Nothing To Write Home About

Sometimes it is a challenge to write a post on this blog every week.

My objective when I starting this blog was simple: to write about my reactions, observations and experiences as a crusty, cynical and somewhat eccentric retired trial attorney who has moved to the sticks of North Georgia after spending close to 40 years living and working on the west coast of Florida in one of the most populous counties in the South. Because I have a natural tendency to see the humor or inanity in most situations, I try to bring a certain puckish levity to my posts.

You would think that writing one moderately funny post a week would not be that tough. It’s not like I’m writing the Declaration of Independence or a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Hell, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope during a three hour train ride. In my defense, the Gettysburg Address only has 272 words. Most posts average a thousand words. Furthermore, I’m using modern words, and we all know that things were simpler in the old days.

But there are weeks like this last one when nothing of note happens and my experiences are humdrum and boring. It’s at such times that writing a post becomes a task.

It has rained here every day for the last seven days. The extent of my activities over the last week is to attend a monthly meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners, help out one afternoon at the Food Pantry, go to the public library three times, and work in my workshop. Over the last week I have not encountered one unusual character, stumbled into a funny situation or made a fool of myself. Hardly the stuff to write home about, much less use as material for an interesting post.

The rain has made it impossible to move ahead with my garden because the soil is too wet. If you try to work the clay soil when it’s wet, you end up making adobe bricks. That’s great if you’re building a pueblo but not so great if you’re trying to grow vegetables. Like every farmer and gardener in North Georgia I’m waiting for three or four dry, sunny and windy days to dry the soil out. Waiting for the weather to change is not an activity that’s fraught with high excitement.

A meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners is more exciting than an embalmers’ convention, but not by much. The most interesting things discussed were the upcoming Master Gardener plant sale and the annual Rabies Clinic. I don’t think I need to say much more than “plant sale” to take the excitement out of a room. Independent testing has shown that a plant sale has the same effect on a horny guy as salt peter.

The Rabies Clinic has its humorous possibilities. It brings out all classes and types of people in Fannin County to get their dogs vaccinated to comply with state law. It’s a rare opportunity to see a snooty rich lady with her equally snooty lap dog in close proximity to a good ol’ boy with his pack of large, snarly and vicious hunting dogs. Both of them are seeking discount rabies vaccinations. A clash of lifestyles is always fodder for an interesting post. Unfortunately the clinic is not for a couple of weeks.

What’s it say about your life when the high point of the week occurred when I was helping out at the Food Pantry? I saw something that I have never seen before. The Food Pantry distributes food to needy persons in Fannin County. I was unpacking boxes of food donated by the local Walmart when I discovered that one of the boxes was filled with 5 pound bags and 10 pound buckets of frozen “chitterlings.”

Chitterlings, a/k/a chitlins, are chopped up pieces of the small intestines of pigs. At least I think they were chopped up. It’s possible the packages contained entire pigs’ intestines. It was hard to tell. To be honest, the packages looked like they contained a bunch of frozen condoms all pressed together.

Admittedly, I have not done a lot of grocery shopping but I didn’t know you could buy frozen raw chitlins in a grocery store. I wonder if it is a regional product that is supposed to appeal to people in these parts. Since Walmart was getting rid of the chitlins it may indicate they are not the popular seller that Walmart thought they would be. Maybe some smart ass Yankee in the corporate purchasing department thought: “Hey, I can buy these cheap and sell them to the hillbillies in North Georgia. Don’t they eat stuff like chitlins?” Yeah, and black folk in the South sit around and tell B’rer Rabbit stories.

What I really want to know is what you do with a ten pound bucket of chitlins. I know that you can deep fry them in grease and make something like a greasy, crispy snack food out of them. I’ve tried them that way, and it took a week of brushing and gargling to get the taste out of my mouth.

It never occurred to me that people actually buy them to cook at home. I thought people stopped eating chitlins for real about the time of the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification. If pressed I would have said that today chitlins are cooked and eaten only in Third World countries or just maybe in this county for ceremonial purposes to celebrate your ancestral roots if your ancestral celebration ritual includes slaughtering and butchering a pig.

According to the Joy of Cooking you can sauté chitlins with onions and peppers. I looked up what sauteing means, and it’s a fancy way of saying frying in grease. I guess the distinction is that the snooty lady with the snooty lapdog eats her chitlins sautéed while the good ol’ boy with the vicious dogs deep fries his. All I know is that Meredith will have nothing to do with them. If I want to try them I’m on my own. And I may do that. There’s a certain cache to being able to say that I bought a ten pound bucket of chitlins.

As you can see, there’s not a lot to talk about this week. I vow that as soon as the weather clears and I can get my garden in I will seek out persons, events, and experiences worth writing about.