The Sun Returns Just in Time

In my last post I complained about the constant overcast we’ve been experiencing for the last month. Wonder of wonders, the clouds parted, and the sun made an appearance on Christmas Day. The gloom receded, the Grinch left for parts unknown, and joy returned to our small corner of the world. Though not as good as having freshly fallen snow on Christmas Day, the clear sky was a welcome respite from the fungus-friendly weather we’ve been having. Unfortunately, the clouds reappeared the day after Christmas, followed by two days of rain. I wonder if this is what it’s like to live in Newfoundland or parts of Scotland in the winter.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of tradition lately. That’s probably due to the Christmas holidays and the Christmas traditions of my family. My two boys are here for the holidays, and I’m acutely aware that the time is not too far off when I will not be able to count on having both of them here for Christmas. As a result, I suppose, our Christmas rituals may have been closer to my heart this year.

Our holiday traditions start the day before Christmas. We do not put up and decorate the Christmas tree until the afternoon of Christmas Eve. The men are responsible for putting the tree in the stand, bringing it in the house and placing it in its appointed corner. There are the usual disagreements over which branches to trim and which side of the tree looks the best. By then, Meredith has gotten down the boxes of lights and ornaments and broken out the eggnog which the men immediately lace heavily with bourbon and start consuming. Then the real work starts―hanging the lights, garland, ornaments and tinsel.

Once the strands of lights are wrapped around the tree, there is the ritual of standing back and squinting at the tree to make sure the solid-colored and flashing bulbs are properly distributed on the tree. Nonfunctioning bulbs are replaced, and serious discussions are held over whether there are too many red and orange bulbs in a particular quadrant, whether a green or blue bulb would look good here or whether a flasher bulb is needed there. More bourbon-laced eggnog is consumed during the bulb negotiations until a consensus is reached that the lights are perfect. If only Congress or the U.N. would function so well.

After the garland is hung, it’s time to put the ornaments on the tree. As the ornaments are removed from their ancient, yellowing boxes Meredith can be counted on to remember their histories: how old Jake or Mike were when they made this or that ornament, what happened the year we acquired this ornament, who gave us this that ornament, and so it goes. There was a time when the kids were small that they were tasked with hanging ornaments on the bottom one-third of the tree. Now that they have grown, we all have to bend to make sure the bottom branches get their fair share of ornaments.

The last thing to go on the tree is the tinsel, a meticulous task at best. By tinsel time, the men have consumed enough fortified eggnog to make any meticulous task a challenge. Shortcuts are not allowed, and the tinsel must be hung two or three strands at a time from the branch tips in order to properly emulate icicles. Woe to the person who gobs tinsel on a branch or throws it on the tree.

When, at last, the tree is decorated and lit up, most of the men are pretty well lit up too. One advantage of our system is that the finished tree always looks great as Christmas cheer, the sentiment of the season and the effects on several eggnogs override any discriminating judgment.

We open our presents on Christmas morning, and later in the day we have our traditional Christmas Day dinner―homemade ravioli and brociole. The dinner preparation starts the day before with the making of the tomato sauce and the brociole. The smell of the sauce simmering on the stove for hours is enough to evoke a Christmas mood as well as a lot of salivating. Talk about a Pavlovian response!

On Christmas Day around noon we make the ravioli. It’s a family affair to roll the dough and assemble the raviolis. By then we’re back at the eggnog. There is usually a contest to see how long a ribbon of pasta we can roll. The record may be close to seven feet.

Christmas dinner happens around 4:00 in the afternoon. This is the only time of the year that we make ravioli and brocioli, and we await the meal like ravenous dogs. When the meal is finally served, massive quantities are consumed, and after dinner we gladly pay the price of our over-indulgence with almost incapacitating attacks of indigestion and heartburn from the wine and the rich tomato sauce. It’s not uncommon for prayers to be sent heavenward after dinner: “Oh God. I ate too much. Make it better.” The supplicant is typically prone on the couch at that point.

