, meet Paint. Paint, meet Wood. Sandpaper? We don't need no stinkin' sandpaper. I have an impatient artisan heritage.

Aside from our throw-away-nothing-because-we-might-be-able-to-use-it-for-something-else family philosophy that lies somewhere between the mountain of collectability and the island of hoarders, I also inherited a nice set of family stories. One of my favorites will get me in trouble with PETA. It involves tick removal from a cat, kerosene, flames and a house fire. That actually wasn't the Southern side of the family. Oh, I mean it IS the southern side, just not the Southern side. I can't remember which cousin was trying to do the cat a service, but he inadvertently caused kitty's demise and burned the house down. I don't think he could do it today, what with the fact that folks usually build solid foundation walls instead of leaving the crawl space open.

There's the story of Granny and the watermelon patch and another one about the time she got bit by a copperhead... or was it a moccasin...? At any rate, she had a scar on the top of her foot where her daddy cut an x and sucked out the poison. In a recent First Aid re-certification course, I learned you're not supposed to do that to a snake bite. Oh well. She was fine, and it made a good story to keep kids from running barefoot through fields or even through a grassy yard in summer twilight.

Why I love the South...

Readers and writers and books...

I took a break from stalking watching owls online long enough to have dinner with two of my teacher peeps and attend a book-signing Friday night. Our basketball team was playing for the conference championship at the same time as the reading. Ninth-grade English teacher SC had one of her students ask if she was going to the game, and she said no, she was going to a poetry reading. She said he laughed off and on for the rest of class.  After all, who goes to those things?!

Well, we do. The author is the dad of one of Zane's buds. It is his first book. It is about the underlying theme of lynching in Langston Hughes' poetry. My area of concentration in lit for my MA was African American literature.  Wrote my thesis on Toni Morrison. LKF, there. 

It was awesome. We were blessed to get an outdoor table at a little Italian restaurant. I kept looking for Billy Joel to show up. We chatted about anything and everything. Food was delightful. Tenth-grade English teacher BV could possibly be the funniest, most insightful person I've ever met. I think anyone who knows her would agree.

The book-signing attracted a fairly large and diverse group of people. Dr. Miller had a delightful reading, but knocked it out of the park with his Q & A. BV cracked up the entire crowd with her assertion that modern poetry makes no sense; Langston Hughes is brilliantly accessible to all. Universality. We had a lovely discussion following the reading about how literature is universal, and if the majority of people don't "get it," then it probs isn't literature at all. 

It made me realize how much I have starved my intellect over the past 16ish years since I gave birth. I see more reading and readings in the future. And definitely more lunches and dinners with friends.

Oh! The picture above. If you've ever been to Quail Ridge Books, you'll recognize the wall.  It's in the bathroom.  Actually, every wall in the bathroom is lined with autographed photos of authors who have done book-signings there. I could get only one shot because there was a pretty long line and the reading was about to start. I was trying to use my best Southern manners and get in and out as quickly as possible. Next time, I'll try to get the rest. 

I am off to read a little. I did buy a copy of Dr. Miller's book, but I didn't get him to sign it; the line was long. I figure that since track starts next week, I'll just ask him to sign it at one of the meets, since our kids run together. That's not odd, is it? I'll get to his book soon, but first... I treated myself to another Clyde Edgerton novel. He's my favorite local author. I always end up laughing until my sides hurt when I read his work; he is spot-on in capturing especially older Southern women. If I didn't know better, I'd swear he'd stalked watched my family online while researching his books. 

Ice, ice baby...

Let's review.  I was born in this town.  I went to college ~30 miles away.  I got married, got a job, and bought a house in a town four miles away from where I went to college and 25ish miles away from the house I lived in growing up.  All these places are in the South.  OK, picky people -- Southeast.

We have one or two winter events a year.  On average there's a fun snow (4-6 inches) and another something.  Sometimes that's snow and sometimes it sleet or ice.  To date this season, we have had six (6) winter events since December 1: dustings of snow, nicely measurable snow, and now sneetice. I'm not complaining; I'm just sayin'.

So as I sit home for the third wintry weather unplanned vacation-from-schwork day, I'm working up motivation to peel more wallpaper ("Mom, when are you going to finish our bathroom?  It's hard not having anywhere to hang towels.") or run on the treadmill (Couch to 5k still under consideration). I am going to get on those things... right after I watch a weather-related Robert Van Winkle video on YouTube. 

Confession...

Snow day here.  Hooray!

The first thing I always think when the power goes out is:  Hey, let's watch movies in the dark.

The first thing I thought when I found out school was canceled today:  Hey, now I can run to the mall and finish up Christmas shopping. 

This being the South, I'm about as likely to get in a car and drive somewhere during a "wintry mix event" as I would be to get the TV to work during a power outage.

I love flawed logic.  It usually means I'm going to get to take a nap.

What I love about Sundays...

Hope...

Target sure is optimistic about the amount of snow our little South Town will be getting this year. I wonder if they know something we don't know...

