Like A Good Neighbor

Whisper The Wonder Horse

One of the best things about living on a farm in the South is having such wonderful neighbors. I actually was thinking about the animal form when I wrote that, but I do have to say that I personally have been blessed with just about the best human neighbors anyone could ever ask for. Our families have owned the same farms for many decades and I'm sure that a hundred years from now these places will still be known as the "Burgess Place" and the "Bevill Farm." Generations of our blood, sweat and tears are in the soil and that does tend to leave a mark on a place. I don't think there's ever been a crisis in our lives that we didn't grieve together over. Or happy times that we didn't rejoice over together. I've had human neighbors over the years that I didn't "get along with" very well, and I can tell you that good fences don't necessarily make good neighbors, it's good, mostly-sane people that make good neighbors!

And not just people. When I'm the very saddest, I don't tend to turn to a human for comfort, I turn to my animals. My horse, Whisper, knows so many of my secrets that no human will ever know. Buford the Bluetick has licked an ocean of tears off my face. Mocha the humble looking rescue goat has made me laugh out loud with her droll "Aunt Bea" personality when I didn't think my face could still form a smile. The antics of baby goats frolicking about and the deep old-soul eyes on the donkeys, Junebug or Firefly always reminds me that life is good. Really really good.

Every "boy" needs his own goat.
This is Buford's "Cricket."

Through thick and thin, when you live on a farm (whether you're in the North, South, East or West I'd imagine, but I have no experience to draw from for anything other than Southern) you're never at a loss for companionship. Sometimes that companionship becomes a little more than is comfortable. Like when a mama goat decides she has been blessed with the spawns of Satan and refuses to have anything to do with her adorable new babies and you end up with the two of them in a big cardboard box in front of the heater in the living room. And your alarm goes off every four hours all during the night so you can tend to their needs. After about a week or so of that and you're swearing off sex forever even though your ship has sailed away from being fertile. Just the fear of having to go through that for years instead of a month is enough to put the fear of God (and men) into any woman!


I once placed a rescued potbellied pig with another family because he had gotten too attached to munching cow hooves.  Not the kind you buy for your dogs at the pet store, but the kind still attached to the cows. Every cow on the farm had little bloody patches above their hooves where Wilbur followed them around waiting for them to stop and graze so he could grab a bite to eat. Wilbur was a character not only because of his addiction to lunch-on-the-hoof but because of his dedication to proving he was a human. He tried to walk on his hind legs (epic fail, but he tried valiantly). He sat down while he ate (if he'd had a pinkie he'd have held it out daintily, I'm sure). He had no interest at all in the other animals except as possible treats. His soul would have been so happy inside a little Min Pin puppy that could have been cuddled forever on his owner's lap. Instead, his soul was encased in a 200-pound black and white form so ungainly that even his own mother probably would have had to cross her piggie toes to say was handsome. He had apparently always been somewhat of a character, as he was placed into rescue because of his penchance for letting himself out of his pen to sit by the side of a fairly busy highway waiting for a car to come by so he could chase it. When Wilbur started looking elsewhere for his treats after one too many of our cows had shaken her horns at him, we decided he had to go. Our cows had been very patient, but we certainly couldn't ask our neighbor's cows to be so kind. So, I put an ad in the Swapper and a few days later an older retired couple came and loaded up Wilbur to take him to their farm an hour away. I warned them about Wilbur's distinct "quirks" and they assured me that none of that would matter. They had no cows. They loved the fact that he was gentle and enjoyed being "loved on." He would have a home for life. The next morning our phone rang. The old gentleman was quite forceful with his demands that he was "bringing that damned pig back." I told him that we had taken down the fence where Wilbur had to stay to keep him out of the cow pasture and we simply couldn't, but I promised to help him find another home for the pesky piglet.


Firefly and Junebug (note Junebug's belly,
I'm thinkin' a Lovebug is on its way!)
with Whisper and Belle Starr


 When I asked what had gone wrong so quickly I had to cover the phone to keep him from hearing me laughing at his story. Seems that they hadn't believed me when I said that Wilbur really wanted to be a lap-pig and that he was not only smart but devious. They had had an epiphany when they were awakened at 4:00 that morning by 200 pounds of pig jumping into bed with them...after not only figuring out how to open the gate on his pen, but also the screen door of their house. He had made his way through the kitchen, down the hall, up the stairs and nudged open their bedroom door, where he, overjoyed to have been reunited with his new humans, hurled himself into the middle of their bed. Like I said, the companionship of our animal neighbors is sometimes a little more than you want. Especially so unexpectedly. The old man kept saying "huh?" "what did you say?" and he finally said "I'm sorry I can't hear you well. My wife screamed so much my ears are still ringing." I'll bet she did!  (Note: Wilbur lived out his life in a petting zoo where his owners chose to capitalize on his antics and find them amusing instead of pesky. Although they did have to rescue the llama after Wilbur decided that llama hoofs were much tastier even than cow.)



