Rains of Ranchipur

While studying for her MBA several years ago , my sister Camille decided to go into the antique furniture business. To this end, she and her daughter Alyssa loaded her carport with their “finds”. Then, reality intervened. Camille got a real job, and Alyssa went to missionary college. The furniture is still under the carport. With the Atlanta Flooded Family (AFF) needing everything to resettle themselves, I had a deal for Camille. I’d pay for the truck if she’d donate the furniture. She can think of it, not as “parting with her stuff”, but as reclaiming her carport.

Camille is always up for a roadtrip. She and I decided to meet in Atlanta to give our gifts to the AFF. Alas, the Rains of Ranchipur revisited Georgia and Coker Creek. I couldn’t see twenty feet out my bedroom window. In order to get the donations to the AFF in Atlanta, I figured it was imperative that I be able to see where I’m going. Driving into the rain, down mountain roads with ninety-degree curves may not be the best idea. So I loaded the van for an early a.m. departure -- and took a long nap. When I awoke, Richard had taken photographs of the swollen creeks racing across our property. The insurance company can laugh, but I know that where there is white-out rain, there is the potential for waist-high water.

Charlie and Deborah donated a washing machine, some kitchen ware, and some of Deborah’s clothes. Since Deborah is one of the best-dressed females in Coker Creek, her donations are divine. Betty, at Coker Creek Consignment and Storage, offered a television set, but with all this digital signal business, I figured the family would only receive snow on an old TV. And they probably don’t need snow added to their rain. Betty did give me some coffee mugs for the cause. Others are waiting to see what comes in before going through their stored treasures.

I’ve heard from friends all over the United States offering to help. Some are sending clothing. Some are sending linens. Some are sending money. – Simply because we asked. My daddy used to have a favorite saying, “People are no damned good.” I haven’t found that to be true. I know that some people aren’t good. But, I find that if you ask people to help in the best way they can, most people are pretty darned good.

Like the Girl Scout song says, “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.” They’re both precious.

An Overdose of Okra

We hadn’t been to the garden in over a week. With Richard being puny from the flu, my travels, and the rain, we’d let the garden go native. I suspected that there was a great deal of okra crying out to be picked, but I was intimidated by the scope of the project. The problem is that I feel guilty if I let any of Richard’s and Mamie’s hard gardening work go to waste. I had a good excuse for not visiting the garden as long as the rain continued. And I was busy writing my blog and lining up donations for our niece's flooded family.

It hadn’t rained in two days, so it’s a good thing Richard woke up in a “harvesting mood”. He headed over to Mamie’s where he found at least a bushel of mutant okra so big it tipped the plants over. We could have used them for billy clubs, but they’re not so good for food. Upon his return home,he heaped high the kitchen counters with fuzzy green giants for me to sort.

While I was cutting the tenderest pods, Jack called. He reminded me that his okra also hadn’t been harvested in over a week. I already had a couple of bushels of the slimy little seedpods. Where was I going to put more? Oy vey! Such an overdose of okra! I wonder if the Israelites had this problem with manna. Did they fill every goat skin bag they had with milk and honey, and then feel guilty because there was no way to use all of God’s gifts at once? There are now two large roasters of okra in the oven, and plenty of pods in the compost heap.I saved the babies for pickling.

That bodacious bounty taken care of, Richard decided to pick up the black walnuts littering our lawn. I’ve been told that the only way to crack them is to place them on a concrete driveway and run them over with your car. We don’t have any concrete, so Richard tried cracking the shells with a hammer. He allowed that the bodily injury this method could cause far outweighed the value of the nutmeats. Now he’s waiting for the walnuts to dry, so he can try other methods of black walnut extraction. I guess we know why the hand-picked pieces of black walnut at Designs by Baerreis are so pricey.

We’re having a lot of company in October. I know I’ll be serving oodles of okra, gobs of green beans and mounds of Maque Chou. And since Jack and I are renting a space to sign and sell his book at the Coker Creek Ruritan’s Autumn Gold festival, I might just decide to sell jars of jelly and other goodies from our garden.

