JEWELRY SALE TIME

In rural Southwest Alabama, we love our bargains. Some of the best are to be had at the Hospital Auxiliary Jewelry Sales held by the local hospitals. You never saw such fabulous fakes for sale at $5.00 a piece. I’m sure you have passed some great fake places in airports or in malls as you have traveled. I guess these are the remainders from the importers of those places or something like that. They do not look cheap, they just are.

I have friends who have fine diamonds, but who choose to wear these pieces instead. I have one church friend who is a very conservative person whose real jewelry would never call attention to itself. However, because the rest of us have such fun with the fakes, she’s started to wear them, too. She comes to church with a whole set of large stones on her fingers. She says her husband won’t let her wear them unless he’s along as a body guard. She will let her hands fall to her side as if the jewels are too heavy to carry.

Another friend kept wearing her fabulous fakes so well that she embarrassed her husband into giving her a 4 carat real diamond. She was wearing the fakes around and bragging on them. One lady admired her large ring and was told it wasn’t real. They admirer said “I wish you hadn’t told me”. The husband surprised his wife with the real thing so she’d quit wearing the fakes and bragging about them. I guess he figured he’d give her something the really brag about. Frankly, most of us think having the real thing would be a waste of money when we can play with the fakes and discard them when we’re tired of them.

I am very partial to throw away watches. I have one that is real gold that I bought on sale at a national discount place. The band broke. I was going to have it repaired, but it was going to cost a couple of hundred to do it. I decided to put it in a drawer and just wear throw a ways from the jewelry sales.

There are two hospitals in the area that each has sales, but they use different companies. We have a lot of variety to choose from. One sale is this week and the other is next week. I can’t wait to see what is available. One of the auxiliaries has told their company to bring some new stuff because they have the same customers every time and they want something different. I think that’s real nice of them to provide such good customer service!

Well, I better run. I want to get to the sale before all the good stuff is gone!

Interesting Spring

My friend Deanna keeps track of the truth of the old axiom “If it thunders in February, It will frost in April”. We were discussing it not long ago. She marked it down on the calendar when it did thunder in February. I called her day before yesterday to find out if there was a correlation sine the weatherman gave the forecast for frost this week. She had it documented. The frost was not forecasted for the exact same day, but was within a couple of days. Maybe our ancestors didn’t have the Weather Channel, but it seems that some of their superstitions were more that just folklore.

I am a person who loves the “what ifs?” of life. I still say that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy and that Elvis is alive and well, living in Minnesota and shopping at Wal-Mart. He is just so fat and homely now that he looks like a bad imitation of one of his impersonators. Where better to hide out from the press hounds than in plain sight?

From now on I will pay more attention when it thunders in February. I was lulled into thinking that spring has come. I had begun, but luckily, not finished the process of swapping out winter and spring clothes. Most of the winter stuff I wear little enough anyway. I have to admit that all the wool and fur coats are not really for the climate of rural Southwest Alabama. We get chilly, but only occasionally does it get really bone chillingly cold for any length of time. We get a lot more wear out of shirtsleeves that coats.

I was caught napping as far as the cold was concerned. I still have space heaters in my old house. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that they do the job quite well. The other is that I love having a window unit air conditioner in my bedroom in the summer. I had turned off the pilot lights on the heaters. I hate to turn them on again just for a day or two. It has gotten down to freezing for the last two nights. My remedy has been to get up early in the morning and make a fire in the fireplace. I love to have my early morning coffee or tea by the fire. By midmorning the whole downstairs is warm. I close off the hall that leads to the upstairs where the heat will all rise. I don’t even have heaters upstairs because it always stays warm enough without them.

Old houses do have their quirks. One of them is that we build our houses in rural Southwest Alabama to accommodate the long hot summers. Winter is no more to us than a passing bother. Our tall ceilings are made to cause the summer heat to rise. We have heat in the winter, but it is not our houses reason for being. As I’ve told you before, we can use our front porches for about nine months of the year. It serves as an extended living room. I call myself the Front Porch Philosopher because I do most of my meditating there. I also do most of my entertaining there, too. I have friends who call to see if I’m porch sitting so they can come join me and others who just ride by and if I’m out there, stop to chat. Just last week I had two different overnight guests. We were able to sit on the porch until bedtime chatting. This week, we’d freeze out testers off if we tried.

The thing I hate most about the cold snap is that I have recently accumulated some very nice plants in my travels around the region. I am just itching to get them in the ground. I was counting on this week to begin my spring planting in earnest. As I sit here by the fire, I think I might as well enjoy this, probably the last fire of the season. I said that last month, too.
I visited with Joyce and Ed Burrage yesterday down at Chilton. Joyce has an antique flower garden she’s been cultivating since 1974. She has some nice early blooms that I took pictures of to share with you. There are some early clematis and some real English daisies from seed she got in England. I hope tonight’s cold snap doesn’t get them.