Daddy, you'll never believe what we saw at the BB&T drive-thru...

Being the city girl I am, I had to ask some questions and then come home and do a Google images search. But if I've got a lick of sense in poultry-identification, I believe this is a guinea hen. Yes?

I researched it a little on the regular Google. Evidently, more and more areas are using guinea hens for tick control, of all things! I guess she didn't read the city ordinance about not having free-range poultry within the city limits. I have no idea how she'll pay the fine. She was in the drive-thru lane when we spotted her, but she squawked away... without even making a deposit. ;-)

Top Ten Southern Foods...

10. Home-grown tomatoes. If you haven't walked into a field, picked a tomato (warm to the touch from the hot summer sun), brushed off the dirt and eaten it like an apple, you really haven't ever eaten a tomato. Growing up, tomatoes made an appearance at every meal... breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

9. Watermelon. Admittedly, I've never busted one open on a rock and eaten it in the field, but my daddy did have a pocket knife that worked just fine to cut up a watermelon fresh off the vine. Mmmmmmmmm... I can smell that fresh-sliced watermelon now. It's a social food in the South. Shoot, all food is social food, but watermelon is the super-fun social food. Salt it, spit seeds, smash the rinds...there's no end to the entertainment that can come via watermelons.

8. Sweet potato pie. Sorta like pumpkin pie, only better.

7. Strawberry custard pie. With fresh, slightly over-ripe strawberries. Mmmmmm...

6. Grits. They're just perfect. And contrary to My Cousin Vinny, instant grits are just fine. No breakfast is complete without scrambled eggs, grits, sausage/bacon and grits. Biscuits are optional at breakfast. Grits are mandatory.

5. Biscuits. I have been an eyewitness and can personally verify that not all biscuits come from a cylinder. I've seen my Granny whip up a batch of homemade biscuits, bake them, and serve them for dinner. It can be done. I won't likely ever do it, but it CAN be done.

4. Home-grown cantaloupe and cucumbers. I can make myself sick eating fresh cucumbers and cantaloupe. Cantaloupe, like tomatoes, can make an appearance at any meal. Cucumbers are beyond-words plain. I'm OK with the vinegar thing, but if you're going to pickle cucumbers, just go ahead a pickle them all the way. Grape leaf cucumber pickles are my favorite of all the homemade pickles. Cucumber sandwiches are THE best: white bread, Kraft Real Mayonnaise (on both pieces), a teeny tiny bit of salt, and a freshly sliced cucumber that's been off the vine less than 4 hours. Ahhh...

3. Greens: collard, mustard, and turnip are my favorites. Some people really like Kale. I'm going to throw in cabbage because it's green and leafy too, even though it's not dark green and leafy. Some people put lots of vinegar on greens, but I like them best with the second top Southern food. And just for the record for our non-Southern friends who were totally flummoxed by the Facebook quiz going around, pot liquor is the juice left behind after you've cooked greens. You're going to have to make sure you have some, if you want to eat greens the right way, which is mixed with...

2. Cornbread. No, we don't make it in a frying pan. We always had a round cake pan we used, which worked quite nicely, thank you. Cornbread with greens and a couple of spoonfuls of pot liquor. Mmmmmm... The only time I get that anymore is when my mom cooks for us. No one around here likes greens or black-eyed peas.

1. Sweet Tea, iced - of course! Fresh-brewed and loaded with sugar. We rate all tea by the standard Granny set. If it is so sweet it sucks the water out of the rest of your body, it earns the comparison to "Granny Tea."

The beauty of Southern dialect...

I majored in English at THE University of North Carolina. Go Heels! (It's March. I have to say that or I could get a nasty rash from suppressing the sentiment.)

In my time at Chapel Hill, I was blessed to have Connie Eble as my grammar instructor for a couple of different classes. What I loved most about her class was that she taught grammar from a linguist's perspective. Now if you don't know what a linguist's perspective is, the short explanation is that they observe and report language without pronouncing the superiority of one form over another. As a matter of fact, you give a linguist a dialect and they just revel in the ins and outs of things like vocabulary and syntax and idiom. It makes them absolutely giddy.

One of the greatest exercises I have EVER encountered in an English classroom -- graduate, undergraduate or secondary-- was the Shibboleth exercise we did when we began our unit on usage. I fell in love with language on that day.

Three other things from Connie Eble's class that stuck in my brain and became part of my personal language philosophy are as follows:

1. English is essentially a Germanic language, although we have borrowed nearly 50% of our vocabulary from Latin. Yet, in all our academic brilliance, we have decided to define our language structure by the rules that govern the Romance languages. Basically, our method of diagramming sentences is the linguistic equivalent of putting square pegs into round holes. No wonder so many people hate doing it.

2. English grammar is helpful but not essential in writing. Writing is like driving a car. You can drive a car and get exactly where you want to go every time and never have a clue how the engine works. But if you want to drive a race car for maximum performance or if you're car breaks down and you don't want to be stranded forever, it behooves you to understand how the engine works. So it is with language. If you want to use the language well, you need to know how to maximize its performance. And certainly if your writing breaks down and can't communicate to your reader, you need to know how to fix it.