I’m sure that other families have their own holiday traditions. I’ve noticed in this area that many families have a tradition of decorating their homes, gates and fences for holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Some homeowners go to great lengths. I’ve seen a number of rural homes decorated with an over-abundance of Christmas lights and illuminated Christmas displays. Many of these homes are located on little traveled country roads where they are not seen by many people. When you approach one of these houses at night driving on a winding country road, the trees ahead of you are brightly bathed in different colors. I’m not sure whether I’m going to see a Christmas light display or have a close encounter of the third kind.

Holiday traditions do not define a holiday, but they are the warp and woof of the season―familiar threads that run from one year to the next bringing continuity and comfort to a family. When my sons have families of their own someday, it is inevitable that they will begin to develop their own traditions. Traditions are like that. Like living organisms, they seem to evolve over time. In imitation of the laws of genetics, the holiday traditions of my sons will some mixture our family’s traditions and the traditions of their spouse’s family.

It doesn’t matter to me that our traditions will change over time. But I confess that it is important to me that my children have meaningful holiday traditions and that in their minds those traditions represent a continuous and unbroken line into the past.

It's Been Gloomy

It has been challenging to write this blog lately. I am experiencing a shortage of inspiration and a lack of interesting stuff to write about. Not much has been happening around here that is humorous, odd or worthy of discussion. The fact is that things have been downright humdrum and boring recently. Maybe I’m beginning to get used to this place.

I have been lacking a certain joie de la vie recently, and I attribute that to a number of things.  The weather certainly isn’t helping. All is not sunny in North Georgia these days, and I mean that literally. I don’t think we’ve had an honest sunny day for the past month. The clouds rolled in at the end of November, and it’s been overcast, damp and chilly ever since.

I imagine that the weather here lately is a lot like the weather in countries with names like Slobovia and Dampistan that are located somewhere in Eastern European. Though I’ve never been to the region, and I’m not sure exactly what the weather is really like there, I picture these as being damp, cold and bleak places where the sun rarely shines and the main crops are cabbage, mold and moss. In my imagination these are places populated by rudely dressed peasants who raise goats, live in rough stone huts and eat turnip porridge while huddled around a smoky, sputtering fireplace. These are countries where the national flower is the potato, the national bird is a vulture, and the national anthem goes something like this: “Life is shit. Hail Crapavia.”

I was not expecting weather like this. It may have been cold bad last winter, but I do not remember it being as overcast and dreary. It’s not the cold that’s gets to me; it’s the absence of sunlight. As a former Floridian, I’m used to seeing the sun on a daily basis. I feel like I’m turning into lichen. I’m sure the weather has been great for mushrooms, liverworts and troglodytes, but it's not so great for human beings.

The constant gloom is not helping my outlook on life, and it certainly has dampened my creative spark. Instead of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, I feel like Igor of PMS Acres. It’s hard to be uplifting and humorous in weather like this. I bet there aren’t many comedy clubs in Slobovia or Crapistan. (How many serfs does it take to screw in a light bulb? Oh, that’s right, we don’t have electricity.) The bottom line is that if we don’t get some sunshine around here soon, these posts may get downright depressing.

Which leads me to my next subject. I like words. Whenever I come across a new one, I try to use it in my daily vocabulary. Why use a five cent word when a twenty-five cent word will do? However, I recently came across a word that I cannot imagine I will ever have a chance to use in daily speech. The word is alphitomancy, and it means the use of barley meal as a means of divination.

This got me wondering what sort of people believed that you could foretell the future by sifting through barley meal? For that matter, who eats barley meal? Whoever they were, I have to believe they were an insignificant people who left little mark upon history. The Romans sought omens in the entrails of slaughtered animals, the Greeks consulted scantily clad women at oracles (at least that’s the Hollywood version of what oracle priestesses looked like), and the Vikings threw bones to foresee the future. Compared to these, trying to divine the future by looking for omens in a pile of barley meal seems pretty mundane and anticlimactic. I know that I would be disappointed if I got all worked up over what the future would hold only to find that my soothsayer’s prediction was based on barley meal.

Then it occurred to me that they probably eat barley meal gruel in places like Slobovia and Crapistan; thus, I would not be surprised if they practiced alphitomancy in those places also. Somehow that seems perfect considering how the weather has been around here lately.