Miss Mocha

We don't always get to choose our neighbors. At the moment we're living "close to nature" with a pair of wrens that came in through our open office door and built a nest on the shelf over the door in record time. (I imagine that in the Bird Olympics wrens must be a shoo-in for the gold in "Nest Building Speed" events.) For the next three weeks, everything we do in the office will be accompanied by the flutter of wings and eventually the chittering of baby wrens. Not an entirely bad prospect...except for my fear that they're going to misjudge a flight or cut a turn too close and end up being decapitated by the ceiling fan. Being here when the "wren hits the fan" is not something to which I am looking forward!

Clark and I have been looking at property recently. Still undecided about how and where to spend our "golden years" we've taken advantage of "the interwebs" to see what's available. When it started out we were looking for "just a couple of acres" that we could take care of easily. Admittedly now that we're down to 17 instead of 40 acres, there's less to contend with, but still...it's a lot of upkeep expense and responsibility. But then we both agreed that there was no way in the world that we could ever let Whisper the Wonder Horse go. So, maybe 5 acres? And, poor Miss Mocha has been through so much we couldn't send her out into the world not knowing her fate. 10 acres? And, we've just gotten a good start on the Mini Silky Fainter Goat bloodline, so hate to just walk away from it. When we found ourselves looking at homes with more property than we have now we decided that maybe it wasn't time to let go just yet. Besides, who knows what kind of neighbors we'd have at the new place?
I wonder if we can find a retirement home someday that takes horses?

OCD or Superstitious

I always thought I had a touch of OCD because of some of the things that I find I absolutely cannot do or must do or mustn't. Then one day I absentmindedly blurted out one of my 'phobias' and as it turned out everybody in the room was either as warped as I am, or we're all normal (my bet would be on the warped thing). Or maybe we were just brought up not noticing our parents and grandparents superstitions and we picked them up without realizing? I know my paternal grandmother didn't allow of that kind of foolishness around her. I can actually remember her telling me once that she was glad she wasn't superstitious, and then she followed that by rapping on her rocking chair arm and saying "knock on wood."

These are the little 'rites' and 'lefts' that I notice the most about myself. What kinds of things do you do? Do you call it 'superstitions?' Or OCD? Or just.... well, warped?

• If I get into bed on one side, it doesn't matter if somebody puts a cluster of poisonous snakes and booby traps on the floor on that side, if I'm ever going to get off that mattress, I'll just have to wade through and hope for the best. I have to get back out from the side I got in on. (Maybe a childhood thing when I didn't understand what someone meant by "getting up on the wrong side of the bed?")
• If someone sneezes, no matter where we are or how quiet I'm supposed to be I cannot keep from saying Gezhundeit out loud (or my word play replacement, Guess Who Died).
• If a black cat crosses the road in front of my car, I cannot sit heavy enough on my hands to keep one of them from sneaking out and making the sign of a cross on my windshield.
• I look like a drunken duck when walking on cobblestones because even though my mom's been dead for four years and probably wouldn't complain at all if her back was broken, I still get cold chills if I step on a crack.
• If I see a car with only one headlight working at night, my hands so the 'snap pop' thing from childhood (snap your fingers then hit palm on fist)
• If I spill any salt, I toss a bit of the spilt portion over my left shoulder (I didn't even realize I did this until a friend asked me why I had).
• I won't let anyone kill a cricket in my house. A friend swatted one once and I was almost physically sick.
• If I use someone's pocket knife and we both forget whether it was open or not when it was handed to me, I have to just lay it down and walk away when I'm through with it. I don't think I could force myself to close it, or hand it back open without knowing.
• When someone dies, I can't help noticing to see who the other two will be (death always comes in threes, as any good Southern girl knows!)
• I love opals but even as a little kid I felt funny wearing them. My grandmother gave me a lovely opal pendant for my birthday one year and I don't think I ever wore it after I got home and quickly took it off. It was beautiful and I still own it, I just don't like wearing it.
• I can't stand to see a rocking chair rocking while empty. It makes cold chills run up my spine. I've snapped at many a young kid who leaned on an empty rocker and made it rock.
• I can't imagine seeing a shooting star and NOT making a wish.
• I've opened umbrellas indoors before but I always think about it beforehand and I admit, worry a tad.

