Monday, July 21, 2008

TO EAT OR NOT TO EAT?


I joined Weight Watchers for the first time in my life. I might have needed to before now, but in the past I could knock off the pounds with a little self restraint and a little willpower. I knew I had some pounds to shed, but I do so love to eat! When Weight Watchers scales put the amount I had to loose at only 16 pounds, I didn’t worry too much. I thought that was hardly any challenge at all. The first week I lost 1 ½ pounds. Since then, nothing. Of course, I have been traveling and enjoying every mouthful. At least I haven’t gained!
I’m sure the same could be said by any food lover anywhere, but we have so much good to eat around here. Yesterday we had boiled peanuts for the first time this year. Really good boiled peanuts are made from the green kind fresh picked off the peanut plant, not ones that are already dried, and then resuscitated. The boiled peanuts they sell in truck stops bear as much resemblance to the fresh picked kind as an olive to a truffle. One of the best things about a truffle is the earthy scent. The same is true of the green peanut. It has the same earthy quality as a good fresh potato. Another thing wrong with the commercially sold boiled peanuts is that they are usually over salted, which ruins the delicacy of the flavor. Boiled peanuts to the people of rural Southwest Alabama are a rare treat. I served them to a friend who grew up in Northern Louisiana. He just can’t get the hang of their charm. He prefers them parched. I really didn’t care that he didn’t want many, because there were two of us boiled peanut connoisseurs on hand and it wasn’t a large pot full. I ate the remaining ones for breakfast this morning. I have never been a conventional breakfast eater. I’ve always preferred a sandwich or leftovers to eggs and bacon.
We do have some great traditional breakfast foods here in rural Southwest Alabama that I do enjoy – the heavily smoked local Conecuh Sausage and tomato gravy. This is the time of the year for fresh tomatoes. Garrison Keilor said it best “Two things money can’t buy – true love and homegrown tomatoes.
Tonight for supper, I am having some homegrown tomatoes. I’m going to chop them up over hot pasta with good pesto sauce and extra garlic. It’s also grilling time in the summer, so I am grilling pork chops. I found some rutabagas already cut up at the grocery store, so we’re having those, too. There is leftover banana split pie. I bet very few Italians have had cornbread with their pesto but we’re liable to do that as well. After all, I don’t have to weigh again until Thursday. Food is just too good! Maybe I won’t gain any weight, if I can’t loose and still eat!

Washington, DC

Last week I was in Washington, D.C. A big group of us went to Capitol Hill to lobby to make Highway 84 a four lane. This road runs through several of our counties in rural Southwest Alabama. It is a winding up and down hill road that has many areas that are hard to pass another vehicle on. It is loaded with log trucks at any time of day because the production of wood products is the biggest industry in the whole region.
We are the region that the interstates passed us by. It has been bad for business, but good for culture. We are still the laid back, front porch way of life people who love to spin our stories and yarns because we have not become rat race industrialized. We are probably the ideal place to spend the rest of your life after you’ve done all that. We are probably the ideal place to raise a family in a close knit environment for the same reason. Where we live is always brought home to me in a big way when I watch the reruns of the Andy Griffith Show where he and Barney sit on the front porch after supper and sing harmony on a full stomach. We still live life that.
I do love to travel. I am a born tourist. I used the Washington experience to see as much as I could between trips to Capitol Hill as part of the Highway 84 delegation. I visited the National Botanical Garden right there on Capitol Hill. I was delighted to see that they used so many native plants. I am not generally a picture taking tourist, but I did get some shots with my fancy new cell phone. There were a couple of good ideas I wanted to bring home to use in my own garden plantings. The gardens were emphasizing innovative uses of natural materials.
My roommate and I took a couple of trolley tours. I always find a roommate for travel when I can to share the cost of the room, which in Washington is a lot even with the group rate we had. The trolley tour is the way to go to really see things. There is one that lets you on and off
At various stops to really explore and will pick you up later. It was sold out for the night tour so we took one with another company, which wasn’t as good. It was led by a "has been" actor who obviously didn’t like children or other people much for that matter. He started off slow and only got really animated when we passed the National Theater where he had starred in a production of Hair. That was the one with the naked people singing rock songs. His body must have been better then. He did, however, become very patriotic when the tour was ending. On the last leg, he all but pulled out a flag and waved it at us. As most people who are loudly patriotic, there was a method in his madness. He had his tip jar out as we got off the bus. We had been allowed to use the back entrance to get off at every other stop, but not this one. We discovered the reason was that he had placed a tip jar by his side. He became very humble at that point. The effusiveness of his thanks was predicated by the size of the tip. His was a night tour of the monuments, which I found less than inspiring because I had visited most of them numerous times in the daylight with less crowding of bodies.
We also visited Hillwood, the estate of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the cereal heiress. It has wonderful gardens around the rambling 1950s era house that was remodeled to house some of the finest rooms of paneling ever transported from the castles of Europe. The gardens are the part I like best. I could sit at the bottom of the 40 foot waterfall forever listening to the trickling water. I feel the same way about the Indian Baths at St Stephens Historical Park here in rural Southwest Alabama. They are a natural water formation in a secluded glade. The Post estate has 30 full time gardeners. St. Stephens has a staff of 4 to do everything. I guess we just learn how to make do with less in poor rural area. We love nature, but just take it for granted because we are blessed with some much of it. In Washington, they don’t have much, so they prize it.
One thing traveling does, is make me look at what we have with new eyes. I love to be on the road, but I am always glad to get home and listen to the birdsongs on the front porch. It is hot here, but I can turn on the fan and enjoy the breeze. What we have is unspoiled nature wailing to be discovered here in rural Southwest Alabama.