I have some questions about what the future holds for me. At the top of the list is weather the sun will ever return. I don’t have any barley meal to consult, but I wonder if a package of instant oatmeal will suffice?

This is my last post before Christmas, and I bet you’re glad about that. So I will end this post with a heartfelt wish that you will have a merry and joyous Christmas:

By now in New York City, there's snow on the ground
And out in California, the sunshine's falling down.
And, maybe down in Memphis, Graceland's all in lights
And in Atlanta, Georgia, there's peace on earth tonight.

Christmas in Dixie, it's snowin' in the pines.

Merry Christmas from Dixie, to everyone tonight.

It's windy in Chicago, the kids are out of school.
There's magic in Motown, the city's on the move.
In Jackson, Mississippi, to Charlotte, Caroline
And all across the nation, it's the peaceful Christmas time.

Christmas in Dixie, it's snowin' in the pines
Merry Christmas from Dixie, to everyone tonight.

And from Mineral Bluff in Georgia 

God bless y'all, we love ya.
Happy New Year, good night,
Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas tonight.

A Couple of Complaints

I know the holiday season is the wrong time to complain, but even here, at my home on the range, I am compelled to utter a few discouraging words every now and then.

My first rant is about my cat. Before I go any farther with this, please understand that I like pets. I have had pets all my life. I have owned cats, dogs, gerbils, mice, fish, turtles, iguanas, a chicken, ducks and a ferret. I won’t even include the parrot and snake that my son owned.

I have always taken good care of my pets. I’ve never mistreated them. I was saddened when they passed. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I can’t honestly say that I felt much emotion when the fish and the iguanas died. It’s really hard to form an emotional attachment to reptiles and fish. I think it has to do with the fact that their eyes are beady like the glass eyes of a stuffed animal. I’m convinced that any animal that has beady eyes doesn’t care a rat's ass about you and would just as soon bite you or escape as cuddle up to you. Never trust an animal or a person with beady eyes.

As for my cat, I guess I should have seen it coming. My cat was a little quirky even before I moved here. Maybe that’s an understatement. One indication of our relationship is that even though his official name is Sequoya, he also responds to “fuck you cat” and “get away from me.” Clearly he is not the favorite cat I’ve ever had. Still, it never occurred to me that things could get worse by moving to the country. I had this idea that the great outdoors, with all its mice, chipmunks and other scurrying creatures, would be a wonderful and interesting place for a cat. But not this cat. He took one look through our front door at acres of pasture and woods and said, “Screw that.”

In the 15 months we have been in Georgia, the cat has spent a total of two hours outdoors. Occasionally, he will go outside for a few minutes to eat some grass so that he can throw up on the rug when he gets back in the house.

This cat views the outdoors in the same way I view Uzbekistan―not interested, don’t care, don’t want to go there, don’t even want to think about it. One day last fall, in an effort to show that cat that there was nothing to fear, Mike carried the cat down to a large oak tree in our pasture. The cat huddled under that tree and wouldn’t move until I went down and walked him back. The cat low crawled the entire way, going from grass tuft to grass tuft like a soldier under hostile fire. What a pussy.

If all cats had a fear of the outdoors I might be more understanding. But I see cats in the fields and woods all the time around here. I really don’t understand why our cat is so terrified when it comes to being outside. 

The fact that our cat has this abject fear of the outdoors is not the reason I wish he would go to his just reward. It’s his irritating behavior indoors. When it gets cold outside, this cat clings to you like a fatty tumor. It gets irritating to have cat press up against you every time you sit down. At night, in bed, it lays against me like a ten pound sack of concrete. By the time morning comes I’m teetering on the edge of the mattress because the cat has hogged all the prime territory.

The worst, however, is how the cat gets into bed. It always waits until I’m snuggled in and asleep to hop into bed. Inevitably it feels obliged to stick its asshole near my face before it settles down. Many is the night that I opened my eyes to see this cat’s butthole winking at me. It must be some kind of feline greeting like “Hi. I’m here. Want see my butthole?” Wink, wink.

