Soil and Souls

Mamie continues to apologize for the fact that we’re getting no rain on our garden, when we did such a good job of making it so “pretty.” She’s taken to calling to give us permission to, once again, use her water from her well with the failing pump to save our crops.

With downtown temperatures reaching one hundred degrees, and our heat in the holler at over ninety, our latest habit is to wait until the last two hours before nightfall for any gardening work. An early dinner with Mamie is a good start to our endeavors. This accomplishes the watering of our soil with Mountain Mama’s water and of our souls and her words of wit and wisdom.

So far, we haven’t had a day without a harvest. Richard sliced forty-four cups of crookneck squash yesterday, and we have half a bushel of beans to string. We have yet to get our first ripe tomato, but Mamie is already harvesting potatoes, and our onions seem to be giving up on growing. Our cucumbers are rather bitter, possibly from lack of rain – or Mamie says, because we didn’t cut off the bitter ends.
There are so many tricks that Mamie has learned over ninety years, that she can’t possibly remember to tell us everything we need to know prior to us making our mistakes, and some of our errors give us all a guffaw. Before we put up our pickles, we’ll try cutting off the stem end of each cuke.

Richard expressed concern about Mamie’s chickens in light of the humid, hot weather. In her typical style, Mamie said that they weren’t eating much, but neither was she. She knew this was saving her money on feed and hoped that she’d take off a pound or two. Before going to the garden, we reminded Mamie that the failure of our crops would give us less work to do in the kitchen. She was so pleased that we were able to see something good in what she was worrying over, as if she had caused the skies to remain dry.

Both Jack and Mamie have told us that old-time farmers use dirt as mulch for their plants’ roots. Jack says that, during a drought, the old-timers used to plow dirt onto their rows every other day. It was clearly time to bring out the hoe. While Richard hoed, I watered, thinking about how careful I had to be in telling our city friends about Richard “hoeing” while I watched. “Ho” means a whole different thing in city circles that “hoe” does in the country. This realization should be good for a giggle from Mamie next time I see her.

While we may not be so lucky in many things — As soon as we dug our pond, we had the worst drought in Tennessee history, and as soon as we planted our garden the skies refused to supply rain—we’re blessed by with the gift of laughter and friends with whom we can laugh.

Back to Baseline

Back to Baseline

I really must get back to baseline;
I’ve had two days to mope and whine.
Our house feels too big when all are gone
There’s no ready laughter I can depend upon.
Richard and I have lots of fun,
But there’s not as much energy one-on-one.

It’s true that I’m a bit of a basket case. I can never remember a time that I didn’t mourn the leaving whenever a relative or friend came for a visit. All the anticipation, all the planning, all the preparation, and then all the fellowship and fun – gone in an instant when they roll onto our right-of-way.

Richard reminds me that the cleaning after a group leaves is a good time to relive the fun we had making the messes, but some company becomes family and generally cleans up after themselves, so there’s not even the mixed emotions of less work along with the less people. I hate having to get my brain back in gear to address all the realities that I can so easily avoid when we’re entertaining -- things like watering and weeding the garden before it withers.

Mamie made it clear that we’d lose our hard work if we didn’t put some water on it. Even though she’s worried about her well pump, she gave us permission to water the rows as long as we avoided wasting water on the walkways between them. She sweetened the deal with an invitation to join her for dinner. Two of her sisters and their daughters had come to visit for the long holiday week-end, and the family was in and out of Mamie’s house with casseroles and a host of other foods. Mamie regularly reminds me that eating alone isn’t any fun; we were glad to help her finish some of the leftover largesse.

Mamie faces every day what we’re facing now, the loss of her people who provided her daily giggles. With her oldest son in heaven and her oldest daughter in nursing care, she sure has had a lot of loss to bear in one year. I suspect that she never really had to fully feel the loss of her husband thirty-eight years ago as long as his namesake lived almost next door. If my relationship with my children is any indication of a pattern with children born to a very young mother, Mamie’s oldest daughter was probably also a best friend, as I know her son Frank, Jr. was.

Now that Mamie’s my mountain mama, we often bring her goodies from our cooking capers and invite her over to our house for supper. She hardly ever accepts our invitations, but we sure will be happy to oblige any time she wants us to share her home and hearth with us city slickers. We’re always sure to give her a few giggles because I see the world from a standpoint of at least thirty degrees off center while Richard sees everything from a scientific perspective – and because Mamie believes in learning through love and laughter.

Fun, Frolic and Food

As soon as Nikki’s family drove into our drive, we piled them back into the car for a trip to the Ruritan Building for our First Friday supper where they were introduced to many of our mountain people, including Jack Darnell. They were also able to sample lots of fabulous food, not the least of which was our red beans and rice. As soon as Mary and John headed for Wisconsin the next morning, we took off to Tellico Plains to retrieve our latest find from a vendor at The Barn of Plenty, multi-colored ceramic flower pots for serving “dirt,” Mountaintop Mary’s planned dessert for our Granny Camp cookout.

With only three days of doing, we barely scratched the surface of all the things to do in our neck of the woods, but Corinne did collect some of our local treasures, eggs from Mamie’s hens and gold from Coker Creek. We all ate veggies grown in Mamie’s garden, and Tom came close to catching a fish from the shallows in Tellico River. Nikki spent many an hour in our hammock reading and many more knitting and cross stitching on my favorite place on the couch as we chatted. Richard fulfilled her fantasies of sensational salads and sundaes with real whipped cream. I lost count of how many times she announced that she felt like she was in heaven.

Not only did our guests go home with full tummies and gold dust, they also went away with new knowledge and some of our culinary creations. Bill Schaaf from Bill’s Pit Stop and his twin boys, Billy and Eugene, guided a gold panning tour sharing a lot of local lore along the way. Chef Holly’s husband, Don, drove in from Atlanta to give fly fishing lessons to Richard, Tom and Corinne. Corinne and I enjoyed kitchen time, cooking a little something every day of her stay. We were able to send Nikki’s family home with some of her favorite zucchini muffins, Tom’s favorite roasted pecans, and the family’s favorite lasagna, and some flourless peanut butter and jelly cookies thrown in for good measure.

I’ve been so busy living that I’ve had almost no time for writing. I know that this is not the way a writer is supposed to work; at every writers’ conference I’ve ever attended the speakers admonish us to write for a couple of hours a day if we want to be “real” writers. Maybe only recluses can ever become real writers, and reclusive doesn’t tell the tale of any part of what I’d choose for our lives. I could only hope that my memory wouldn’t fail me before I got to the telling of our tales.

Two and a half weeks of fun and frolic with close friends and relations only whetted my appetite for more. Another niece, Ginette, and her four children are planning to be here for four days, but I have to wait for another week and a half before the next Granny Camp session begins.

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.