Discovering Pass-along Plants

While we were filming the Ghost Trail the other day at Old Cahawba, I found the most interesting book in the Gift Shop. I owned it years ago and somehow lost it. It was like finding an old friend. It is Passalong Plants by Steve Bender and Felder Rushing. Steve Bender works for Southern Living as the garden editor. Felder Rushing is a retired professor and botanist in Mississippi. I have listened to Felder and his partner Dr. Dirt many times as a I have traveled rural Southwest Alabama.

The book is about plants have been grown in southern gardens for generations, but are hard to find in commercial nurseries. There are many old favorites and a few old enemies that want to take the property once they get a toe hold. The less desirable plants are called Aunt Bea’s pickles for the Andy Griffith show where Aunt Bea makes pickles for the county fair that are so bad nobody wants to eat them, but nobody has the heart to tell her. A beginning gardener will take anything. They are gullible and learn the hard way. I loved how they characterized these plants. All the articles are clever and make for great summer front porch reading. You can read one or two in just a few minutes. Some folks would say this would make a good bathroom book, too, for the same reason.

I highly recommend you get this as a reference book. I also recommend you visit Cahawba. Linda Derry, their director tells me that one of their major focuses is going to be native plants of the Alabama prairie. If you do go, be sure to visit their Gift Shop for the book and other great finds. When you go, plan to spend some time. They have great ghost stories there, too.

Alabama Ghost Stories!

For the past couple of weeks I have been working with the Honors Program at the University of Alabama on a Ghost Trail for Perry, Dallas and Wilcox Counties. They are three of the 11 counties on our tourism region. The reason they were chosen is because the program was housed at Judson College and that made these three easily accessible. This was in addition to the fact that Selma has developed a Haunted History Tour and has some Ghost Events leading up to Halloween on an annual basis.

This turned out to be a fun and fulfilling assignment for me, the students and the story tellers, I think it’s fair to say that once you start fooling with ghosts in the Black Belt, they start coming out of the woodwork. AS one resident of Marion told me “Anybody with a 143 year old house has at least one.” It seems like the houses don’t even have to be very old to have one. There are a lot of ghosts roaming around the Black Belt. As Kathryn Tucker Windham told us when we interviewed her, “I have been collecting ghost stories for years and I never heard about but two bad ones.” The ones we learned about were benign, but they get around to a lot of places.

The students working with me on the project were delightful and took their assignment seriously. Running into so many ghosts started them thinking. One asked “Why do you suppose there are so many around here?” we came up with several theories. One is that people just love rural Southwest Alabama so much, they hate to leave it, even in death. We always have known that we southerners love the land, we just didn’t realize we loved it all the way into the hereafter. Another theory we came up with as we talked to people was that southerners are superstitious. It comes from their ancestry and love of storytelling. There are a lot of southerners who have an African ancestry who brought legends of the supernatural with them to this country. A lot of others have Scottish or Irish ancestry where the “Sight” or ability to see things outside the realm of the physical is taken as a matter of course for those of Celtic Heritage. Living side by side with the loquacious storytellers of all the heritages, people learned to embroider the stories to make them more fascinating.

Some people who talked to us have really seen or heard the ghosts they speak of. These folks say they are not ghost stories, but ghost truths. There is little controversy in the general population as to whether ghosts exist. Everybody knows where one is or knows somebody who does. People loved to be scared. As Alfred Hitchcock said, “ If people didn’t like to be scared, why would they say ‘Boo’ to a baby?

I talked to one gentleman who had some reservations about ghosts because of his Christian faith. I explained my theory to him. I think of ghosts as energy imprints, in the same way a photograph has a negative, a departed body can leave an energy imprint around a place or event that they felt strongly about. In my thinking, there is nothing about being a ghost that prevents the spirit from going on the heaven. That is just my opinion. That is why I call myself the Front Porch Philosopher. I think about things. Lately, I’ve thought a lot about ghosts. I see them as a way to get people to come to visit rural Southwest Alabama. If ghosts will get them here, we can show them a lot of other things. Stay tuned to Alabama’s Front Porches for a Ghost Story Trail soon to be seen here.

Neighborhood Animals

Life on the porch is interesting. If traveling around wasn’t so much fun, I’d be like Emily Dickinson and stay here all the time. She wrote poetry in her upstairs bedroom,. I’ll think profound thoughts here in the porch. It’s early morning here in rural Southwest Alabama. The neighbor’s animals have joined me. There is a calico cat that thinks she lives here and a new rat terrier puppy. I think he’s adorable, but not so his mother. She and I have an uneasy peace. She slinks around the neighborhood, barking at all passing by. She barks at me until I scold her severely. There is nothing cuddly about her. She ate my best pair of sandals are couple of years ago when I was naïve enough to leave them on my own porch. I can’t quite forgive her for that. They were and still would be, the most comfortable pair of shoes I ever owned.

I have never had quite the animosity toward an animal that I feel for the shoe chewing dog, but I am fond of her offspring. His name is Buddy. The only cross word we had was yesterday when he tried to chew up my computer cord while I was working on the porch. The porch is my open air office during all the months I can sit here without a parka and hood. Even in the summer, early mornings are ideal for being here.

Last night, two old friends came to dinner and we actually ate on the porch. The animals didn’t understand why they were not welcome during the meal. It’s not like they actually belong to me. I don’t feed them or perform any care giving activities for them. The neighbors take very good care of their animals. They are not hungry, but they were not about to go away last night without a fuss. They didn’t get it that they were not welcome at the party. Of course, mama Molly, the mother rat terrier dog is never welcome at any event on my porch. I try to never entertain any guests who nip, snarl, pr bark at me. Usually, if it is just me the baby dog, Buddy and the cat, whom I have nicknamed Miss Tabb because she is a tabby are welcome. Last night was different. There was major food involved. My friends brought bacon wrapped filets, grilled Vidalia onions, asparagus with lemon sauce and homemade blackberry cobbler from berries picked fresh that day. Nobody would have been welcome to share. I am greedy when it comes to good food.

Those of you who know my hometown know that we have a leash law here. When it was enacted, my brother was among the most vocal against it. In the funny way that life has of coming full circle, he is now the ordinance officer for the city, which included dog catching. There was much controversy over it as there is with any issue when you try to turn a community into an organized city. We just got zoning in the last few years and just went wet last year. For those of you who may not know,” going wet” means allowing liquor to be sold. There was such an outcry over selling alcohol in some sectors that you would have thought the proponents were try to catch their children and boil them. So far, I can’t tell much difference since we went wet from when we were dry. I did however, go to a local store to buy a bottle of wine to serve my guests last night. That was nice that I didn’t have to buy it far away and import it.

My brother never reads my blog. In fact, he may not be aware that I have one, so please don’t tell him about my porch friend animals who are not on leashes. I want them to still visit, only not at dinner parties.