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As I write this column, Lib, our mare and soon-to-be- mother, has not yet had her foal. However, there will be a new moon on her due date, April 19, and the farmer says this phase of the moon is bound to be a factor. He says she could “go any time.” In addition to watching the moon, the farmer has been watching his horse. Now that she is showing signs of preparation for labor, the farmer is feverishly reading his horse reference works. The other night he was so much into the foaling chapter in Horse Care that he didn’t even perk up when the weather came on. He did pause long enough to instruct me to get the tincture of iodine ready. I raised 4 rambunctious boys without having to stockpile tincture of iodine. Maybe they have this at CVS or Big Lots? To his credit, the farmer has cleaned out Lib’s stall, hauling in about 8 inches of wood shavings to make her comfortable. I could have hugged his neck for this. Sentimentality aside, our main concern is that the baby will come during the middle of the night – and we won’t be there. The farmer wants to be on hand, but this is a sure 'nough Biblical case of the spirit’s being willing but the flesh being weak. Were I to wake him at 10 PM, midnight, or 2 AM with news of the mare’s impending delivery, I’m not sure I could “roust” the farmer out of bed. That’s why another neck I could hug is that of Mother Nature herself. She so arranged it that none of my babies came at an inconvenient time for the farmer. Two were born after supper, one at 2 AM, and the other right after breakfast. The only birth that conflicted with the dairy operation was the third son, born after breakfast, and the one at 2 AM, well, the farmer woke up for the key parts. Although our lives no longer revolve around milking schedules (or my OB appointments), the farmer still hits the sack with the crickets and gets up with the roosters, as if he had 88 Holsteins to milk twice a day. Despite the vows I made on our wedding day, I never got acclimated to his schedule. My belief is that if God means for us to go to bed at 8 PM, why does the news come on at 11 PM? Constitutionally speaking, I used to be able to stay up half the night. When we lived in the old farm house, this meant the fire in the woodstove burned 24/7. The last log I threw on lasted till the farmer got up between 4 and 5 AM. But this old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. Last night, I checked on Lib off and on all night, and am worn to a frazzle. At least I didn’t have to hike back and forth through the pasture to the barn. The farmer has rigged me up a high-powered halogen spotlight. My job is to go out in the yard, beam the light down at the barn and see what Lib is up to. What do our sons think? Just another case of their parents going “high-tech red-neck.” At least this time, it’s for a good cause.
On the eve of Easter, Baby Miles came home from college bursting with spring fever: he and his daddy would plant a vegetable garden on the back 40! Of course, by vegetables they mean corn, beans, tomatoes and okra. Far be it from me to ask them to plant Chinese cabbage. This year, a prolific vegetable garden couldn’t be more critical. About a month ago, someone committed a major faux pas down at the barn. It may even have been a crime. “Someone” unplugged the deep freeze in order to plug in a welder. This went unnoticed at first. Then the weather warmed up, and the collards started smelling. When the farmer first whiffed the collards, he assumed the smell was coming from the hay he’d bought for his soon-to-foal mare. But the smells intensified, and even the pregnant part-Percheron began to swoon. Eventually, the commingling of smells from fermenting corn, blackberries, and catfish overtook the barn, the animals and the farmer. While waiting on either the rapture or a good time to dispose of the “food,” the farmer plugged the freezer back in and refroze the remains. Once word of this gets out, I’ll never be invited to rejoin the Homemakers Club. In fact, I’ll probably be canned! For failing to follow proper canning and freezing procedures is to homemakers what failing to follow proper torquing procedures is to mechanics. It was several days before the farmer summoned the courage to tell me about our loss. Only those who have worked up 60 quarts of corn on a 98-degree July day can plumb the depths of my grief. What a precious treasure is freshly-frozen Southern-sweet cut-off corn. Money can’t buy it, even at a high-dollar grocery store. Great corn is something you do. “So, we lost our corn,” the farmer said. “I’ll plant more.” But who will compensate me for last July’s blood, sweat and tears? Ditto for the blackberries. At my age, I don’t need to be out in the briar patch rooting for blackberries. Why didn’t the farmer guard these with his very life, or at least put a steel trap on the freezer cord? Poor Miles. He lost his catfish and deer hamburger. Son Jason said he thought he might have had a bear in there. And the farmer says we lost hog jowls along with our rhubarb. To his credit, the farmer has a plan. “Don’t you worry,” he says. “First I’m going to bury what was in the freezer and then I’m going to plant you a big garden. Even if the drought comes back, we’ll clean out the spring so that you can water your garden.” “My garden.” This is how the farmer is making it up to me. Every spring, hope springs eternal in families tied to the land and hooked on gardening. It’s easy to envision tall green cornstalks swaying in the breeze -- and 160 quarts of Silver Queen and Seneca Chief headed for the deep freeze. Miles and the farmer have planted the back 40 in just such unbounded hope. But Monday Miles will go back to NC State and the farmer to the Snack Shop. Who will grow “my garden”? I reckon it’s appropriate on Easter to recognize, that like everything else worthwhile in life, this garden will ultimately be up to the Good Lord.