I could go on and on about the irritating habits of this cat, but what’s the point? Suffice it to say that while I will never intentionally harm the little bastard, my fervent hope is that he will get swooped up by a hawk someday. That way, I will not feel remorse because the predator/prey thing is a part of the natural order. How’s that for a justification?

There’s a lesson in this tirade. If you have pets and are thinking about moving to the country, you should give serious consideration to how your pets will react to the move. Not every creature relishes the country life.

My second complaint is about Walmart. I have nothing against Walmart. When you live in a rural area, Walmart is your go to store. There is almost no need to shop anywhere else. You can buy just about everything you need to survive at Walmart.

And rural Walmarts are so much better than urban Walmarts. The people who shop at rural Walmarts are, by and large, normal people. You’re not going to see a 7-foot drag queen in spandex and a pink tutu, a grossly obese woman wearing a t-back and a sequined bra with her massive cha-cha’s spilling over the top, or a goth kid with pink and purple hair dressed all in black with half the hardware from the nuts and bolts section of Ace Hardware through his or her nose, lips, ears and God knows what other body parts.

Obviously, I’m exaggerating a little, but I bet the photos in those emails that circulate showing the ridiculous and bizarre people who shop at Walmart were taken in urban Walmarts, not rural ones. There are several explanations for this. I’d like to think that country folk have more sense and good taste. I’d also like to believe that people in rural America actually have constructive things to do. It’s awfully hard to accomplish your daily chores dressed like the fairy gueen.

That’s not to say that all the people who shop at country Walmarts are attractive and fit physical specimens. We have our share of fat asses in rural America. This leads to my second complaint. Have you noticed that the carts at Walmart are extra large? That’s because some psychologist figured out that larger grocery carts cause shoppers to buy more stuff. The problem is that it’s difficult to push your extra large cart around the aisles when you keep getting blocked by fat asses. The other day I had a fat ass on the right, a fat ass on the left and a fat ass in front. I know it sounds like “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” but it was a horrible experience. I felt like I was stuck in rush hour traffic in downtown Atlanta surrounded by huge tractor-trailer trucks.

There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Smaller carts and wider aisles are two of the obvious ones. Or maybe Walmart could take cue from traffic engineers and create “fat ass only” lanes. How about “fat ass only” shopping hours? Whatever the solution, Walmart needs to address this urgent problem.

Boy, I’m glad I got those two beefs off my chest. I feel better already.

A Strange Find in the Garden

If this post was a Sherlock Holmes’ mystery it might be called “An Unusual Occurrence.” Another name for it might be “Freaky Shit at Sassafras Farm.”

A couple of weeks ago Mike and I were turning the soil in the rows of the garden. Mike was working on one row, and I was working on another. Suddenly he called out, “Come over here. You have got to see this.” I looked up, and he was staring down at something in the middle of the row he was working on. I walked over to see what it was. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing. I was looking at the hoof end of a deer leg sticking up about four inches out of the freshly dug ground.

To set the scene a little more precisely, my garden is large and surrounded by an electric fence. The nearest neighbor is about 300 yards away across a small valley. Not ten minutes prior I had walked down the same row pulling up frost damaged plants. The old mulch under the plants was undisturbed. I did not notice the deer leg when I pulled out the old plants, and Mike did not notice the deer leg prior to digging the shovel blade into the ground. While it is possible that the deer leg was just lying on the top of the old mulch and we just didn’t see it, that doesn’t seem likely. The greater weight of the evidence (to use a legal phrase) is that the leg had been buried or at least covered by the old mulch and was uncovered when Mike turned the soil.

After the initial shock of seeing a deer foot sticking out of the ground wore off, I reached down and gently pulled on the hoof. Out of the ground came the foreleg off a deer. I was happy about that because I was halfway expecting to find that the hoof was attached to the rest of the deer. That would have really freaked me out.

The leg was about 18 inches long and had been severed four inches above the elbow joint. There was bare bone down to the elbow joint, but the rest of the leg had fur on it and was undamaged. The joints were limber, and there was no sign that insects had chewed on the leg. Based on this, I concluded that the leg was fresh and had not been in or on the ground for more than a couple of days. Of course, I am not a deer forensic pathologist so I could be wrong. The only other clue was that the end of the exposed leg bone had been severed cleanly as if it has been sawed through.

