Granny Camp Games

We thought we were going to have Nicholas, Miya and their friends in early June, for the first official “Granny Camp” session of the summer, but those plans were changed at the last minute. I’ve been sitting on “G,” and waiting for “o” for a month now. Mountaintop Mary and I have been conspiring to share kids and camping capers since last summer.

My niece Nikki and her family are coming today. We’ll begin their stay with introducing them to anywhere from twenty to one hundred of our neighbors at the July First Friday potluck supper. They’ll also get to meet Mary and John and their two dogs, as Mary’s ER visit has delayed their departure until at least tomorrow.
Nikki’s pre-teen daughter, Corinne, brought Coker Creek gold home from her last trip to visit us. Her one request is for gold panning with Bill of Bill’s Pit Stop, so this is the activity planned for the first full day of fun and frolic. Since I’ve never known Bill to come out of the creek without a vial of gold, I’m sure this will be a highlight of this trip for her, her daddy, Tom, and her mom. Mountaintop Mary, Don and their four grandchildren are going to join us in the gold panning adventure that will begin at Doc Roger’s field and continue in the creek that runs in back of our house. I’m hoping Corinne will love having a “little sister” to play with.

I can’t wait to cook with Corinne. She and I have shared kitchen capers since she was a toddler. One of her favorite creations is Cajun roasted pecans which are a favorite of her daddy. She’s an old hand at layering lasagna and breaking bread for bread pudding, as well as cutting up carrots for carrot cake. And I know Nikki is already drooling over the prospect of Richard’s perfectly prepared salads.

We’re old hands at Granny Camp; Rachel used to visit us with her girls for four weeks every summer. The first ten years were spent in New Orleans, where one of Richard’s joys was sharing what he referred to as “twucks, twains and twactors” with the kids. He was also into bringing home vast quantities of “fwozen confections” for everyone. Another of his tricks was building towers of “chick sticks” around the kids, and teaching them how to use leverage to tumble the towers.

The last five of the years of this summer tradition in Louisiana were spent on Lake Pontchartrain. Outdoor activities ruled on the lake. Richard would arrange to have everything in order for the day’s activities, whether they included crabbing, cooking or blasting across the lake in a boat. Rachel came to calling him an elf because whatever we wanted to do was waiting for us as before we even decided to do it. Richard is still an event elf; Nikki has been talking about his salads since her last summer visit with Corinne.

Let the Granny Camp games begin.

Spit Sisters

Either I really do have a huge black cloud hanging over my head, or I never noticed before how many of life’s curve balls can fly past any one person. Over the course of the last two years, no less than all of my best friends have been handling life-threatening diseases in themselves or in an immediate family member. While baking cookies and making casseroles for the various affected parties, we had come to joke about my curse. But maybe that further jinxed us.

The curse has struck again; either that, or John and Mary were really meant to stay a couple more days in our neck of the woods. On our way to the Museum of Appalachia, we had to take a u-turn to UT Hospital, where Mary was admitted for testing and observation. As Richard and John accompanied Mary into the ER, I was tasked with checking her in. On the admission form, there was a space for me to enter my relationship to her. I almost wrote “spit sister” in the allowed space.

I became spit sister to Mountaintop Mary while taking her to the hospital in Maryville when her husband Don had been hit by my curse, and she drank out of my cup of water. While doing our last book signing, Jack finished the barbecue plate that I had started and abandoned on our display table. I told him that this meant I was his spit sister. He doubled the club begun with Mountaintop Mary.

Then along came Music Mary, drinking out of my cup of water while riding in my van. I’m now up to being spit sister to three and blood sister to one friend. This is in addition to my four birth sisters, one deceased, and scores of soul sisters. All I can say is that I’m happy for the ability to send holiday and birthday greetings by the phone and email; otherwise, postage and card costs would put us in the poor house.

