That “Funny” Fall Feeling

I awoke to a perfect fall day with dappled sunlight through thinning leaves and a nippy breeze billowing the hammock strung between the boughs of the front yard trees. I answered the early-morning ringing of the phone with slight trepidation, as is usual when the phone rings late at night or early in the morning. What a nice surprise! -- the delighted and delightful voice of the Marine mom to whom we brought the furniture and other household donations. She spent several glorious minutes commenting on what a blessing our family has been to her family.

I was glowing as I answered emails, blogged -- which are two of my favorite activities – and spoke to my son, Scott, and my daughter-in-law, Buffy. Richard and I relaxed over breakfast -- as only retirees can do – discussing our plans for the day. Richard then went to Mamie’s to cut the spent cornstalks for making decorative shocks for the Autumn Gold Festival. While there, he cut okra, picked peas, and pulled up carrots. I began organizing the house in preparation for week-end guests. And, I finally found a family in need of a free washer. Richard made that delivery.

Like we needed any more fresh produce in our house, I had placed an order last week for the world’s finest, fattest, sweetest pecans -- (Schermer Pecans, for those who may want to know) in preparation for making Cajun spiced pecans. This year, in addition to making them for Christmas gifts, I may attempt to sell them at the Autumn Gold Festival. Since Jack and I will have a booth at the festival to sell his book, I figure “why not?” When my case of twenty-four pounds of pecans arrived by UPS, I could hardly wait for Richard to carry them to the kitchen.

I can lose myself in the kitchen and computer for days. Between cooking and writing, I could find myself out on the street for forgetting to pay the power bill, if I don’t discipline myself. And I can always find something better to do than cleaning house. I bribed myself to finish my filing before I could reward myself with shelling peas and other kitchen tasks, like roasting pecans.

We eased into the evening – me with white wine and Richard with faux wine. For dinner, we feasted on more of Richard’s sumptuous salads, Richard’s roasted root vegetables, and rotisserie chicken. We ended the day with a CSI fix, as usual.

I should have been basking in a glow of well-being. But when change is in the air, I become suspicious. My moods alternate between anxiety and anticipation. Our dog, Gypsy Woman, and our cat, Buster, also change their behaviors on fall days. Buster takes longer naps and Gypsy seems suspicious of everything that moves, patiently patrolling for what Richard calls “beasties and ghoulies” until Richard signals her that she’s off-duty after dark. Buster, oblivious to Gypsy’s jumpiness, spends even more time snuggled up with his favorite fluffy friend – Gypsy. Maybe Buster has the best idea – We should spend more time snuggling. Or should we become extra vigilant, like Gypsy – preparing our property for a long, cold winter?

I know that in the spring, we call the restlessness “spring fever”, but what do we call that “funny” feeling in the fall?

Following the Flood

I should have known better than to think that Camille could simply load a few items in a truck and head out for Atlanta. Not Camille. First, she went out to unload a couple of years’ worth of “stuff” off the table and desk tops in preparation for dusting the items. Then, she had to locate gorilla glue to repair the legs that had fallen off the antique table. After that, she had to rent a trailer – only to realize that her vehicle didn’t have a tail light harness. My mind had exploded by this point, so we agreed to coordinate our meeting place when she got closer to Atlanta.

Meantime, Rachel and I were having one of our “Lucy and Ethel” adventures finding the home of our Atlanta Flooded Family. Long before arriving at the address we’d been given, we saw the distinctive signs of flooding. Mud-frosted foliage lined the roads, and every road suggested by my navigation system for leading into the area sported several barricades with signs declaring, “Road Closed”. We were unable to call our AFF for alternate directions because the phone in their new apartment hadn’t yet been connected. Never the type of gals to be deterred by having no clue where we are, Rachel and I laughed along, alternately barreling forward and backing up for quite a while before finding our destination – we thought.

Well, it seems that there are adjoining apartment complexes with matching numbering schemes. We knocked. We asked around. We didn’t locate our AFF, but we ascertained that there were a lot of families in this area who were in need of a full complement of household goods. With promises of returning to the wrong address with our donations if we were unable to find the right address, we soldiered on. It may have taken us a bit longer to find the right address because we always treat being lost as just another adventure -- but find it, we did.

By the time we got to our flooded family, another of their friends had given them a washer. We got everything, except the washing machine, unloaded with still no sign of Camille. The last I spoke with her, my sister’s saga was too complicated to comprehend. I never did see her, but I think her carport is cleared.

We were thrilled that one of the parents is in the US Marines and the other works for Fed-Ex and at contract remodeling and renovations. We felt so productive knowing that crisis is not a way of life for this family seeking emergency intervention. And we could feel patriotic, to boot, helping someone who earns her living defending our country. Talk about enlightened self-interest.

I’m still driving around Atlanta looking for someone in need of a washer. Maybe I could be Atlanta’s Wandering Washer Woman if I didn’t need to head back to the holler.

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.