I’m off to Atlanta again to deliver to our flooded family the harvest of household items from our kind Coker Creek friends. I wonder if they’d like some smothered okra…

Never Kiss Your Cousins

Can you believe that there’s a diagnosis for being too happy? I once went to psychologist who gave me a personality test and decided that, “There’s nobody that damn happy.” He then sent me to a psychiatrist who told me I needed a mood stabilizing medication. I knew enough about this medication to know that it could kill my liver. I also knew plenty of people who were on three or four mood altering medications and were still in a bad mood. It seems that when one doesn’t work, the shrinks keep adding more. I refused the medication. Anyway, who ever heard of trying to cure happiness?

People seem to get an itch whenever anything unfamiliar rubs up against them. One thing I like about country people is that they don’t think everything has to be “fixed”. Lots of their people are different; but they seem to celebrate differences, as long as the “different” folks are their folks. They even have a phrase to describe the mentally ill and brain damaged in their families: “He/she ain’t right.” In the country, people seem to look at themselves and their familiars for a way to accommodate the itch. In the city, they seem to look to the experts to “cure” the itch – and cure it in a hurry.

I’m generally considered “not right” by folks whether in the country or in the city. A lot of people like that about me. Richard married me to “bring some life” into his house. Richard is a stoic New Englander who grew up on a nice, stable chicken breeding farm. I tried to warn him that he wasn’t ready for the life forms that I was going to drag through his home. He didn’t know better because he had never been married, even though he was forty-eight years old. So he took the plunge.

My Cajun grandma used to brag that my sister married one of our cousins. She grew up in an era when you judged marriage prospects by who “their people” are. In order to make a good match, you had to have close interfamily ties. When my daddy brought my mama from Bayou Teche, less than one hundred miles away, to Bayou Lafourche to meet his mama’s mama, his grandma started crying, “Oh, Leonard, why you marrying a foreigner?” Daddy’s grandma spoke only Cajun French; Mama’s people spoke only English. And Daddy’s grandma didn’t know any of Mama’s “people”. By great-grandma’s standards, Mama could have just as soon come from another continent.

I guess my mama’s folks weren’t foreign enough. While it’s true that sometimes you win in genetic roulette by breeding like with like, often the weaknesses in the offspring far outweigh the strengths. Even though rural folks used to marry their cousins because they lacked transportation into and out of isolated pockets of population, today’s country people generally like hybrid vigor in their livestock.

I’ll admit that I’m rather high strung, but so are thoroughbred horses. My family all tends toward the “high strung”, and most of them married high-strung people – and have high-strung kids. That makes for family gatherings with a “whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on”.

Richard hasn’t yet asked to get off the roller coaster of our combined lives -- not even when I dragged him to a reunion of our family one summer. I like that about him.

Mountain Mists and Monsoons

As wonderful as the retreat with Gayle was, by the time it was over, I was exhausted. Richard is fond of reminding me that all change is stressful, whether it’s good or bad. No wonder I was exhausted. I’d been to the hospital twice, Roger’s house, the retreat, and Rachel’s house twice. I had also driven over five hundred miles in my almost-two-hundred-thousand-mile-on-the-odometer van.

When I turned on my phone, I found a message from Richard that the rains had been soaking our home for several days. The prediction was for another nine days of rain, so he wanted to make sure that I got home before dark. I called and assured him that would be no problem.

Well, I took a wrong turn not two miles from the retreat center. It wasn’t long before I began to see fuchsia wildflowers that didn’t look familiar, but you know how flowers are: changing daily -- and I’d been on retreat for two days. With my head in the clouds and a smile on my face, remembering the good times with Gayle, I drove on – until I hit a dead end. Oops! I may not make it before dark, after all. The bad news was that I hadn’t a clue where I was. The good news was that I got to pass the beautiful fields of fuchsia flowers a second time. I did, however, focus long enough to get back on the right route.

I drove through light rain in Atlanta, and in and out of showers until I hit Tennessee. My “almost home” spot was enchanted by pockets of fresh-washed, sun-dappled green and gold, alternating with moving mists. It was such a fitting way to re-enter my mountain reality after a week-end of mysticism and shared memories. It was like being gently awakened from a dream.