I don't think of myself as superstitious, but once I started making a list I started feeling very witchy. I think I'll go rub some of my crystals and start watching for the first star so I can make a wish.

I love this artwork by Diane Evans (http://dianaevans.blogspot.com), note the shoes on the table (brings bad luck for the day, at least they're not upside down which is bad luck in itself), the acorn on the floor (I'm sure she dropped it there on the way to put it in the windowsill to ward off lightning), the spilled salt, Friday the 13th on the calender, open umbrella and one has to hope she doesn't swallow a watermelon seed, because we all know they can take root inside your belly! (Hope the cat doesn't see the ladybug and harm it.)

It's a Small World

It never ceases to amaze me how much smaller the world has gotten since the first time I plugged my telephone cable into the back of my computer. After a few screeches, moans and groans of something called a "modem" and suddenly I was connected to parts of the world I never knew existed.

I don't think I will ever forget the feeling of amazement I had the very first time I opened up my email folder and there were twenty-something messages awaiting me. I found myself looking over my shoulder, feeling pretty creepy that I hadn't even given anyone my email address yet and already I was getting mail. Who knew?

As I opened those emails one-by-one, I puzzled over why someone would be asking if I wanted my penis to be enlarged. And who would think I needed help with credit management? And why would I want to buy vitamins and Viagra from Mexico? Sadly, I remember the way I handled these early emails. I actually hit "reply" to tell these misguided souls that I was very sorry but they had the wrong address.

Is it just a Southern thing to be polite? Did folks from other parts of the world have the same experience and immediately just delete and go on? Obviously, if they did, they had a much smoother time in their next few weeks as I did. Once the spammers knew they had a live address, it was forwarded to a thousand other companies all wanting to sell me vaginal cream, dog food, a college degree, miracle hair restorers, commemorative coins and of course, always the option of having a larger penis or breasts.

Eventually I realized the error of my ways, learned to use a spam filter and learned to just delete unwanted emails. Today I happily press the "report spam" button on my gmail and am happy to announce that except for the times that I've stupidly given my correct email address when filling out something on Facebook, I rarely get spam. Sometimes when I sign up for soemthing that I know I never want to hear from again, I use a seldom-checked Yahoo account. And, it is living proof that spammers still live and breed because I currently have over 1000 emails in that inbox. Not a single one of them legitimate "to Bobbye" emails.

Although spam is a nasty fact of internet life, there are a thousand wonderful things to make up for it. Well, there are viruses too, and nothing makes up for that but still, I don't see how I could manage if suddenly I was told I could never again go online.

I can't remember the last time I opened a phone book. I just type the person or company into Bing or Google and voila. I don't bother checking the weather on the radio or television, I just check it online.  I rarely place orders by phone, but am a confirmed ebay-aholic and am dangerously close to becoming an Amazon-aholic. We choose what we're going to be watching on TV by going to Netflix and picking out movies and shows. I keep up with family and friends on Facebook. I try to keep abreast of the publishing world via Twitter and about fifteen blogs that I try to keep current on reading. I have a half dozen blogs of my own where I discuss writing, horses, herbs, being Southern, rant about an indignity suffered or ponder the ponderable.

I also use the internet to find seeds and plants for our greenhouse. The world is a wonderful place for a gardener. And the Internet makes it even more wonderful. I am at the moment corresponding with a nice male gardener from Pakistan. He and I are, in his words, "knee replacement brother and sister" and we're getting our individual seed lists prepared so we can exchange seeds. Next year Cedarbrook will hopefully have plants available to our clients that are native to the Southern part of Pakistan; ready to grow in gardens in the Southern USA.

I have corresponded with many people from around the world in the 8 years since I first made my tentative steps into the unknown world of "online." I have become good friends with people of both sexes from Iran, Afghanistan, Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, Wales, Scotland, Japan and Egypt. I have been lucky enough to get to meet in person a few of those folks and liked them as well in person as I did their online persona (not everyone is the same, I found out to my great chagrin when I dabbled with internet dating and discovered that many people's online persona were very far from who they are in real life, or IRL as it's known to us dedicated 'netters).