I guess I should just be glad I live in rural Southwest Alabama where this cold, too, shall pass.

Healing Springs

I love having adventures in rural Southwest Alabama. It’s fun to discover new places that are interesting in our area. Yesterday I went to Healing Springs. It is located in north Washington County near Millry. It has been rumored to have healing powers since an Indian Chief discovered them three hundred years ago. He had a running sore on his leg that nothing would cure. He took some of the mineral sludge that is in the runoff around the spring and rubbed it on the sore. He was cured. Since then, there have been scores of miraculous healings of all kinds. Whether they are true or not, most of the residents of the area believe. They come at all hours to collect the water to drink. The gates are open to the public during all the daylight hours. There is a man who lives on the site of the ruins of the old hotel and springs who leaves the gate open when he goes to work, then closes it at night. Virginia Radley, the owner of the Healing Springs property has a house on the property that she visits frequently. She tells of the man who came by just a few nights ago about ten o’clock. The gates were locked and he blew his car horn to get somebody’s attention. He had driven from Quitman, Mississippi to get water. When told that the springs were open only in daylight hours, he said “You don’t understand. I just got off from work and came straight here. My whole family drinks this water for their heath, including my elderly mother. She depends on this water.” He was allowed to get the water, but told in the future, he would have to make other arrangements.

Healing Springs was once a thriving resort in the early part of the 20th Century. People came by train to stay at the hotel and drink the water. There were originally 33 springs which dwindled to 17. There are now three that overflow and are operational. They are designated as being for different conditions

There is the Mound Spring which is for female diseases as well as dyspepsia, indigestion, stomach troubles, eczema, old sores and skin diseases. This is the spring that Dr. Knight, the dentist who was the father of the present owner benefited from when he came with a stomach ulcer in the early part of the last century to take a cure. He was cured in 6 weeks. He vowed when he left to return and buy the springs, which he did.

The Creek Spring is designated for kidney, bladder, urinary ailments, and Bright’s Disease.

The Iron Spring is for instantaneous relief of chronic constipation, piles, chills, malaria fevers and as a blood builder.

I took home two bottles of the Mound Spring water. Virginia gave me two old glass half gallon bottles to fill at the spring. She said her mother always thought glass was a better preserver of the natural state of the water than was plastic. The water is quite tasty. There has been some discussion of bottling it for sale. However, as the water sits, the minerals in it settle to the bottom of the container forming the same rusty residue that the Indian Chief used to cure his sore. In bottled water, the water is purified of substances, then minerals are added to enhance flavor. The whole point of these waters are the original mineral content, so further methods need to be sought before it would ever be commercially bottled. In the meantime, anyone can stop by and get the waters for free if they bring their own containers. The owner intends to keep the property open to the public for free as long as she can.

Going to visit Healing Springs is part of a neat package of several things to see in the area. There is a completely restored train caboose located in downtown Millry. It is located directly beneath a large American Flag flying overhead. This was designated by Jackie Sims of Mobile as a memorial to her deceased husband. There are two other attractions in the immediate area. One is the Emmett Woods State Lake for birding and fishing. The other is a new attraction. There is a racecourse located down the same road that passes Healing Springs.
It will feature sulky racing. There will be a regular schedule of racing events on the weekends as the facility progress. Now visitors can ride down to see the horses and visit with the owners.

It’s neat to discover new things to do in your own backyard. It’s also neat to travel off the beaten path into rural Southwest Alabama to visit unusual scenic attractions.
There are a number of interesting places to eat along the way. In nearby Silas there is Dee Doc’s which has fried seafood and steaks, There is Bimbo’s which serves homemade pizzas from scratch from an old family recipe as well as American selections. There is Bobby’s Fish Camp on the river between Silas and Coffeeville that specialized in fried catfish and hushpuppies. In Millry, there is fast food to be had at the local convenience store. In Chatom, there are three restaurants offering a meat and three with sweet tea, the local lunch specialty. As you know, food is very important to me. I don’t want to go anywhere without knowing what I can eat. However, the real nutrients of this trip are found in the water, not just the food.

Conecuh Sausage Outlet

I’ve told you about Conecuh Sausage before. It is a local favorite. They have an outlet right near the interstate in Evergreen. It has been there for some time, but just lately, they put a sign up on I-65. Travelers have discovered Conecuh Sausage!

