Tracking Jack

The most amazing people have been happening to me since I became Jack’s publisher. Mrs. Mary has speeded up the process of these happenings, and now I have a really wild tale to tell.

Friday morning I got a frantic email saying, “Would you help these people please??” It was from Betty, the president of the Coker Creek Heritage Group. She had forwarded an email that read, “I am on a mission to find Jack Darnell, the author. A friend sent me an article and a video of Jack Darnell. I too am a writer, and would like to meet the man whose name I have been using for over 70 years. I noticed the article said he lives on Coker Creek. I will travel back down 68 to see if I can locate him.” The email was signed Jack Darnell.

I immediately answered that I was Coker Creek Jack Darnell’s publisher and that I’d attempt to set up a meeting. I gave directions to Jack’s home on Coker Creek with instructions to “Look for the banks of daffodils. If you get to the bridge over Coker Creek, back up; you’ve found Jack’s house.” Today, on Jack’s front porch, we had that meeting of the men who have shared a name for seventy years and a passion for writing for much of that time. We were all like kids at Christmas; we were so excited to make each others’ acquaintance.

What a study in contrasts were these two Jacks! The visiting author was extremely gregarious with a bald head covered by a skipper’s cap, while our Jack is soft-spoken and shy with a beautiful head of neatly combed hair. Coker Creek Jack is clean shaven while our visitor was well-whiskered. Our local author is a dedicated homebody while this fellow scribe definitely loves to travel; he and his wife Sherry live in an RV. Before retirement, RV Jack spent his career traveling with the Navy; our Jack’s only time living away from here was his two-year stint in the Army.

The total tour was in order from drinking water out of the spring to explanations of the various types of kerosene lamp wicks in Jack’s room-lighting methods. Roving Jack even insisted that his wife take a picture of him sitting in Jack’s outhouse (fully clothed). The two men autographed books for each other, and laughed a lot at each others’ stories.

Both write, and both are published through a division of Amazon called CreateSpace; although, unlike our Jack, “Jack the Younger” writes a travel blog. Much of traveling Jack’s work is non-fiction; all of our Jack’s work is pure fantasy. I can’t wait to read some of “Jack the Younger’s” work, but it is kind or eerie to see the same name on two such different types of writing.

As usual, Jack Darnell of Coker Creek’s Appalachian Folktales The Book That Jack Built can be purchased at local retailers or ordered through Amazon. To check out traveling Jack’s blog, see http://shipslog-jack.blogspot.com/

Artists' Adventures with Mountaintop Mary

Mrs. Mary (Jack’s GED teacher, and not to be confused with Mountaintop Mary) is so excited about Jack’s book being published that she’s taken to spreading my name to all her friends who have work that she feels really should be published. This lead to a call the day after I met Mrs. Mary from a woman named Nancy. Nancy is an author and illustrator, and Mrs. Mary wanted me to meet her “right away.” One thing about dealing with matriarchs is that they don’t take kindly to denial or dilly-dallying when there’s important work to be done.

I had tried to get to Nancy’s the day I got her call, but ended up on a sightseeing tour to Townsend instead. I had never been to Lenoir City or to the Cross-Eyed Cricket Campground before, and our GPS was in Richard’s Bronco II. It’s dangerous for me to drive in unknown territory when I’m in my creative zone because my analytical self stays behind; and the prospect of meeting a talented artist always sends me into La-La Land, or Townsend Tennessee, as the case may be. I had a lovely drive along the Little River, but I finally returned home, determined to meet Nancy the next day.

I had been meaning to check in with Mountaintop Mary regarding the resolution to the problems she’d been having with scanning my and Jack’s work, and I also thought it would be fun for us to take a trek together, in what my friend, Girl Reporter Susan, calls Lucy/Ethel style. She agreed, so we set out a little before lunch yesterday.

Forsythia! Quince! Daffodils! Easter! Spring is happening in the holler even if it’s still too wet to plow. I wouldn’t have known the name of the magnificent magenta blooms next to our spring-fed creek if I hadn’t been with Mountaintop Mary yesterday. I had been calling it weigela until Mary and I got to telling tales of what’s blooming in our back yards. Mary’s place is atop a mountain, and her bushes blooming still hasn’t begun. I wonder if even a couple of hundred feet of altitude change can affect what’s in bloom and when.

