FALL IS IN THE AIR

It is finally happening. The hint of fall is in the air that signals the end of the humidity season. Another signal is the Confederate Rose that is blooming in my front yard. It is some relative of the native hibiscus. It has heart shaped leaves with points that make the leaves look like bats flying away. How’s that for a scientific analysis? The stalks grow 20 feet tall. It froze to the ground last winter, but is standing as tall as ever. It is one of my favorite plants. It looks like the flowers we used to make out of Kleenex and bobby pins. Some of my neighbors have the same plant with flowers that start out white in the morning and turn hot pink by late afternoon. Mine is medium pink and darkens slightly as the day goes on.
I am more of a gardener by default than design, but I accidentally picked the perfect location for it. My house sits in the corner of my lot, right next to the street. My front porch is right there. If I read on the porch at night, I look like that picture by Edward Hopper where the woman in the office is sitting in the picture window on display. I put this plant right in front of the corner where it screens the porch just a bit. It gives the semblance of privacy, if not the real thing.
Speaking of my porch, it is a place well known for its entertainment value. It has become a gathering place for new friends and old. If I am on the porch, it’s just like it used to be when everybody had a front porch, it is a signal to visitors that they are welcome to join me. Weather permitting; it is where I live when I am at home and feeling the least bit sociable. It is where most of my meals are served to guests. Breakfast is always served on the porch unless it’s so cold that my guest’s teeth rattle. All my breakfasts are portable and easy to eat. They’re like hors d’oeuvres for the morning. I have never been a grits and eggs gal. I prefer the three Sees for my breakfast food group: sandwiches, snacks and sweets. Anyway everything tastes better when looking at the flowers that surround us. All summer long there are the old fashioned altheas or Rose of Sharon as they are sometimes called. My favorites are the purple ones right by the front steps. There are also white with maroon throats and then the pure white one, which I am told is unusual. They used to grow everywhere. Now the altheas are pass-along plants. They will grow anywhere, so people quit growing them. Anything that grows too good, we consider invasive and try to kill it off. There are now double hybrid altheas that don’t reproduce so readily, so we treasure them. The same is true of roses, we poison the old varieties that spring up too readily along roadsides and pet the temperamental ones that have to be sprayed and pruned. I hear that is true all over and not just in rural Southwest Alabama where I live. If it’s a native plant, we ignore it or fight it. If it’s exotic and temperamental, we pet it. WE pull goldenrod out of our gardens and the English pet them because they don’t grow wild there.
The Confederate rose is not a native plant in its fanciful doubled variety, but it is easy to grow. It will root easily from a cutting stuck in the ground. My sister in law has three big clumps she started that way. I bought mine from a local five and ten cent store. Maybe the reason it is found mostly at older houses is because the clumps get so big. It is a prima donna in that it requires a big space for the clump to spread and flow. I just have one because it does take up so much space, but that one is making my mornings on the porch glorious.

WHY TURKEYS DON’T LIVE IN TOWN

There is a reason turkeys live in the wild and not in towns. This was brought home to me in a very personal way last Saturday morning. My last blog was about the turkeys roaming my neighborhood. The neighbors and I were enjoying turkey watching as the pair of fine gobblers meandered about the streets and yards around us. I had run in to get my camera to take their picture last week and discovered that my camera battery needed recharging. I had vowed to keep it at the ready. I was armed with it last weekend. I was sitting on the porch with my cup of tea contemplating life when I heard an explosion worthy of a bomb, not once, but twice. The lights in my house went off. It sounded the way it does when a squirrel gets on a utility pole and blows the transformer, only ten times as loud. We have families of squirrels that live happily and unmolested in our neighborhood. They feast on the pecans that would have made us pies. We begrudgingly concede the pecans to them. We wish them gone, but none of us are willing to handle pellet guns to dispose of them. We warily coexist with the squirrels because even though there are plenty of people around who eat squirrels, nobody in our neighborhood wants to fry up the rat-like creatures.
We count on the utility poles to dispose of a few of them for us, and live with the rest.
My neighbor, Kiki, of the ling golden locks came by in her SUV. She had been in the process of drying her hair when the explosion occurred. She was going to her brother’s house down the road to finish the job. She pulled up by the porch so wee could discuss the explosion. WE discussed the nuisance of the squirrels. I continued to drink my tea. I had already called the power company to come and take care of the lights. Kiki came back in just a minute. She said “It’s not a squirrel that got in the transformer. It was one of our two turkeys. The explosion blew him up. It’s not a pretty sight.” She said she was going to get her brother to dispose of the turkey.
In the meantime, the lineman from the power company came. I heard him around back just working away. Since I am not very mechanical, I didn’t go around there. In a little while he came around to the front porch where I was. He said “I need your help.” I found that very surprising because we have already established that I am not mechanical. He said “I need a witness. In all my 26 years of this kind of work, I have never seen a turkey blow a transformer”. That is why turkeys shouldn’t live in town. Their natural instincts are not equipped to deal with obstacles like power poles. It looked like a good roost to him.
I had hoped to get a picture of the pair of strutting turkeys to share with you. I chose not to record the mangled turkey that was the result of the encounter with the utility pole. It was not a pretty sight. None of us have seen his strutting partner since the accident. One of the birds went to turkey heaven and the other back to the woods. Alas, I was not quick enough to get the perfect nature shot of the two cavorting turkeys to share with you. I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity again. AS I said, there is a reason turkeys do not live in town!