I continue to fail to understand how the hatred and distrust of others continues to grow so rampantly in the US just because someone is from a culture other than your own. I find it fascinating to meet people who are polar opposites of myself in religion, culture, sex, race, creed, and politics. I don't have to always agree with someone to be friends. Maybe I take being Southern to an extreme? Maybe there's such a thing as being too hospitable to the unknown? Maybe it's not a good thing to keep my Internet door open and the latchstring out to anyone who wants to extend an international hand of friendship?

Nah, I think Disney was right (was Walt perhaps a closet Southerner?). It's a world of laughter, a world of tears, it's a world of hope and a world of fears. There's so much that we share, that it's time we're aware it's a small world after all!

When Autumn Leaves Start to Fall

I hate to see the leaves start falling from the trees because it's a precursor of things to come. My least favorite time of year. (Do they call it "Fall" because that's what the leaves do?) I don't dread the falling temperatures and frosty morns. In fact I wouldn't mind the natural change of the season at all... if it didn't mean knowing that for the next few months my life will be altered by the start of the Season-Of-Not-Fitting-In..

First comes dove season. Mornings will be a pleasant time of being jolted out of bed by the cracks of rifles and booms of shotguns as hunters blast entire dove covies out of the sky. Doves are one of my favorite wild birds. I love their gentle coos and I think their understated grey outfits are actually much more beautiful than some of their flashier cousins. I happen to prefer them in their natural habitat rather than floating in gravy though. (And that's saying a lot coming from me. I'll eat almost anything if you put white gravy on it!) Soon after bird season comes deer season. And every other Southern man you see will be outfitted in camoflage. I accidentally bumped into a guy at Walmart who had on a camoflage jumpsuit, camo boots, camo cap and camo gloves. He didn't see the humor in it when I said "Oops, sorry, didn't see you."

Has anyone figured out why these guys (and women too, certainly hunting isn't just for good old boys any more!) spend a small fortune outfitting themselves, their gear and their four-wheelers with materials designed to hide them...and then top things off with bright orange vests and caps. I know the orange is to keep other hunters from seeing them, but how stupid are birds and deer anyway? "Run Ralph! It's a trap! Aaargh. I'm shot. I saw a hat and vest but it looked like they were just walking around on a bush."

I've never been much of one for hunting. Or, as it is referred to here in the south "a-huntin'." I love guns and I love shooting them, but I'd rather hear a metal target ping than to hear an animal's death rattles.  I went deer hunting once when I was seventeen years old to impress a guy I was dating. After I'd thought about what actually might happen if we saw a deer, I spent the entire morning "accidentally" snapping twigs and rustling leaves. He didn't ask me out again, but at least I didn't have to watch Bambi bleeding out before he was gutted and then left to rot after the choice pieces of meat and bragger's pictures were taken. If you eat what you kill, then you have my blessing. If you hunt simply to prove that you're a mighty hunter, at the top of the food chain, but you leave most of whatever animal you killed behind when you leave, then I think it's only fair that we arm the animals and let it at least be a fair fight. Be warned that if they shoot you first, they have the right to cut off your head and hang it on a tree in their part of the woods.

"Fair" doesn't seem to be in a lot of hunters' vocabulary. I know there are good, honest, trustworthy conservation-savvy hunters out there who hunt by the rules, respect what they hunt and eat what they kill. Again, you have my blessing. But, I've met a whole passel of the other kind of hunter. The ones who use every dirty trick in the book to bag their quarry. And, if it's true what they say, that you should never hunt anything that's smarter than you, those boys need to be looking for an organized worm hunt somewhere. And they need to be armed with water pistols and cap guns instead of high powered rifles with all sorts of fancy scopes and equipment that tilts the balance of chance in their favor.

In the middle of all of this comes the time of "Football Frenzy." Now, football I actually used to enjoy. When I was a cheerleader in junior high and in the marching rifle corps in high school, I couldn't wait for the first chill in the air which meant that football season was upon us. I can still smell the fresh night air exquisitely seasoned with the smells coming from the snack bar of hamburgers and hotdogs cooking, and can almost taste the sickly sweet crunch of the first candied apples of the season. I can remember watching a high school game, snuggled under a blanket with a guy that I'd had a huge crush on for a long time and thinking that it just didn't get any better than that (I was wrong, it got a lot better). I didn't care what team was playing, I just enjoyed the way football games "felt." And, then, it all went south.