Of course, we had to walk up to the house to show Meredith our grisly find. I think it’s a basic human trait to try to shock the crap out of other people. Our rat terrier came down the steps to see what I was holding, but once she got a sniff of it, she backed off quickly with an expression that signified “fuck that.” She wanted no part of the deer leg. Maybe she thought it was from a giant rat that was out of her league.

Of course, my mind was racing through possible explanations for the presence of a severed deer leg in my garden. As is my tendency, the more bizarre ones occurred to me first.

Was my garden the deer equivalent of the old Indian graveyard in Poltergeist? Had I disturbed the dead ancestors of Bambi? I could just hear the small voice of a child saying, “They’re here.”

Was my property the deer equivalent of the elephant’s graveyard?

Had the deer leg just fallen from the sky?

Was it a reindeer leg? Had Santa been flying a test run and had a mid-air accident?

Was this some North Georgia hillbilly idea of a practical joke? Were Clem and Billy Bob sitting around one day when the brilliant idea came to them to bury a deer leg in the neighbor’s garden? That seemed to me to be a lot of work for Clem and Billy Bob.

Maybe one of the neighbors was trying to send me a message. If so, it was a pretty obscure message. If it was a message, it was way over my head. On reflection, this theory did not seem likely to me. If the folks around here wanted to send me a message, they would not have been that subtle.

Ultimately, we concluded that one of my neighbors had shot a deer, and in the process of dressing it out, a dog had gotten hold of the severed deer leg and buried it in the garden. It is deer season around here, and I hear gunshots in the surrounding hills on a daily basis. (As an aside, the deer limit in Georgia is 12 per person, which is an indication of just how many deer there are in these parts.) One additional clue comports with this explanation. We usually see three deer crossing our gravel road as we drive out of the property. In the last couple of weeks, we have only seen two deer.

I disposed of the deer leg by throwing it as far as I could towards the fence line. As luck would have it, it lodged high in the branches of a white pine. I’m hoping that the next time Jake visits and uses the tractor it will fall out onto his lap. That should be good for a few laughs. There’s nothing like raw country humor.

In looking back over my posts since I moved to the mountains of North Georgia, several common threads occur. One of those threads is relating experiences that strike me as being uniquely rural in nature―you know, events and circumstances that you would not expect to experience in a highly populated urban area are like Pinellas County. I think it’s fair to say that finding a severed deer leg in your garden is one of those experiences.

And some of you thought that I would find life in the sticks boring.

I Help Santa

Thanksgiving has passed, and Christmas has come to Fannin County. The Christmas season starts in the City of Blue Ridge with an annual celebration that has small town America written all over it. It’s called Light Up Blue Ridge, and it’s always held on the first Saturday after Thanksgiving because people hereabouts have a proper appreciation that Thanksgiving and Christmas are two distinct holidays. Christmas decorations should never appear until after the Thanksgiving turkey has been consumed.

My son, Mike, and I were fortunate enough to be a small part of the festivities this year because an organization which I belong to, Feed Fannin, has the lucrative “get your kid’s picture taken with Santa Claus” concession, and we volunteered to help. We arrived in town around noon and discovered that downtown Blue Ridge was jammed with people. We had to walk a couple of blocks to get to the town park in the center of Blue Ridge. The park was festooned with Christmas lights, and a huge Christmas tree had been erected. The local merchants and organizations had set up tents in the park and were selling food to the masses. Apparently boiled peanuts are considered holiday fare in the South.

The festivities started at noon with a parade, complete with Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus riding in a horse drawn wagon, through downtown Blue Ridge. The parade went down East Main Street, turned left along the north end of the park, and then turned left to go south on West Main Street. From start to finish the entire parade route was about ten blocks which gives you an idea of how small the downtown area is. You could watch the parade pass on East Main Street and then walk across the park and watch it pass again on West Main Street. It’s like having the parade in stereo.