TURKEYS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

I was sitting on the front porch the other day and I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were two full grown turkey gobblers strutting across the street to promenade in my neighbor’s front yard. They seemed perfectly at home. They walked around and pecked a lot, then flew up into the trees on the wooded lot across the street.
One of the neighbor boys came out and I asked him if they had any new turkey pets. He told me that a man a few blocks away used to raise turkeys from eggs. He sold his house and the remaining turkeys were part of the deal. The person who bought the house had no wish to raise the turkeys, so he turned them loose. They apparently liked the area and stayed. “Yesterday, they were in your front yard,” my neighbor told me. They seem to belong to all of us. We seem to live in a board sanctuary by default. I guess the turkeys are savvy enough to get out of the street if there are cars coming by. The man who sold the house has been gone for some months.
I wonder if the animal control officers know about them. One of them is my brother and I’m not going to tell him. He probably would leave them alone anyway. Any turkey smart enough to survive in town deserves to live out his normal life span in as much peace as a turkey can find in a small town. What is the lifespan of an unmolested turkey anyway?
I look forward to seeing the turkeys strut around the neighborhood. WE have a live and let live attitude around here for the most part. The only thing that really disturbs us is really loud music or gasoline powered generators or blower packs. WE don’t have too much noise in small towns in rural Southwest Alabama. The only regular noise is the train that comes through town a few times a day. If we even notice it, it is music to our ears. It’s all in what you get used to. There used to be a mill whistle that went off twice a day until a few years ago when the mill closed. We took it as a matter of course. We sort of miss it now that it’s gone. If the train quit coming through we wouldn’t have any excitement at all on a regular basis, unless the turkeys multiply and produce offspring. If we get a lot of turkeys in the neighborhood, the word will get around. We’ll be overrun with birdwatchers or turkey hunters, whichever get here first. There are probably more turkey hunters in the area than birdwatchers, but even they won’t shoot pets. I guess that’s what these turkeys are, the new neighborhood pets.

HURRICANE GUSTAV ARRIVES

I am sitting here on the front porch watching Gustav arrive. This hurricane is not going to be a destroyer. It is making landfall in Louisiana and we are in Southwest Alabama. It is only 115 miles per hour there, not the 150 mph of Katrina. We are on the northeast side of the storm, which is the worst quadrant, but are far enough away that our only damage may be wind, and may not even be that. The wind is beginning to gust a little, but just enough to set the wind chimes tinkling.
They don’t usually ring in the summertime unless there is a pretty good wind because they are sheltered by the trees that surround the porch.
We have not had a really damaging hurricane here in a couple of years. Before that we all remembered 1979 as the Big One. In my lifetime, I don’t remember a hurricane until then except for Camille in 1968 when someone I cared about was at National Guard Camp in Biloxi when it came through. We in rural Southwest Alabama don’t live in fear of hurricanes as our friends on the Gulf Coast proper do.
We have learned to give the warnings proper respect. Until a hurricane makes landfall, we do watch the weather bulletins. Friday, I went to the library and checked out enough books to last over the Labor Day Weekend. Saturday, I did buy batteries and pick up a few groceries. Yesterday, I did charge my lanterns that I might need if the electricity went off. After Hurricane Dennis, when we were without power for a few days, I did buy some lanterns to read by. If I have a good book handy, I can weather any storm. I cooked a pot of Chef Dodd’s New England Cheddar Cheese Soup that I could reheat on the gas grill if I needed to. I made a shrimp, mushroom and Conecuh sausage pizza that I cut in slices and put in the refrigerator.
My friend Nell gave me a new recipe for Almond Skillet Cake which I made just because it was good therapy and would do for breakfast with tea. It is so easy and so good I’m going to share it now. It tastes like something you get at a little European bakery. It could actually be made over a campfire or on a gas grill. I would have sworn it had marzipan in it.

Almond Skillet Cake
1 ½ sticks of butter melted 4 oz sliced almonds
1 ½ c sugar
1 ½ c plain flour
2 eggs
Put a sheet of foil, ungreased, in an iron skillet. This is a 10 or 12 inch skillet, the kind you fry chicken in, not make cornbread. Mix all ingredients together and pour into skillet. This will be a thin cake. Sprinkle almonds on top. Sprinkle a little sugar on top of the almonds. Start in a cold oven. Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes. Let cool in pan. Cut in small pie shaped wedges.
This will be good if you have anybody come by for a Hurricane Party. This could happen. After all, this is rural Southwest Alabama. We will celebrate anything. Not getting hit directly by a hurricane is definitely something to celebrate!