Mary’s unplanned ER visit did give us the opportunity to introduce John, not to the Museum of Appalachia, but to the wonderful Thai restaurant where Mary and I had eaten a couple of days before. At this point, we’re waiting for the doctors to finish their testing, while we get to have Mary and John’s company for at least one more night. We’d happily let them move in with us, if only our house had a bit more space. John and Richard have been like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, rebuilding the porch steps and the pump house with both of their many power tools.

Mary has pointed out that she knows there’s room on our property for a travel trailer of their own, but she’s not sure we have enough space for all of John’s “big boy” toys and tools. While he recently sold his motorcycle, John does still have his sailboat. Somehow, I don’t think our pond can compete with the Great Lakes for sailing. Oh, well…

Water Watching

One of the most scenic drives in this area is the drive from Coker Creek to Chattanooga. We shared this path through paradise with John and Mary. The forested highway from here to Farner is a stunning study in natural beauty with the dappled sunlight sifting through the leaves of the hardwood trees. This is followed by the drive along the Ocoee River where the Olympics held whitewater events in 1996.

Richard and I had once done whitewater rafting with visitors, but we’d never taken the time to visit the whitewater visitors’ center. Mary and John are great travel companions because they’re interested in processes and people, not simply racing from one event to another. We walked over the river on the catwalk bridge created for viewing the river other than from the road.

We enjoyed watching families happily splashing in the pools between the rocks, some of which were deep enough for swimming. This will be a welcome addition to less-than-an-hour away “Granny Camp” activities. While Mary waited for the concession stand manager to brew her a pot of decaf, this very informative man gave us background information on the area, especially the recent rockslide that closed the road and the center for almost six months this winter. This prompted Mary to encourage another stop for viewing the rockslide site.

The best area for seeing this sight turned out to be the put-in for river rafters and kayakers, where we watched these daredevils launch their arks of adventure. We were then able to follow some of them partway down the rapids which span the classifications from class one to class five. I was happy to be comfortably cool and dry watching from an automobile on the road rather than in a wet and wild raft. There are area rivers where the rapids only reach class three; that’s more the speed for me.

The interstate highway approach to Chattanooga offers panoramic vistas of the valley with long-range backdrops of surrounding mountains. With the high humidity in the area, there’s almost always a canopy of cumulus clouds crowning the view. This is almost worth the trip all by itself, but we soldiered on to the city.

Our destination was the Tennessee River Gorge tour offered by the aquarium. Since we were all boaters, and Mary and John still sail the Great Lakes, the prospect of boating on a southeastern river was appealing to all of us. Mary and I got a kick out of the on-board naturalist’s off-the-cuff explanations of the sights we were seeing, but Richard and John I think would have preferred a more didactic dissertation.

I felt right at home standing topside on the boat’s bridge with the breezes blowing through my hair and the sun warming my shoulders. The sounds of the engine and the sight of the spray transported me back to our life on the lake. All that was missing was the smell of salt sea and the sounds of the grandchildren’s voices and laughter.

Musical Mary

Richard refers to her as Sweet Mary,
But this is so limiting.
I think I’ll call her Musical Mary
To honor her gift of singing.

John and Richard replaced the steps
While Mary and I ran the streets.
We ate Thai on our way to Nancy’s
Beautiful woodland retreat.

There are so many things to discover;
It’s nice sharing them with a friend.
I know that I’ll miss this Mary
When her vacation comes to an end.

Mary says she likes to evoke
At least one giggle a day.
I like to be with people who have
Such a ready sense of play.

Finding a Fro

We went to a flea market to find a fro.
“For what?” you say, “did you go?”
Is it a hairdo for curly hair,
Or a direction, as in “to and fro?”
Well, my friend; you’re not even close
To both guesses, I’ll answer, “No.”

When Jack showed Richard his fro,
Richard began to lust for one.
He wasn’t sure what he’d do with it,
But it seemed like it would be fun.
While showing this old-time tool to friends,
Male bonding would be done.

Then Jack was on a mission
To find a fro for his friend.
And when Jack begins a project,
He won’t rest until its end.
Richard now possesses the tool
Whose purpose is to mend.

