This morning is rainy and overcast. The Appalachian blend coffee from Mast General Store is delicious. These are the type of mornings I love. Years ago I found a sweatshirt at Target that I loved but as the years went on as much as I loved the sweatshirt, I wouldn't wear it. You know I was saving it for just the right time and I am so glad I did because this fraying at the sleeves, seen better days sweatshirt is worn almost every morning here. It is the first thing I put on over my jammies to go downstairs and make coffee and watch the birds or read or blog.
I stayed up again last night reading the book my friend Inez loaned me. Oh my goodness, I got to laughing so hard at a couple of the stories from the mountains. I realized just last night that the author and I are near in age when she wrote about high school graduation and her years in college. Her experiences growing up in a remote mountain area compared to mine of growing up in a big city are at the opposite ends of experience but how she thinks and now remembering are not unlike and being so opposite narrows the gap.
Even though I have loved and collected Southern fiction for years, I never quite identified with the southern belle type, I would not have been a sorority type, and hopefully not trailer park type living a bare existence. But after reading these stories here and there in the mountains, I think I could identify with being a mountain girl that moves away from the home place but would be ready in an instant to return. When I was growing up and the reality of my life was just a bit too much to take, that reality changed the instant I shut my bedroom door because many a day in that bedroom I was working on a farm. You know playing and imagining and in the evening when I attempted to do my homework, I would turn off the overhead light and only use the small desk lamp to make me feel I was in the country working on my lessons after a hard days work after school, on the farm that only existed in my imagination but got me through an early season of life. I did have some experience "farming" when I was little. I would help my cousins pick and shuck corn in the summer and in their personal garden I would pick peas, beans and other veggies, snap and shell them with my grandmother. At my grandmother's I would pick plumbs and help her make jelly. By the time I was old enough, her apple orchard was just a bunch of old, dangerous trees that always allured me but I had been given strict instructions from every relative on the face of the earth, so it seemed, to stay out of the apple orchard and don't play by the old well. You know I did both but very carefully.
Well, there was a whole blast from the past paragraph and I don't think I have ever shared that I loved imagining I lived on a farm when I was very young. Here's an additional look back, I was very creative and always inventing something new with Tinker Toys. Somehow, I couldn't parlay that into a career.
There was great success in finding somethings last night that had been stored away in haste of company coming. Now, to find the last few things. I was telling a friend the other day it felt good to turn the corner for some downtime here at home and just when it is the right time season-wise, I'll be ready for company. Sometimes when it is so beautiful outdoors, I feel guilty for staying in the house but maybe one day soon winter will come and I'll get some of those projects I have been putting off, done. It looks like Christmas here will be in the 70's! Just a few degrees warmer than Houston. El Nino and our installing a generator has made these things happen.
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