South to Tuscaloosa and Auburn. And I reached an age where friendships suddenly were won or lost according to what college team you rooted for. Let me tell you, football in Alabama isn't a sport. It's a freakin' religion. And college football fanatics are every bit as zealous as any Bible thumping reverend trying to save the souls of the lost. If you admit that you don't care which team wins, and you aren't willing to put the local radio station on speed dial hoping you can win tickets to the Iron Bowl (that's the game where the Tigers and the Tide battle to the death) then you might as well just pull down your panties and kiss your ass goodbye as far as having a social life goes, because you have done the social suicide equal of standing nekkid on the courthouse steps and admitting that you sacrifice chickens to your Lord Satan every Friday night. (By the way, how come they both get to have two mascots? Why aren't they the Auburn Eagles? Or the Alabama Elephants? C'mon. One mascot to the team, please.)

I have been to one Iron Bowl. It was horrid. I went with the family of a guy that I liked a lot. We had great seats, and it should have been fun. But, the family was made up of rabid Auburn fans. And we had a group of rabid Alabama fans sitting in our section. And believe me, never the twain should meet!  I was a nervous wreck during the entire game, thinking somebody was gonna pull out a switchblade and it was going to be game over. Permanently. Besides the drama of team "spirit" (or spit, as one overzealous but under-edited fan had written on their hand-printed poster) I just didn't enjoy being in a stadium that large. I'm not big on crowds, and honey, that one is a crowd and a half. All the boos and hisses make it swell to bigger than life status in a hurry! Maybe I would probably enjoy football again if I lived somewhere else?

Car racing is another story, now. I used to think I could never imagine anything more boring than watching cars go around and around in a circle for two or three hours. And then I dated a rabid NASCAR fan who introduced me to the behind-the-scenes part of racing and I found myself enjoying a few races a year.

 NASCAR is pretty big in the South. After all the sport was born here in the south as moonshine runners started racing their cars against each other on the backroads of the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee seeing who could outrun the cops and get home safely with their bootlegged whiskey. I may not know football, but I do know a little bit about cars, racing and drivers. I adore Mark Martin, think Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson are just the cutest things, and I always liked Rusty Wallace. My favorite for a long time was Elliot Sadler...I'm a huge M&Ms fan, and he used to drive the 38 M&Ms car.

Do you think understanding car races will somewhat make up for the fact that I don't care much for football and I hate hunting? I'd sure hate to lose my ranking as a fine Southern woman on a technicality.

I'll Take "Embarrassment" for Two Hundred

I just remembered, the hard way, Lesson # 27 in the Southern Ladies Understanding of Truths (aka SLUT).

Lesson # 27: If you go to Jack's (the only hamburger joint in town) for lunch on Sunday, either be extremely well-dressed, go through the drive-in line, or be prepared to give gossip-fodder to a minimum of thirty-seven people you went to school/church/Girl Scouts/cheerleader camp with and would rather be caught drowning kittens than to ever see them again.

Unfortunately, I remembered this Lesson as I was walking into Jacks at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, wearing old ratty shorts and a stained scrub top, with unshaven legs, no underwear, no makeup, missing teeth (I broke two teeth and have to wait until my dental insurance kicks in on October 1 before I can have them repaired...believe me, what lookth cute on a thix year old mitthes the mark on a 52 year old), and hair that looked like a monkey with a toothbrush fixed it for me this morning. (If you've ever had a scrunched-curly perm that was a few days post-washing you'll know what I mean.)

I had thought we were going through the drive through, or I'd have at least brushed my hair and put on long pants (or shaved my legs) and dashed on a little eyeliner so my face didn't look like a blank wig-form. I was assured by my loved ones (note the use of the word 'loved', past tense) that I "look fine" and besides "we won't see anybody we know anyway." Note that both reassurances came from men who probably don't know that SLUT exists and have no idea about the many codes by which we Southern women must abide.

The Lesson was brought home quick and hard when the first person I saw after sitting down and stuffing my face full of fried chicken (the diet starts tomorrow, I promise) was an old flame from high school. He was a quarterback for our rival team, I was a lowly rifle-bearer (not quite the activist role it sounds) and I'm sure he never knew how quickly he made my heart beat. Or that it hurt my soul when he started dating one of my friends and I had to double-date with them many times, sadly watching him happily being with someone else.

He of course looks better than he did in high school. I look better than I did thirty minutes after my knee-replacement surgery (in a hospital gown, pale, bloody and tossing my cookies).