It seemed surprising to me that all the houses, horses, fields and farms of Coker Creek remained the same. I floated home and found our Great Pyrenees, our tabby cat, and Richard all lined up on the porch. Richard had made salads. I fed the dog. Richard carried in my luggage. We discussed whether Richard had started building an arc and whether I should begin collecting pairs of animals. Richard reminded me that God had promised Noah that there wouldn’t be another world- wide flood. I was home!

The next day was a perfect pajama day – Rain, rain, rain. Most of the day, I sat in my writer’s room (also called the guest bedroom and playroom, depending on whose here). I read, wrote, and relaxed while it rained, rained, rained. Rachel called in the afternoon to tell me that it’s a good thing we moved to the mountains because parts of Atlanta were flooding.

We slept well that night, in our mountain home, to the sound of continued rain on the trees. It’s easier to sleep when you have flood insurance. You should have heard the insurance salesperson laughing when I insisted on flood insurance for our mountain place. I’ll bet the folks in Atlanta aren’t laughing.

I awakened to bright sunlight the following morning. While drinking my coffee, I turned on the news. Oh my God! There were photos of parts of Rachel’s suburbs under eight feet of water. I called Rachel for assurance that her family and friends are okay. They are.

Rachel reminded me that unlike on the coast, there aren’t boats in every Atlanta driveway to do rescue work. And as Roger pointed out, Atlanta people don’t know that if you have to climb to your attic to escape the floodwaters, you should bring an ax for breaking out if the waters keep rising. I began calling other Atlanta friends. Thankfully, all are okay as long as the locusts don’t start swarming.

My niece’s husband has an Atlanta cousin with children that lost her home. We’ve offered them help, and we’re now putting out pleas for help for others who are displaced. We think we know something about how they feel.

That Wild and Crazy Cook

Richard has been doing a lot of cooking. He has always been interested in cooking. When I met him he would create elaborate meals for friends, using the cookbooks of Julia Child. He’s always loved the Julia cookbooks because they have step-by-step photos and give so much detail. Julia Child actually gives twelve steps for boiling an egg. That much detail drives me crazy, but is right in Richard’s comfort zone.

Richard is a scientist and a process person. He’s never in a hurry to get to the end of a project or a journey. We get there when we get there, and enjoy the trip along the way. This is often good, but sometimes gets him in a bit of trouble. Like when he’d choose a complete Julia Child menu and think he could prepare all five courses by himself in one day.

I know that a twenty-four hour day is just a method for keeping track of time, but Richard lives on a continuum of eternal time that doesn’t necessarily synch with the rest of the world. This served him well when he was on hospital call for three or four days in a row, but not so much when having guests for dinner.

The first time he had me over for dinner, I arrived at 7:00p.m. to find him still vacuuming his house. He offered me a drink, told me to make myself at home and disappeared with his vacuum cleaner. I wandered into the kitchen to find Julia Child and Company cookbook open to a paella recipe and all the ingredients laid out on the counter – raw. I had nothing better to do, so I began preparing the paella. Julia Child recipes are not things you can whip up in a half hour. By the time we had dinner, it was 11:00 p.m.

Fast forward to the first time we had a dinner party together. It was important to Richard that he prepare the meal. He pulled out his Julia Child cookbooks, and came up with a menu and grocery list. Since early in our relationship, Richard has minimized our power struggles by insisting that in every shared project, we first decide who is officer and who is enlisted. For this meal, I was enlisted.

As Richard sliced and diced, my job was to stir and sauté. It didn’t take long for me to realize that our meal wouldn’t make it to the table until well after our guests were passed out from hunger (or, quite possibly, from inebriation). Behind Richard’s back, I began to cut corners to save time. We did get the meal done in time, and then agreed that we’d use no more than two Julia recipes per meal.

Since I travel so much, Richard often attends the bluegrass sessions at Charlie and Deborah’s without me. Other attendees look forward to discovering what’s in our chafing dish, and being exposed to something out of the ordinary. Richard’s most recent creation was Paprika Chicken, a rustic stew with carrots, potatoes, onions, red and green bell peppers, and a bunch of spices including caraway seeds and paprika. To feed the crowd, plus leave some for our host and hostess, plus give some to Mamie and some to Jack, Richard had to make a vat of vittles.