3. Who sets the rules of grammar? Well...? OK, think about who taught YOU the rules of the language. Your English teacher. Your English professor. Maybe a journalist here or there. Basically, the "safe-keepers" of the English language are English instructors. They write books about what's right and what's not. Woo Hoo! I can feel the surge of power coursing through my veins.

Now where on Earth was I going with this post? Oh yes... the beauty of Southern dialect... Before I sat under Dr. Eble's instruction, I had a distinct feeling that there was a right and wrong way of doing things. If I did wrong, there would be red. If I did right, there would be an "A."

Having a linguist teach language, I became aware for the first time of the beauty of language in the vernacular. The speech of the native speaker. The glory of dialect. My dialect is Southern American English. I never really appreciated SAE before that moment. Now, it's a treasure.

Some of my favorite SAE sayings:

1. "fixing to" - indicating preparation for an impending course of action. I am fixing to get up and go cook dinner.

2. "might could" - a double modal that is MOST helpful in indicating potential without certainty. I might could cook dinner a little better if I actually went to the grocery store and bought food.

3. "y'all" - properly used as the collective/plural second person pronoun. Y'all need to come over and eat dinner with us after church on Sunday.

4. "won't" - Unique to certain parts of the South, won't is a substitute for the first person singular form or the verb to be. Q: Who ate the last piece of sweet potato pie? A: It won't me.

5. "Bless your heart" - That one is very complex. Here's a nice summary of it. It could possibly be the ultimate Southern Shibboleth.

Down on Granddaddy's farm - Part 2...

Well... life on the farm is kinda laid back...

("Thank God I'm a Country Boy," by John Denver)

There she is, folks. The famed farm truck. Granddaddy has a truck parked near the end of the LONG driveway. It hasn't been moved in quite a while. This picture was taken three or so years ago, so I'm sure it's even more impressive today. If you'll look real close, you'll see a tree growing out of the hood area.

Down on Granddaddy's farm - Part 1...

This is Granddaddy. Granddaddy lives on a farm. Granddaddy has quite a sense of humor.

Granddaddy has a hen named Agnes.
Granddaddy has an old stove on his front porch.
Granddaddy has an old frying pan that he doesn't use anymore.
Granddaddy has some straw.

Now... Agnes has a new nest.

And Granddaddy can cross "eggs" off the grocery list.

5 Things that Scare Away Snow...

I have lived in this area of the fabled rain-snow-line my entire life. After years of "The Snow is Coming! The Snow is Coming!"only to be followed by a little jig we call "Oops We Missed It Again," I've discovered five things that scare away an impending snow storm. I'm going to take a gamble in sharing these secrets, as people I know ... in my own family even (MOM!) ... don't like snow. I trust you will use your newfound knowledge for good (snow) and not evil (no snow).

1. Parking your car in a different spot than you normally park. Parking facing out (if you normally pull in headlights first) = Strike 1. Parking at the end of the driveway, facing the street = Strike 2. Parking on the street, facing whatever direction you drive to get out of the neighborhood = Strike 3. We're out of the running for some good snow.

2. Failing to purchase bread, milk, and/or eggs within 48 hours of the predicted snow. They are staples. We can't risk running out of them. And once again, for our friends who have been transplanted from other parts to our lovely area... no... we don't make french toast every time it snows. It's just a coincidence that our must-have-staples are the ingredients for a yummy breakfast.

3. Not doing homework. OK kids... do you want snow or not? If so... get that homework done!!!

4. Bringing home extra work from the office/school so that you will have something to work on while you're stuck at home until it's safe to drive.*

5. Getting snow stuff out of storage before it starts to snow. "Stuff" includes ski pants, sleds, shovels, skis, snowboards, snow boots, etc. If it helps you have fun in the snow, it MUST remain in storage until YOU are ready to walk out in the snow and play.

You see... evidently southern snow is very, very shy. Or sneaky. At any rate, if you act like you know it's coming, you'll scare it away for certain. (The only exception is the grocery store trip. Just don't buy something obviously snow-related like hot chocolate mix or marshmallows. Stick to the staples.) So, for the love of all things cold and flaky and wet, PLEASE be good and let the snow fall without fear.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

*When is it safe to drive after a snow? It is safe to drive after a snow when ALL the snow is gone. Do not even think about using four-wheel drive or chains or any of those anti-snow gadgets to get around on the roads. You may have done it a million times before if you're from another area like, say, the North or the Midwest. But people here don't know how to drive in the snow. We hardly ever get any because folks are always doing ridiculous things like parking cars in the street, not going to the grocery store, skipping homework, planning to be out of work, and unpacking snow equipment early. So it doesn't matter how great a snow-driver you are if everyone else on the road is clueless, does it? If you do go out, be patient and stop saying bad things about southern drivers. Remember, a southern driver warned you to stay off the road in the snow.