I'd have rather set my hair on fire and put it out with a hammer than to have him see me when I wasn't "prepared.". When he went to the rest room, I dashed out of the building and headed for the car to wait for my "loved ones" to finish eating. I turned on the radio to drown out the voices of the creators of SLUT reminding me that I KNEW BETTER!

Question: How old do I have to get before it no longer matters?

Answer: Refer to SLUT Lesson #127 "Until the casket closes, it always matters how you look in public."

I See Dead People (And Casseroles)

My dad has been gone two weeks, and I still catch myself dialing his number to see if he wants to go with me to town, or if he needs anything. In his honor, today's blog will be a chapter from the memoirs that I hope to have finished by the end of the year..............


One of the most important things you learn when you're growing up Southern is that death happens. Nobody down here hides death from a child although they might use euphamisms like "she has gone to be with the angels," "she's gone to be with Jesus" or a thousand more. No matter what they call it, there is no doubt in any Southern child's mind that death is final.

Until fairly recently, it was a custom in the South to "sit up" (or set up, as it was said) with the dead. I assume that harks back to the days when dead people miraculously came back to life having been mistakenly labeled as dead (thus the reason for putting a string around the finger of the deceased that was attached to a bell on the surface, just in case; if someone used it and was dug up in time it was said that they were 'saved by the bell') Or perhaps it was to keep wild animals at bay that might have wanted to feast on a tasty unembalmed corpse in the days when homes were less inpenetrable than now. Perhaps it is simply the signature gesture of respect from Southern people? For whatever reason, neighbors and family took shifts throughout the days and night between death and burial sitting beside the open casket (nobody much wanted the night shift, when the shadows got long and the air got filled with spooky sounds, and every sense is heightened by the knowledge that you are in the room with Death).

When you're five or six years old and you walk into someone's house (it is also only fairly recently that funeral homes took the place of someone laying in state in their own home) and instead of a couch there's a big metal box with a creepy looking person asleep in it, and everyone is crying and speaking in hushed tones -- you become very aware that "death" is a bad thing. No horror story ever written can come close to the feeling you get the very first time you're held up to look into a casket at a dead person. I was probably two or three and it was my great-grandmother. I reached out and touched her hand and remember not how it felt, but how it made me feel: filled with sadness and emptiness.

Death always has a humorous as well as a macabre side though. One of Ray Stevens funniest songs was about the experiece of sitting up with a dead relative and in the middle of a thunderstorm rigor mortis took over and stiffened the man's body into a sitting position. The chorus of the song says "I ain't settin' up with the dead no more, since the dead started settin' up too!" I believe that it is a true honor to have people remember you with laughter, and the religions that have happy parties instead of gloom and doom vigils have the right idea.

The whole ordeal of "funeral planning" is one that is taken to great extreme by Southerners, with great pageantry and fanfare. Very few are sent off on their one-way trip to see Jesus without a royal goodbye. While people from other areas have their memorial services and wakes, etc., they have nothing that comes close to a good old timey Southern funeral. And, there is no machine that man will ever create that can get a message to so many so quickly as telling one Southern woman that a "person of importance" has passed to his great reward and a funeral must be planned quickly. "Importance" of course being a subjective term in this instance...it could mean someone who was very visible in the church, someone who owned a local business, someone who was related to someone who was "important" or perhaps they were important simply for dying. Especially if they were "the first."

In case you have never heard about this phenomenon in nature, death always comes in threes. Ask any Southerner worth his salt. If you died after a long dry spell with no funerals, immediately your neighbors started looking at each other suspiciously watching for signs of who would be next. When the next person breathed their last, everyone nodded solemnly and said "Yep, it always comes in threes. I just wonder who'll be the third." It didn't matter if it was months before the hearse pulled into our cemetery again, when it did it would be met with those same solemn nods as the fates proved once again that they could count. If you've heard the Kevin Bacon rule (everyone is connected to Kevin Bacon if you can count back far enough) you will understand the reasoning behind the death of anyone from anywhere, counting towards our personal “rule of three.”

I can remember once when we had had two deaths in our valley and then there was a long breath-holding wait for the third axe to fall. Finally, one day my mother was talking to her mother in Ohio who had to leave the conversation early to go to a funeral. My mother proudly called everyone she knew to announce that she had just learned who the third one was. One of her parent’s parishioners had just been killed in a car accident. A moment of silence was given this fallen Yankee soul, and then life got back to normal. I’m not sure what would have happened if a massive weather anomaly or some other freak of nature had ever wreaked havoc on our community and there was a whole roomful of corpses. Toes, fingers, beans and pebbles would have likely been smoking as everyone tried to figure out whether the end count could be divided by three. And if not, who would be next.