When I arrived at home the day after bluegrass, Richard regaled me with stories of his kitchen conquests. He was so proud of his method for efficiently deboning all that chicken, and how well he utilized so much of our fresh-from-Mamie’s-garden produce. He was positively poetic in his praise of our potatoes; they were so firm, so flavorful, so fantastic. And the ease with which he deseeded the peppers; I should have seen him at work…

Everyone loved the dish, and he had saved a generous portion for me. I agreed that it was, as Richard would say, “A keeper”.

The only complaint Richard had was that the directions in the cookbook were faulty. I pointed out that I found this hard to believe based on the results of Richard’s efforts. In his very precise manner, Richard explained to me that the instructions had said to cube the bell peppers. He was horrified! How could this be? If he cubed the peppers, they would be only five sixteenths of an inch cubes, and this was a rustic dish. He had to make an executive decision. Did I tell you that Richard likes rules? Was he to disobey the rules?

Richard decided to cut the peppers into half inch squares, throwing all caution to the wind. I told him I think he’s about to graduate from cook to chef.

Jumping Jack and Happy Hens

I’m heading to Georgia to be with Holly and Don while Don has surgery for liver cancer, and then on to visit another dear friend from my ten years living in Atlanta, Roger. Then it’s off to Columbus, Georgia to attend a retreat with my new-mother-days neighbor, Gayle. So, I made the rounds to collect veggies and deliver cooked samples before my departure. We hadn’t picked Jack’s okra or peppers for several days, and I didn’t want Jack’s labors to go to waste. I really am a sucker for fresh okra.

I arrived at Jack’s house to find a solar collector aimed at the morning sun in front of his porch. Jack’s marine battery, that powered his television before the digital conversion made it impossible for a lot of mountain folk to receive anything other than satellite television, was hooked up to the solar collector. He had borrowed Cotton’s solar collection panel to give it a try running an electric light bulb. He likes the extra light so much that he and his cousin are considering buying their own solar set-up. What’s next -- a word processor to replace his manual typewriter? I think we’re in danger of Jack jumping over the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

We sat in the cool autumn breeze on his porch and talked about the trip Richard and I took with Charlie and Deborah to Oak Ridge. This led to a discussion of our hopes for the future of solar and wind power. Jack allowed that he’s not averse to accepting modern-day technologies; he simply wants the benefits to outweigh the costs – to the environment and to his way of life. We then walked to the garden up the road.

After collecting okra, we walked back down the road to his kitchen garden on the side of his house. As we collected the peppers, and a couple of ears of Silver Queen corn, Jack told me how he keeps his garden soil healthy by composting all his organic waste. I was intrigued by his telling of how some old-time farmers used to allow their brush piles to decompose on their fields, mowing around them as they rotted. I wonder if this is where the custom of raking leaves originated.

After lunch, Richard and I went to Mamie’s to help her clean her hen house. Both Jack and Mamie use a small amount of commercial fertilizer because they don’t create enough animal and yard waste to substitute for it. Jack has only one horse to clean up after, and Mamie’s several dozen chickens aren’t exactly a commercial egg-laying operation. But they do poop, so Richard and I decided to collect their offerings and transfer them to our garden plot for feeding next year’s crops.

Richard’s lack of immune system because of his heart transplant dictates that he’s not allowed to breathe in a chicken house. Not breathing could seriously inhibit his ability to shovel shit. (Excuse my being crude, but sometimes there is no substitute for the perfect word.) For this type of task, we purchased a super-high-efficiency face mask. With Richard looking and sounding like a cheap knock-off of Darth Vader and me in my honest-to-goodness cowboy boots, we entered the laying house.

Mamie and I were the bucket brigade. Mamie positioned empty buckets for Richard to fill, while I transported the full containers to Richard’s trailer. Richard positioned the trailer near the garden and took empty buckets from me while he, quite literally, took a breather. I walked over all of the played-out parts of our garden, sifting the poop over the soil. I also found out why cowboy boots are called shit-kickers; the pointy toe is a great way to break up clods of you-know-what. Next time Mamie’s son Junior tills (or is it plowing?), the manure will be incorporated into the dirt. We finished the yearly hen house cleaning in less than two hours. I think a farm family originated the saying, “Many hands make light work.”