Monday, July 7, 2008

THE PARTING OF DEATH

Here in rural Southwest Alabama, we take our relationships seriously. The highest compliment we can pay someone is to take them into our families. We may not always like our families, but we are intensely loyal to them. Once you become part of the clan, you are in for life, literally. One of my friends is dying. She had moved away from Alabama to go to Texas to be near family to have them help with an ailing husband. The husband is still with us after two open heart surgeries, a series of brain operations and a jaw full of tooth implants. He is 12 years older than his wife. She, the caregiver, is the one going first. She not only took care of him, but of another older friend who lived with them until he died.

We always thought Patsy would have a whole other lifetime after she buried the old guys. It didn’t happen that way. One month age she was diagnosed with lung cancer that had already spread to her spine by the time they found it. Her birthday was this weekend. Three of us who had shared her life for many years went to visit her. It was a good thing we did. They day after we left, she had surgery and is now on a respirator.

Our culture is such that we are not really used to people moving in and out of our lives. We are not a transient culture. We have deep roots. People who move in rarely move out. Even those who come in with the industries get stuck. They may be transferred, but they come back to use to retire.

We once had radar based located in Thomasville. It was one of three- Thomasville, Eufaula, and Dauphin Island designed to be the first line of defense against Cuba in the 1960s. Even the young men sent in to serve in the Air Force here seemed to stick. We’ve always said we’d have to wonder where a lot of the local girls would have found husbands if that base hadn’t been here because so many of the boys married local girls. Even those who didn’t came back a few years ago to have a reunion here. We’re the kind of place where you feel like you belong.

A good example of this is the Hatton family. They got ready to retire. They had a motor home. They pulled out a map of the Southwest Alabama area and put a pin in. They knew they liked the area, so they just selected a spot at random and came to explore. They were from one of those states up north with a lot of snow. That was their main criteria for choosing us. They settled in Coffeeville, one of the smaller towns in the area. It has one grocery store, a bank, a drugstore, and a couple of filling stations. They were welcomed and became part of the community.

The way my friend Patsy got to Thomaston, which became her hometown was through Army friends. Pasty’s husband was career army. They had never had roots. They came to visit their army friends and stayed 25 years. In a short time, Patsy became the mayor. She served most of 4 terms. She only left when her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was the town handy man. His condition was a secret. People still needed his services. Patsy was afraid he was going to get hurt or make a mistake on the job. To avoid this, they announced that they were moving to Texas to be near family. It turned out that the diagnosis was wrong. He had spinal fluid leaking, which has caused his brain to shrink. That was the problem instead of Alzheimer’s.

Of course, we have kept in touch. Friends may leave the area, but never leave our hearts. We have visited back and forth, but not often enough. There are four of us friends that call ourselves the YaYas ever since we read Rebecca Wells’ book of the same name. We’ve had many funny times together, a lot of them recalled this weekend. I’m so glad we had the opportunity. Sometimes it does get to be too late.

CREPE MYRTLE TIME

I have always said that if crepe myrtles didn’t bloom so long that we would appreciate them more. We have festivals and trails for short term bloomers like azaleas and dogwoods, but we ignore the equally beautiful crepe myrtles because they last so long. My fairy godmother, Kathryn Tucker Windham says they bloom 100 days once they start. I have just noticed them in the past week or so, so we have over 90 days of splendor left.

Downtown Thomasville has been revitalized with new plantings and streetscapes. An integral part of the scheme is the light lavender pink Near East crepe myrtles. They have a restrained gentility of bloom that enhances rather than shouts. I have always liked that…until this year. The crepe myrtles that catch my eye this year are the happy watermelon reds. There is one up the street at a very unremarkable house. You don’t even notice the house, though, for the sentinel tree. I’m including a picture of it to make your eyes glad.

I have done something wrong with my crepe myrtles. They are gigantic trees, but don’t seem to bloom too well. Perhaps I need to prune, them, but they’re so big, I’d have to hire a tree trimming company to do it. They aren’t that old in plant terms. I can remember distinctly when I planted them. A local girl was getting married. Because her college roommate was the Governor’s daughter, there was a tea for her at the Governor’s Mansion. I bought them that day. I thought they were all going to be one color, white, but I turned out with 5 different plants to have 5 different colors. That was in the days before I became a born again gardener, so they are lucky to have lived at all, let alone bloomed. I have pretty much ignored them low these 25 years, but yesterday I made a point to have a good look at them. They are not shouting glory to the skies like the tree up the street. In fact, they’re hardly even saying “hello”.

I am glad they put the crepe myrtles in downtown, even if I wish now they were a brighter, bawdier version of themselves. Thomasville is not a restrained, genteel Black Belt town, we are noisier than that with the town being built up around the train tracks. I live downtown. The day is punctuated by the whistle blasts of rumbling locomotives. As gas prices rise, I expect to hear more of them.

The train tracks were the interstates of their day. Before that, it was the rivers with their steamboats. Rural Southwest Alabama was in the mainstream during both of those eras. When the interstates were built, we were bypassed. It really turned out to be a good thing because, it is like our small towns remained intact, untouched by urban sprawl. We still have downtowns and trees. When the bank built a new parking lot downtown, they left a particularly nice purple crepe myrtle intact. I’m going to go in a few minutes and ride around town to count the blooming crepe myrtles. It‘s a new game for me. You are never too old to experience wonder. That is how I plan to spend today, enjoying life in rural Southwest Alabama.