Our first stop was at Donna’s Old Town Café in Madisonville. They always have good food and I wanted Mary to meet the proprietress of this successful mother/daughter business. I was able to recruit Donna’s daughter for teaching kids’ cooking classes and promoting our upcoming Coker Creek Cooking Classes. I also scored some additional bagitudes (handbags with attitude) for my granddaughters. It’s never too early to start having them act out their individuality.

We spent a lot of time going down what Mary calls bunny trails, both literally and verbally, before we finally found Nancy, but was it ever worth it when we got there! What a talented woman! She’s written scores of poetry pieces and illustrated innumerable of her stories. She also showed us a method she’s found for making resplendent reproductions of her water colors – on her home computer and printer.

I’m now chomping at the bit to get our next New Orleans trip behind us so that Nancy and I can get her poetry anthology to the presses.

The Men of the Matriarchs

The bravest men in the world are those who remain married to matriarchs. They are not only subject to the displeasure of “She Who Will Be Obeyed,” they also have to put up with confusion of, and possibly ridicule from their peers.

A matriarch is a woman who will stand up to anyone – sometimes even her Creator—when her loved ones are threatened; she is definitely a force with whom to be reckoned. The bravest among their men know how to “batten down the hatches” when the hurricanes start brewing with those steamy tropical depressions and duck and cover when the volcanoes start to rumble. They realize that when the skies have cleared or the earth-scorching is complete, new life will emerge, probably more vibrant than the last. These are the real heroes that you read about in fairytales.

If “She Who Will Be Obeyed,” deems it necessary to slay dragons, the real hero will sharpen his sword, swallow his fear, and head out – with or without a trusty steed or fellow warriors. Many brave men are vanquished that way, as they may not have the kind of friends who are brave enough to be their posse.

It is very important that the “Queens of the Universe” encourage and allow their knights to develop a round table of like-minded men; otherwise, they will continue to lose all the good, brave men who are their only hope of having a protective perimeter around their women’s circles that are formed around the crops and the kids.

It is true that there are many men who are better at doing the heavy lifting around the homeplace, entertaining the offspring, and teaching the trades than their women. It is also true that there are many warrior women in the matriarchal matrix. We must be able to join hands, focus on the fights which are important on a world-wide basis, and start circling the wagons, lifting our voices in songs of gratitude, community, and hope; all the while lifting our hands in earth-enriching partnerships with our Creator and all of creation.

We in Coker Creek have our forested land, our clean water coming from our springs pouring out of the sides of the mountains, our manure and loam-rich soil, and our neighbors who live by the values of faith, family, friends, and fun. We even have local honey bees and milk cows living off the fat of the land and leaking their gifts all over it – there for the taking, if we only care to collect our share. I don’t know how you get much closer to the Land of Milk and Honey where manna falls from the skies.

Every one of us can grab a hoe, a plow, a pot, a spoon, a chain saw, or a hammer and work side-by-side with all our fellow travelers to create a better place for not only our local neighbors, but all who want to come and taste the goodness of Creation here in Coker Creek. If we women want it, and our men think it’s good, nothing can stop us from expanding out like our ancestors did. We are, after all, at an intersection of one of the greatest and earliest trade routes in North America.

Now if we only had a bigger table…and a round one, at that.

Matriarchal Mind Meld

There’s really little I like better than visiting with matriarchs. I wouldn’t say this without including their men, except most men of the matriarchs let their women do all the in-depth discussion stuff, or they’re no longer around to tell their tales.

I love to get male viewpoints on life, especially from men who have well-learned life’s lessons, but trying to get a man to spill what he knows without another man present is really like pulling hen’s teeth, or trying to herd cats; and I don’t know which is more difficult.

I got a double matriarchal mind-meld yesterday; it may take me a while to process all the wisdom I collected. I began the day with a call from Mamie informing me that she’s following my example and leaving Coker Creek for a while. I admitted that I knew wanderlust was contagious and asked where she was heading. She was delighted to tell me that she decided to break with the rest of us who fled the mountains during the cold weather and go south now that it’s getting warm.

When I expressed concern that she may not return in time for the ground to be dry enough to plow, she wasted no time in giving me an garden preparation assignment “for Richard” while she’s away. I guess she really has given up on me ever being useful in the manual labor department. I dropped by her house to tell her bon voyage, and then headed to Vonore to meet the inspiration for Jack’s publishing efforts.