You see, the old-time roofs
Were protected with wooded shakes.
But how does one replace the ones
That develop cracks and breaks?
A fro is the wood slicer
That this job ideally takes.

John loves to work with wood,
Even while he’s on vacation.
He whittles in every port of call
As he and Mary travel the nation.
A fro for the workshop at his home
Would give him great elation.

Hence the trip to search the stalls
Of vendors of antiques and junk.
We searched, and asked, and perused
The contents of many a trunk.
We finally found a flawless fro --
Well, the flawless part may be bunk.

But John is happy as a pig in a pen
He’ll be able to play “Stump the Chump.”
How many of his Midwestern friends
Will even have a hunch
About this tool from Appalachia?
Quite the game to play at lunch.

Maque Choux and Faux Barbeque

It’s wonderful having guests who are open to anything, but not addicted to activity. Mary and John have been sleeping in, as one would imagine one should do while on vacation. This gives me and Richard the opportunity to also catch up on our beauty rest after staying up later than my bedtime gabbing and guffawing. Of course staying up late and sleeping in is easy here in the summer when darkness doesn’t descend until nine in the evening and the sun doesn’t come over the hill until nine in the morning.

After they were here for a couple of days, we figured it was time to introduce our northern Great Lakes guests to some of our mountain folk. We started with Jack and worked our way over to Mamie. These encounters went well, so we decided to have a bit of a dinner party, even though we only have six kitchen chairs. John and Mary are boaters, and John enjoys classic cars, so we invited Deborah and Charlie over to join us for supper. We all enjoyed swapping tales of automobile escapades and bragging about boating. The boating blunders were at least as entertaining as the bragging.

Even though our guests are from Wisconsin, I figured we’d introduce them to something that they can only get from a Cajun cook. On a pre-BP-oil-spill trip down to Louisiana, I’d brought home forty pounds of Gulf shrimp for our freezer. It was time to put some of them to use, so we had barbeque shrimp (which never see a barbeque grill) over some of Tellico Bakery’s fabulous sourdough bread. The sauce resembles a barbecue sauce in looks only; it’s really mostly a bread dipping sauce of butter, olive oil, paprika and other herbs and spices. We accompanied this with some of the stewed corn dish called Maque Choux that I make by the vat during harvesting season and one of Richard salads, this time with many of the ingredients also grown by him.

Richard outdid himself with the preparation of desserts. In addition to the brownies and homemade fudge sauce that I already had on hand, he whipped up a batch of shortcake with strawberries, blueberries, and custard sauce. Because the custard sauce called for a bunch of egg yolks, he had a lot of leftover egg whites that he baked into a meringue. This gave me the opportunity to wallow in one of my most favorite desserts, floating island, which consists of a puddle of creamy custard sauce topped with a fluffy pillow of perfect meringue. Others at the table got very creative with the ingredients presented. John and Mary’s concoctions resembled banana splits, minus the bananas – shortbread topped with the various fruits, a generous slather of custard sauce and a cloud of meringue.

I thought of asking Mary to sing for her supper, since she is a professional classical singer, but I didn’t want to push my luck. I did, however, inform Charlie and Deborah that before the next time our “Cheese- head” friends come south, we should send Mary some Bluegrass music to practice for her Coker Creek debut.

Violins and Vittles

We began the day’s activities with foraging for food;
Several stops off the mountain were made for this endeavor.
Tellico Grains provided pastries; Kats -- riverside lunch.
With Barn of Plenty’s sweet corn, our supper came together.

After dining, we shared a bit of classical culture;
As we floated together through lovely music by Bach.
We watched violin concert greats and organ masters online
Spending our evening with Grieg, Procofiev, and Itzhak.

I can’t help but wonder how they’ll feel about our Bluegrass,
Where even Stradivarius violins are called fiddles.
I console myself with the thought that it will be okay,
Because I know at least they’ll like our music night vittles.