As soon as the word was spread (rapidly) that the Grim Reaper had visited our valley, a few cursory tears were shed and then the women stoicly went to work. Kettles whistled, pots steamed and skillets sizzled as every woman worked her magic to create her contributions to the bereaved family’s table. It became almost a matter of pride to be the first to walk up the porch steps and open the door with its white beribboned wreath and announce to the family that “I knew y’all wouldn’t feel like cooking so I’ve brought you a little something.” Every woman found her niche and it was considered a cardinal sin if you brought the same dish that you knew someone else was bringing. My mother's tried and true was a congealed salad with lime jello, pineapple, cottage cheese and marshmallows. It was wonderful. I have the recipe but I have never been able to make it taste like hers. Most people brought casseroles, wonderful inventions that I feel sure have their roots in a need for a quick, cheap covered dish meal to take to a bereaved family.

Tupperware parties were really big about this time, mostly because Tupperware bowls gave a nice neat appearance to the food that was delivered to the families of the deceased. No more plastic wrap that didn't stick or tin foil that was easily torn. I’m sure stock rose in masking tape too, for every piece of Tupperware, china and pottery that most women owned had a piece of masking tape across the bottom with their name carefully written on it. Just as it was a matter of pride to be the first to take a dish to the newly bereaved, it was equally important for the bereaved to quickly return the dishes, freshly washed. More than once, after the glow had worn off of the festivities that surround a Southern death the gossip lines were filled with “it’s been two weeks, bless her heart, and she hasn’t gotten back my jello bowl yet. And if someone else dies, I’m gonna be needing that. I hate to call her and bother her, bless her heart, but I need my bowl!” Heaven forbid that grief keep a woman parted from her $4 piece of pink plastic with matching burping lid.

Times were hard in those days and sometimes it was tough to keep enough food in the freezer and on the table to feed your own family. Cooking for an additional family added to the stress of these women’s already-stretched budget, but somehow they pulled it off. Deviled eggs, macaroni salad, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, pork chops, biscuits, sliced tomatoes, dill pickles, fried okra, green beans, cole slaw, boiled cabbage, potato salad, pintos and ham…my mouth waters just thinking about it. It’s not worth losing a family member for, but, if you’ve got to let go of someone you love there’s no question that there's no better place to do it than in the South!

The funerals themselves are carried out with a grandeur reserved in most parts of the world for royalty. Rooms of floral arrangements give funeral parlors a sickly sweet odor found nowhere else. People pore over name cards seeing who sent an arrangement, who just sent a card and subtly checking to see who spent the most money on their spray. Wars have been fought with less tactical planning than that of a group of Southern women planning the dinner before the funeral, the funeral program and then a dinner afterwards.

As many good intentions as most people had when it came to funerals, I have been to some that sickened me with their overbearing preachers (hard to imagine some of these men as "ministers" as they did little 'ministering" and a whole lot of hellfire and damnation preaching!) who took advantage of the occasion to remind everyone that the person in that casket didn't have a chance to make their peace, but you do. "There but for the Grace of God go you." And you. And you. One funeral in particular was the worst I have ever attended. I tend to get flashes of pictures when I'm experiencing certain emotions, and I was sitting far at the back of the room but still got the image of an old wringer washing machine. And certainly, that pious man behind the pulpit was wringing as much emotion from that poor family as he could. His voice raised and lowered like only a man who loved to hear himself talk can manage. No sleazy televangelist every sweated and cried and gave such an emotional sermon. As far as I recall (and this was many years ago), no word of peace, joy, life-everlasting or discussion of what this person had achieved in their life was mentioned. Just the threat that "someday this will be you. Then what?" This person's young sons sobbed so hard they were near fainting and still the sanctimonious parson found the energy to point at them and remind them that their daddy had gone for good and it was up to them to take care of their mother and sisters and their daddy would love to be sitting right there beside them, his rough hand holding theirs, but he had been called on for greater duty..... Yeah. Very few Southern kids grew up with any idea other than that Death was final.