What a delightful woman! Mary is eighty years old and still going strong. Even though she walks with a cane, there’s nothing pitiful about her. Her eyes and mind are as lively as one could ever wish to have, no matter what one’s age. When I asked if she was still tutoring GED students, she revealed that she’s not tutoring, but is substitute teaching. Can you imagine the drive that she must have, still entering the classroom at age eighty – with the help of a cane? She says she may give it up this year – much like Mamie threatens yearly to give up her chickens and egg empire, I suspect.

One of my favorite topics to discuss with these lovely ladies is the partnerships they had with their husbands. Both Mamie and Mrs. Mary are long-time widows that are quite in love, to this day, with the men they married. It’s so refreshing and informative to hear how they over came life’s challenges and celebrated life’s successes together.

Mamie still loves to recount the nights they planted the crops necessary to she and her husband Frank Sr.’s , and their family’s survival by the light of their truck and tractor lights. Even though I just met Mrs. Mary, she shared beautiful memories of her childhood on Citico Creek, her education at the Quaker school in Tennessee, her chance meeting and subsequent courtship and marriage to the love of her life and some of the challenges they overcame as a couple.

What generous souls! I need to keep these stories coming; I can use all the advice that I can get on keeping my hero happy– or he may stop waiting for me when I go on my adventures without him.

Fun With Our Freezer

Richard was really my hero yesterday. He went out to our large freezer that we keep in the “cat house” (so named because, when we had two cats, they claimed this outbuilding as their own). One of the great losses of our lives in Coker Creek was silently creeping into our reality, and we would not have known it until it was too late without Richard’s foraging for fish in our freezer.

Our freezer was in the process of a mysterious meltdown! My twenty-five pounds of head-on Gulf shrimp, months of Jack’s banana peppers that we had so lovingly pared and blanched for use in interesting hors d’oeuvres, gallons of greens and Buffy’s beans all at the edge of annihilation. Richard was clearly on the verge of panic – I don’t know if this was because he could see all of these culinary creations of the past year being hauled to the dump, or because he really feared my meltdown, along with that of the freezer. Richard never really panics, but he does get close occasionally.

It seems that all this winter’s rain and snow not only dampened the earth and her inhabitants, it also shorted out the electrical cord connecting the freezer to the source of its power. This should have been a simple, fast fix – plug in another extension cord, right? This is easier said than done when the freezer in question is several hundred feet from the closest electrical outlet.

Not only is that, but the power to the cat house is in a daisy chain from the house to the RV to the cat house freezer. Nothing that hooks up to an RV is of the household variety; therefore, no maintenance or repair parts are available anywhere near locally. This would be the case even if we lived in a major metropolis, but it is even less likely that we’ll find parts within a one hundred mile radius living on a mountain top in the forest in South East Tennessee.

Richard was able to locate enough power tool extension cords connected to his various projects to temporarily get juice flowing back into our treasure trove of frozen foods while he went in search of heavy duty electrical cord repair parts. All the while, there was nothing I could do but stay at my computer avoiding the issue. I just couldn’t bear to face the freezer facts.

With great trepidation, after several hours of denial, I finally determined to go see if I could do some damage control. Richard had said that there was still ice on some of the shelves even though the food felt defrosted to him. There was some slim hope that I could carefully salvage at least a bit of our bounty by immediately cooking it and inviting all our neighbors over for a food frenzy feast, like we’re used to doing after the freezers defrost in the power outages connected to hurricanes.

I took a garbage bag with me on the hundred yard walk; I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. I slowly opened the freezer, expecting the worst. My eyes went immediately to my treasured jumbo shrimp. They were not only still solidly frozen; they hadn’t even melted and refrozen into a great glob. If the shrimp were still individually frozen, the rest couldn’t be too bad. I looked for reasons for Richard’s report of impending dietary doom. A couple of sugary sauces were indeed still soft, but they never get solidly frozen. Our friends will just have to wait for their food fantasies to be sated, one dinner delight at a time.

Rummaging in the Refrigerator

It really all started with Josie saying she was tired of chicken, and that Adam was going to, hopefully, (if it didn’t keep raining) grill some good burgers. This put hamburgers into my mind – not new ones, but the ones leftover from the previous night’s supper. Nether Richard nor I had been terribly impressed with the quality of the meat, so I wasn’t looking forward to eating them reheated “au natural.”