Who knew that cleaning a chicken house would be another “homecoming” for Richard? He says that, when he was a kid, his family egg layer breeding operations supplied six hundred trucks – that’s about three thousand tons – of chicken poop to North Brookfield, Massachusetts farmers per year. He waxed ecstatic about how nice and dry and easy to handle Mamie’s chicken poop was compared to the poop he shoveled as a child. And he looked like a proud papa that had just finished painting the nursery as he surveyed the chickens fluffing the newly laid straw litter in the newly cleaned hen house.

Mamie insisted on paying us for our labors. I tried declining payment on the basis that I had read in Budget Travel about farms charging one thousand dollars a week to teach “campers” how to farm by using them as hired help. When that didn’t work, I explained that if she taught at an agricultural college, they’d pay her probably fifty thousand dollars a year-- And we weren’t paying her anything for her knowledge. Mamie laughed and started our payment with four dozen of her good, brown yard eggs.

Mountain Mama

I’ve always admired the women of the Old Testament. They seemed to be women of substance, who knew how to survive and protect their children no matter what life threw at them. Their attitudes were more “Bring it on.” than “Wait and worry.”

Mamie Murphy is that kind of woman. She was only fourteen years old when Frank took her as his bride. Frank had left Coker Creek looking for work, as did many people during the Great Depression. He hired on at Mamie’s daddy’s Texas farm, and fell in love with the little spitfire named Mamie.

Just like in the Bible, Frank worked for his love’s daddy to earn his bride. Unlike in the Bible, he didn’t have to first marry her sister to get Mamie. Now, Mamie’s daddy didn’t know that Frank planned to take his oldest daughter from him, but Mamie’s mom and sisters saw that he was worthy and helped them elope. It was to be three years before she saw her family again.

Leaving her mother, father and four younger sisters, Mamie traveled more than twelve hundred miles with her new husband. This journey to a new life took her from her familiar surroundings in the flatlands of Texas to the wild wonders of the Cherokee National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains. By the time she reached her fifteenth birthday, she had her first child, a daughter she named Jean.

Times were hard everywhere, and Coker Creek was no exception. In 1934, the timber industry was the only viable industry in the area. Frank’s family worked in the lumber industry, and in 1935 opened several businesses to service the industry: a sawmill, a general store and post office. When electricity became available to the area, Mamie traveled the mountains signing people up for electricity. When she had enough customers to make it worth the while of the utility company to run the lines, they added a Laundromat. The family also farmed vegetables and raised chickens for eggs. They even took a stint at raising hogs. Mamie says that families used to trade products from their farms. One family may have a milk cow, and the next may have a crop of potatoes. They would trade for what they needed.

Mamie, with a baby on her hip – and three more in her future -- farmed, clerked, planted, picked and plucked. She also acted as postmistress of Coker Creek for fifty years.

Just about the time Mamie and Frank got their children reared, Frank died. Mamie kept on running her home, farm, store and the post office. When, while a still-young widow, her store burned down with a new shipment of merchandise, she took to her bed for two hours and then got up to do what had to be done to reopen the post office. She says she’s always too busy to get depressed.

Whenever discussing a life-changing event like a death in the family, my Cajun grandma would preface the discussion with a question, “Do you want to laugh or do you want to cry?” We would then frame our stories in terms that would evoke the desired emotion. No matter what we discuss, Mamie manages to spin the story in a positive direction with her ever -present gift of good humor and the constant twinkle in her blue eyes. Mamie clearly prefers to laugh.

Mamie is almost ninety years old now. When we met, she told me that after running the post office for fifty years, she figured that if she was going to do anything else with her life, she better get to it. Mamie is still raising crops and chickens for eggs. She does all her own housework, even though she says it takes her a while to straighten up in the mornings. And she has a revolving door of guests to whom she serves her wonderful home-grown, home-cooked vegetables.

As a matter of fact, she’s looking forward to the second week-end in October, her busiest time of year for entertaining out-of-state guests. Her oldest son Frank, Jr. is very active in the Coker Creek Ruritan Club. The second week-end in October is when they put on their annual fundraiser, the Autumn Gold Festival. Mamie will be putting several families up at her house for the week-end.