The festivities end when Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus press a switch and light up the Christmas tree and lights in the park. This happens around eight o’clock in the evening. Almost immediately afterward, everyone goes home and the sidewalks are rolled up. If you like the late night life, I suggest you do not move to a small town.

Mike and I arrived on scene just after the parade started. There were probably a thousand people lining the streets to watch the parade. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of families with kids eager to catch a glimpse of Santa. The Christmas parade was a lot like the annual Fourth of July parade, only with Christmas decorations rather than patriotic bunting. The parade participants were the usual cast of characters. There were local politicians, the county sheriff and the town’s police chief, firemen and EMS personal driving their fire trucks and emergency vehicles, the high school marching band, local boy and girl scout troops, floats built by local businesses, clubs and organizations, and people driving classic and antique cars.

As far as I could see the only groups missing from the parade were the local political parties. They participated in the Fourth of July parade. I speculate that the local Republican Party was still celebrating its shellacking of the Dems, the local Tea Party could not get organized in time, and the local Democratic Party was being politically correct for fear of offending any atheists or non-Christians in Fannin County (which, as you may imagine, is not a large voting block in these parts).

Feed Fannin set up its Santa Claus concession in a small gazebo in the park. Mike volunteered to work the camera and take the pictures of the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, and I volunteered to keep Mrs. Claus supplied with candy canes to hand out to the kids after they talked to Santa. My secondary job was to club any unruly children into submission. Thankfully, there were no problems like that.

It was a chilly day. Fortunately, I was stationed near Mr. and Mrs. Clause which means I was also near the large propane heater that had been set up to keep the Clauses warm. No one in Feed Fannin knew exactly how the heater operated. They got it going, but I was a little apprehensive that it might blow any minute. I had visions of Mr. and Mrs. Claus running from the gazebo as flaming torches. That would have traumatized an entire generation of Fannin County children.

Mike and I were enjoying the parade when we realized that a long line of parents and kids had already assembled to have their pictures taken with Santa. This made us a little nervous that we might screw up and start a riot. We didn't realize that it was such a big deal. Thank God that things went smoothly.

I have to say that Santa and Mrs. Claus looked great. Santa’s white beard was genuine, and he played the part perfectly. Someone told me that he does this every year and really gets into character once he starts. I guess he’s a method actor. Mrs. Claus was great too. She must have worked in quality control at one time because she kept handing cracked candy canes back to me as unsuitable. It wasn’t my fault they were cracked; they came that way. I was working my butt off taking the candy canes out of their boxes, checking them for cracks and keeping Mr. Claus supplied while trying to keep an eye on the propane heater and be on the lookout for kamikaze kids. I don’t think she truly appreciated the stress I was under.

The candy canes were individually wrapped in tight plastic. It wasn’t real obvious that they were. I kept asking Mrs. Claus to tell the parents to take the plastic off before giving the candy cane to their kid. I was concerned that some little kid would collapse his head trying to suck a plastic wrapped candy cane.

I discovered that there are four types of kids who have their picture taken with Santa. There are the true believers who are eager to let Santa know what they want for Christmas. There are older kids who are not sure whether Santa is real or not, but are hedging their bets by talking to Santa just in case.

Then there are the children who are absolutely terrified of Santa and do anything they can to get out of Santa’s grasp. It looked to me like Santa had done some steer wrestling in his day. I don’t blame the kids for being frightened. They were enjoying the parade and all of the sudden their parents plopped them on the lap of a fat guy with a beard wearing funny clothes and a weird hat. I’m surprised that psychiatrists haven’t discovered a condition like Post Santa Stress Syndrome.

My favorite are the ones kids who go stiff and motionless when they are placed on Santa’s lap. It’s like they’ve gone catatonic. They are usually babies who have no clue what Christmas is, much less what is happening to them. Mike said they look like turnips with big eyes. I was concerned that one was actually brain dead.

There’s nothing like Christmas in a small town. It’s a genuine holiday rather than an excuse for stores to sell stuff. Being here at this time of the season invokes in me some of the feelings I had about Christmas as a small child before I became old and jaded, and there is nothing wrong with that in my book.