It was a chili kind of day, one of those damp days where, whatever the thermometer says the temperature is, your toes don’t believe it. Time to take out the chili ingredients, which, in my case almost never starts with a trip to the grocery store. It usually starts with rummaging through the refrigerator to see what leftovers I can re-imagine as a new dish, in this case it started with those hamburger patties.

As I rummaged, I found a bit of a jar of salsa, several onions that had long-since spouted green tops, some chopped jalapenos that I had frozen several months ago, and a few cloves of garlic that were getting a bit past their prime. I also found two beautiful, crisp bell peppers, one yellow and one orange that Richard had bought for his sumptuous salad-making.

I did want some bell pepper in the chili, but I had two challenges in using these peppers. The first is that these peppers probably cost as much as everything else in my refrigerator combined. The second is that Richard would have to drive a minimum of twenty-three miles each way to replace them. Our local grocery store (only eleven mile away – one way) doesn’t carry such “exotic” ingredients. I opted for a jar of roasted red peppers from our pantry.

It was a bit of a challenge unearthing all these ingredients, as both our refrigerator and freezer are regular sources of avalanche activity. But, in these matters, I’m much braver than Richard; and a woman’s sometimes got to have mercy on her man. The only thing I asked of him is that he fetch the tomatoes that I had canned last summer.

He was happy to do so, and inquired as to how many jars I needed and where he would find them. He was a bit incredulous when I told him to look under our bed -- until I informed him that the reason our marriage was so fruitful is because we sleep on top of so many of the fruits of our labors. At this point, he just went to get the tomatoes, but still looked surprised that they were actually where I said they’d be.

While I was busy stirring my witch’s brew, Deborah called asking which day we wanted her and Charlie to come over for dinner. It seems that Richard had invited them over, but didn’t give them a date. How nice that I was already cooking enough for company (like I even know how to cook for only two.)

The chili got Charlie’s seal of approval, but since Deborah prefers not to eat meat I did a bit more rummaging and came up with the ingredients for spaghetti squash tossed with sun dried tomatoes, a bit of feta cheese and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds. We all loved Richard’s salad, and had a grand old time talking at our table.
See what can happen when we’re open to anything…

"Deep-Doo"

If you’ve ever heard two cats fighting, you have a pretty good idea of what’s been happening I my head recently. I’m a rather impassioned speaker even if I’m reciting my grocery list. Okay, maybe that’s not a good example because we all know how passionate I am about food. Anyway, Rachel agreed to come up to the holler for a “just us” visit. She has known me for almost thirty-nine years, so she knew what she was signing on for. She refers to my favorite conversational topics, things like “the meaning of life,” as “Deep-Doo.”

It had been a couple of years since we had this much “just us” time, so I had kind of stored up the “Doo;” it was pretty deep. Not to mention that I’ve lately been torn between two “lovers,” Coker Creek and New Orleans. Rachel understands my struggle because she’s often longing for the Louisiana lifestyle. I also am sorely distressed by the climate of fear in our political discourse in the country. We took on all these topics, and then some, including religion – you know all the things we’re taught not to discuss in polite society.

Poor Richard; he must have thought there were two tigers in a big sack in the living room. As we talked, my voice got louder and louder, which is, I think part of having grown up in a family of eleven passionate people. First, he retreated to the kitchen, then he headed to his office, and finally he closed the office door – all the while suffering in silence as Rachel and I took on all the problems of the world.

In the early days of our relationship, quiet spoken Richard would stop my arguments with, “Just because you can talk louder than me doesn’t make you right.” Even when I’m in agreement with a person, the greater my feeling for whatever the topic, the louder my voice gets. My daddy used to call me “Mighty Powerful Woman, “probably on the strength of my voice. He also called me “Y” –because I always wanted the “why” behind every statement of rule or belief.

When Rachel went back to tell Richard good-bye, Richard came out of the room shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m glad you had a good time,” he said, rather quizzically. “If you call that a good time, which I don’t understand.” Rachel replied, “I wouldn’t call it a good time, but it was fulfilling.” “Yeah, I’m full to overflowing,” I said.

This was only partially true. I did feel filled with Rachel’s love for me, but I felt empty of all the grief and anguish I’d saved up. I don’t know how Rachel felt when she left, but I felt purged, and utterly exhausted.

Richard is a brave man to have two matriarchs in his house at the same time. He seems no worse for the wear; in fact, he calmly proceeded to the kitchen after Rachel departed and made sumptuous salads and burgers. What a man!