Valentine Yard Flowers

I was fortunate enough to receive my favorite kind of Valentine flowers – the kind I arrange myself. Florists do a good job in our town, but I enjoy doing the arrangements myself. I am like most of the southern women I know – our creativity comes out in the bouquets we create. We go out in our yards and pick some of our own plants and greenery to add to the mix.
This time of year the pickings in our yard are wonderful. February is the month of the flowering bushes and first of the bulb flowers. All old house places and many of our roadsides have daffodils, snow drops and fragrant narcissuses popping up in shades of yellow and white. The forsythia yellow bells, the orangey pink of quince, and the delicate white traceries of bridal wreath are perfect for adding to the Wal-Mart flowers that our gentlemen callers purchase for us.
In my own yard, I grow all of the above, plus some variegated shrubs that spark up bouquets. I get so much satisfaction from going out to pick what I have, then putting it into bouquets with my gift flowers. I made three big bouquets out of my gleanings. I didn’t even add camellias although I love them. They are so beautiful, but are somewhat prima donnas in that they shine best alone. I did see a really nice bouquet that included them when I visited Susie McGowan recently. She had done one of our yard-plus arrangements that I thought was so pretty I snapped a picture of it. Hers included antique purple dawn camellias. They seemed to get along quite nicely with the other flowers in her bouquet. Sometime I catch mine between frosts and add them into bouquets of greenery and red berries at Christmas. I had a white bush called Alba Plena which means plenty whites (actually, it means many white), but it produces abundant flowers all winter long.
If I had written Steel Magnolias it would have been Steel Camellias because they really are tough. I think of them as like southern women, they look so delicate, but are really so tough.
In just a few weeks, our pilgrimage season starts in the Black Belt of Alabama. There are a multitude of antebellum homes in the area. Many of them were kept as family homes out of necessity long enough for people to begin to appreciate them.
I spent the night with my friend Garland in Camden recently in her old family home that she had bought from the other heirs. It was lovingly and unpretentiously restored. I say unpretentiously because the floors still has the durable brown enamel that everybody put on their old house floors to keep them polished looking when servants to do the work became a rarity or when they had enough children to do serious damage to the finish. Another unpretentious thing about the house is that she left one wall in the kitchen a brinel mixture of paints. This was over the objections of her husband who favored painting the whole thing white. They compromised with the one wall being left the odd, but charming mixture of yellow, green and bare wall. For those of you not from here, brinel is a word used to describe a dog that is not a single color, but an odd mixture that looks like it was painted by an impressionist artist in muddy colors.
I’m including a number of my yard flowers still life shots for your perusal.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I did putting them together. Now I need to have a party to show them off. My living room smells great right now, mostly because of the kiss-me-at-the-gate I picked over my neighbor’s garden fence. We have this help yourself agreement. She gets camellias if she wants them and I get whatever sticks over the fence. That’s how we do things in rural southwest Alabama.

Mama Neet and Uncle Daddy

My parents are snowbirds. They come down every winter from Lexington, Kentucky. Now they come to rural southwest Alabama to get away from the snow. They used to go to Florida to play golf, but now they’re past that. They are in their 80s/. They are still active every day, going to the local senior center and church activities. They live in a mother-in law suite over my brother’s garage while they are here. However, talking about the new senior apartments that have opened in town as their next stop.
My mother is Mama Neet. She named herself that when she had grandchildren. Uncle Daddy is what we named him when he became our stepfather. They short version is – Mama and Daddy were married. His sister Mary Jim was married to Bill. Daddy died. Mary Jim died. Mama married our uncle who became Uncle Daddy.
It sure is convenient to have your mother marry somebody you already like. It’s even more convenient to have her marry someone whose children are kin to you. You know you like the steps and in-laws. It saves much adjustment and grief. There are fewer family conflicts. We call the cousins Cuddin’ Brother and Cuddin’ Sis.
We laugh about what Jeff Foxworthy could doth our family. “You may be a redneck if you have an Uncle Daddy.” We think it far better to have an Uncle Daddy than a Stepmonster.
Uncle Daddy was raised in a cold weather state, but he’s the one who wants to be in a warmer clime. Mama just wants to come home and be among family.
Let me tell you something even stranger. My Gentleman Caller had an Uncle Daddy, too. He’s from Louisiana originally, so I guess it’s a southern thing.
I think it’s a marvelous idea. We have somebody we like to entertain Mama and keep her out of our hair and business (to some extent). We have someone who loves to eat as much as we do, so there are lots of family get togethers. We had one this weekend that involved a marathon of feeding.
They will be here until April. We will all have gained 10 more pounds by then.

End of Hunting Season

Another time of religious ritual has passed for the men of rural southwest Alabama. There are a lot more of them than show up on the census. Our population ranks swell in the winter. It is because of hunting season. Men come from as far away as they can drive for a weekend. They do not stay in motels. They stay in the woods in shanties that they, and certainly not their wives, would not be caught dead in ordinarily.
I know one man who lives in a historic house locally who has his little trailer in the woods that he inhabits for much of hunting season. He calls it his castle. He says it tongue in cheek, but we think he secretly means it. Most of these guys think that way. Not only is hunting a religion, but their castles are generally the places where no woman can go. Women may not be able to go there for more than one reason. In addition to not being welcome, they may not can stand the smell. Men on hunting expeditions are not necessarily concerned with housekeeping or hygiene. Men who frequent hunting camps may have one near freak in the bunch who cleans up, but it is rare. Mostly the schedule is such that there is little time for it. The hunting experience requires getting up well before daybreak. It demands for the truly dedicated, a shower with dirt smelling soap so that the deer won’t be able to detect the hunter in the tree. It requires sitting in a tree stand in a tree for as long as the hunter can tolerate the position, then climbing down, going somewhere to eat and recoup, a brief nap, then returning to the stand until dark. Should one be lucky enough to shoot a deer, there may be a period of time roaming the woods at night following a trail of blood to find the animal.
By this time, the most dedicated of hunters is exhausted. He can only crawl back to his castle. He will eat a huge meal that takes time to prepare, drink alcoholic beverages if he is so inclined, tell tall tales of what he saw to his fellow hunters, then fall into bed, only to rise before daybreak to hunt again. With all this to do, who has time to wash dishes and do other mundane household chores. Besides, the smell doesn’t bother nature boys the way it does sissy women.
Why do hunters do this grueling ritual as often as they can? Why do they take vacation time from work to punish themselves like this? Somewhere in the depths of their psyche there still lurks, a vestige of the primitive urge of the hunter gatherer. It’s like chasing women, a lot of them just can’t help it. Safe to say, given a choice of hunting or chasing women, true hunters would choose chasing deer and turkey. Both are expensive hobbies, but hunting has the edge because it is perfectly acceptable to brag about your hunting conquests, even putting your picture in the paper with your conquests. In polite company, it would be bad form to brag this way about the women you’ve caught. Given a choice, bragging rights is worth a lot to a man. Besides, a hunter had something to show for his efforts. Right now, I know at least one man who after killing four deer and filling his freezer with venison, is sitting with 46 pounds of sausage wondering what he is going to do with it. It is a good problem for a hunter. As he gives the sausage to other people, when they thank him for his generosity, he can mention the four deer he killed. He can “I’m glad you can use it. After the four deer I killed this season, I just don’t have room in the freezer for any more”. For the next few weeks, he and his fellow hunters can relax. After that turkey season starts and a whole new set of rituals begin.