I have made my family members promise there will be no "viewing" when I die (the archaic custom where friends and family, for the days preceding the funeral, meet each evening at the funeral home where they sit and reminisce and gossip and stand and look at the dead body saying ridiculous things like "He looks like he's just going to sit up and talk to us, don't he?" I was just barely out of grade school when I scandalized my family by replying loudly "No, he doesn't. He looks dead.") A lot of tombstones carry the phrase "He's not dead, he's only sleeping." I hate that. It really freaked me out when I was a kid, and it makes my skin crawl now. If he is just sleeping, why the hell is he six feet under the ground and sealed in a concrete vault?

I am quite certain that my friends, neighbors and family members fretted when I didn't plan a big end-all funeral when my mother died. For one thing, her mind had died years ago, it just took a while for her body to decide to follow. It was not a time for tears, it was a time for rejoicing that she was now at peace and her tormented soul could rest. For another, not only had I promised my mother (when she still had some lucid thoughts) exactly what kind of funeral I would plan, but I didn't have the energy at the time to plan a big circus of a funeral to appease anyone else. I was in the middle of a fight with breast cancer. I bravely wore my wig and dark sunglasses to a graveside service that I wrote specifically for her. Afterwards the funeral director called me at home and asked me where I had found the service, he wanted to buy the book. He was very surprised when I told him that I had written it and he suggested I should look into a career of writing eulogies, memorial services, etc. I can't imagine anything I would hate more. When my father died he had a similar funeral filled with laughing memories and even a couple of jokes.. We had discussed it at length, and I followed his last wishes. And it is much the service that I will request for myself...if I ever die (my father's old joke).

Yep. I don't like big fancy funerals and find them a waste of time and emotion and money. Maybe that should be our secret? I don't want to get tossed out of the Southerner's Society. Perhaps I shouldn't mention that I drink my tea unsweetened too. Shhhh.

Well, Butter My Butt....

I posted on my Facebook wall about how thrilled I was with our lowering temperatures that were rescuing us from record high temperatures. (We've all been hotter'n two dollar pistols for about two months now.) Without thinking about it, I said that "temperatures are dropping faster than panties on prom night." Within minutes friends from all over the country started replying, noting the quote more than our cool temps.

That phrase is one that popped up in one of the novels I'm writing. I think it's original, but I guess it's possible I heard it somewhere. My mind has always collected interesting turns of phrases and I drop them into conversation without giving a lot of thought to where they came from.

Besides our humor, the other thing for which Southerners are well known is our colorful language. Folks who ain't from around here sometimes have as hard a time deciphering our conversations as they would if they'd been air-dropped into Swahili without a guide book. I can remember pointing out for my cousin the whereabouts of a croquet ball that had veered off course and into some bushes. For some reason, he had a problem with following the description of "right over yonder." Try explaining to someone where and what "yonder" is. He also had a problem when we went shopping and I didn't jump on a bargain he found because I said I "nah, need that like a sow needs a sewing machine." He didn't know that a sow was a mama hog thus didn't know how totally useless a sewing machine would be for one.My grandma used to make further notice that sows don't need side-pockets either when someone tried to sell her something she didn't want.

I've told my Californian nieces that we couldn't go fishing that day because it was gonna come up a cloud and we'd get wetter'n heck because it was gonna be a toad strangler. And they didn't know what I meant. I blame the education system!

My grandaddy always said that if you give the devil a ride he's gonna wanna drive. Is there anybody who can't figure out that that's the same thing as saying "don't give into temptation or it will rule your life." My mama (who was born a Yankee, but she moved South early enough that she got at least some good education) used to say that something was "too much sugar for a nickel" if something was too much trouble to be worth doing, or if someone was being suspiciously nice.

Biscuits figure into a lot of southern sayings. Telling someone to "butter my butt and call me a biscuit" means the same thing as saying "well now, that surprises me." "That just takes my biscuit," means the same thing (think "takes the cake"). And "You're the butter on my biscuit" is a southerner's way of telling someone that wouldn't want to live without them.

A lot of wonderful Southern sayings are now being referred to as "redneck." Barbara Mandrell sang a song about "Being Southern when Southern wasn't cool." I know how she felt. I was apparently redneck long before Jeff Foxworthy made us famous. Before that, we were just PWTs. (Poor White Trash)

My family coined the best PWT phrase of all time after a failed attempt at getting one of my cousin's cars pulled back home after it quit on him on the way to town and he didn't have a rope or chain. Take it from me, "You can't pull a car with duct tape and pantyhose."