This is more than a meat market. It is a gift shop with all sorts of treasures. They have gifts, hunting supplies and accessories, cookbooks, and all sorts of condiments. Most importantly, though, they have lots of Conecuh meat products. They have sausage, hams and smoked turkey breasts frozen for travel. You can buy a sausage dog on the spot. They even have samples so you’ll know what Conecuh Sausage tastes like. They will give you a complimentary cook booklet on ways to prepare the sausage.

People who grew up on Conecuh Sausage really like it. We know of people who live up north who bring an extra suitcase when they come down just to take a lot of this sausage home. Now the traveler is discovering how good it is.

Here is a new favorite way I cook Conecuh Sausage:

Conecuh Split Pea Soup
½ lb Conecuh sausage diced
1 large onion, chopped
½ c chopped celery
1 c sliced baby carrots
1 qt water
1 pkg. dried split peas
1 tbsp seasoned salt
1 tsp dried tarragon
1 tsp sugar

Fry sausage until done. Add onion and celery. Put a lid on the pan and sauté until tender. Add all other ingredients. Bring to a boil, then simmer on low for 1 ½ -2 hours until peas disintegrate and carrots are tender.

Of course, always serve with cornbread; just we do everything else here in rural Southwest Alabama!

Exploring Rural Countryside

Right now I am out exploring the 11 county areas of Rural Southwest Alabama cataloguing assets so that we can decide what things to see we have that are worth bragging about. That would seem easy enough on the surface, but what we locals think is valuable might not always be what you would want to see if you came visiting. It’s like years when years ago I was traveling around to schools on my job and the principal would always want me to eat in the school cafeteria because the food was so good. Let me tell you, that was rarely the case. There were two or three schools that had good food on a regular basis, but most did not. Some of them could even mess up a hamburger. The only thing that could be counted on to be consistently good was fried chicken. Stick enough grease to it and it’s hard to ruin a chicken. The rest of the time, the food was, as my ninety year old friend Mr. Earl Huggins would say, “nothing to write home about”. The thing was that they got so used to eating the food, the staff lost perspective. It was what they had, so they ate it.

There is a parallel here. When you ask people in a community what there is to see in the area, they don’t often have any more perspective than the people at the school have about the cafeteria food. They either refer you to whatever museum they may have with local history or a ball field. The museums may or may not be good. I know recently a friend of mine came to me and said “You need to help the people in Podunk (name changed to protect the obvious) start a museum. Well, Podunk is a dying town that has very little appeal. Why, even the people who used to live there moved off and left the town to die. The history they wanted to preserve might appeal to the grandchildren of the lady who wanted to give you her mother’s wedding dress, but wouldn’t be much in interesting the steady stream of visitors they hoped to attract. Let’s face it, what interests us because we included it because of our links to it won’t mean much to somebody else unless viewed in a larger context. It Mrs. Vanity’s wedding dress were part of a curetted bridal exhibit with information about several periods of history and marriage customs of the rural south, it might be worth a shot. Visitors want context, not random objects jiggled up together in a musty place for them to see. If the random objects are for sale at a bargain, the visitor might be interested in buying them and fitting the objects into their own personal context. However, just to come to Podunk and see some random local things don’t have much appeal to the visitor from somewhere else.

By the same token, some of the things that the locals take for granted might be the very things that appeal to visitors. I ran across one of those things recently in Evergreen, Alabama. I was going out exploring. I happened to mention my destination to my friend, Norman. When I mentioned where I was headed, he said “There’s an airport there that is really cool. You can be riding down the road and see fighter planes coming in to land right over your head.” I had passed that little airport a thousand times and never thought much about it. Nobody in Evergreen had ever said “You need to go out to the airport and watch those Navy pilots do their training maneuvers”. Well, that day I started asking questions. The field is owned by the City of Evergreen, but is a training facility for the Pensacola Air Station. I found out that one of the guys who work at the library where I frequently go to get information had a brother who works there. He called out there and found out that the place would let tourists come by any time and see the planes flying in. In fact, they had two fighter planes displayed up in the air on poles that people could come to look at up close. They have a special event every fall where planes fly in for a weekend festival with all kinds of interesting activities. This place is just off the interstate. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people ride that interstate highway every day who would love to know about Middleton Field.

Probably there are just as many who come down the road who would love to know that there is a City Park in Evergreen that has a good place fro them to break up their journey. There’s a playground for the children, a walking track, and a place to ride horses, fish, or watch birds. How many weary travelers would jump at the chance for just such a break in their journey? Sometimes, we just don’t know what we’ve got.

We’re so hot on getting a new industry to come to town, but we don’t count the travelers who buy gas, shop with us and eat in our restaurants as being a continuous streak of economic development. We locals just don’t appreciate what we’ve got, or know how to package it. We focus on the food in the cafeteria instead of the banquet that is all around us.