At my age, you would think it would take a whole lot more than the morning’s news to rattle my cage. Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had heard about every cockamamie idea known to man... Then this mother of 4 grown boys blew a gasket upon reading in the newspaper that a man with a degree in education stated that taking naps in kindergarten is a waste of valuable learning time. First they take prayer out of schools, now naps! This expert obviously hasn’t read Robert Fulghum’s essay, “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” These are just 3 of life’s many lessons to be learned in kindergarten and I quote: “Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Take a nap every afternoon.” I rest my case. And I take you back to the summer of 1976, the year public kindergartens were launched in the Cleveland County Schools. Due to a lack of something, probably money, there was a lottery to determine which 5-year-olds would be eligible to attend. Being resistant to this new-fangled idea, I was ecstatic when our first-born, Jason, was not selected in the kindergarten lottery. Kindergarten would wreak havoc with Jason’s sleeping schedule. He often took a morning nap and always took a 2-hour afternoon nap. Having to go to school all day would be the death of him. As my luck would have it, August approached and the “Central Office” decided that the lottery was unfair and that kindergarten must be available and mandatory for every 5-year-old Cleveland Countian. I marched right up to the school house for probably the only confrontation I ever had with the teacher and the principal. “I want to register as a conscientious objector,” I said. “Our son cannot possibly survive without his afternoon nap. He can come to school for the morning’s session, but then I’ll have to pick him up, take him home, and tuck him in.” In the end, of course, the educational bureaucracy won out. I cried watching him enter the classroom, taking our very best bath towel with him. It was small consolation that after lunch he would be allowed to nap on the floor on his towel. The pediatrician added his assurances that this arrangement wouldn’t hurt Jason, but I’m not sure. To this day, he dozes off at all hours, obviously trying to overcome the sleep-deprivation of his early years. Our other sons also were avid nappers. Maybe that’s because when they were not sleeping, they wore themselves to a frazzle climbing, running, jumping, building, tearing down, biking, racing, rolling, chomping down, wrestling and mudding. My theory was that boys needed to play hard and rest well. Someone asked Jason recently how in the world his mother survived 4 boys. Jason let the cat out of the bag, “Easy. Every morning, as soon as we ate our Froot Loops, she bundled us up and made us go outside to play.” Thank goodness we lived in a time when it was safe for boys to venture – and mostly adventure -- outside. And in a place where common sense prevailed in kindergarten classrooms.
If you happen to be the next person to ask if the farmer is adjusting to retirement, step back while I holler, “YES!” The farmer has always loved life, so what is there to adjust to? Granted there are some among us for whom retirement is more than just another day. The farmer, however, is not one of these types. Neither the smallest nor the largest life experiences rattle his cage. In other words, had he been in Dallas last week when the gorilla got loose in the zoo, the farmer would have followed at an unsafe distance, hollering, “Hey, would y’all take a look at that?” And he would have spun stories about it for 2 decades at the Snack Shop. Neither the drastic change in his employment nor in his daily schedule fazed the farmer. This means, of course, that he still wakes up before the other roosters, perks the first pot of coffee, and reflects on the meaning of life and the condition of the tires on his menagerie of trucks, trailers, and tillers. But even the most down-to-earth among us can only reflect so long. What next? Just before sunrise, he wakes me up, sending me out to exercise while he boils a pot of oatmeal for me and fries a pan of cholesterol for his own breakfast. After that, I’m not sure what’s happening while I’m at work. However, here is what I know. All the yard work and a hint of the housework is getting done. In the process, he is hogging our shared mobile phone minutes. Mostly, these calls are to other male retirees who relish conversations about barns, bulls, and back-then. When my favorite retiree promised to refinish an antique meal chest, I had visions of how glorious retirement could be. We are now into Month 3 on this simple, straight-legged project. When I asked if there were an anticipated completion date, he simply said, “Don’t worry. When I get it done, it will be soon enough.” He’s right, of course. A couple of weeks ago I came down with a cold, which gave me a clearer view of how he’s handling retirement. Actually, the view wasn’t clear at all. Instead, there was an early morning bonfire in the vicinity of the barn. We had known that the place could go at any time, but did it have to happen with me too sick to care? Finally, I shivered my way down to the barn – to find the farmer and his dog deliberately torching what was left of PaPa’s GrandPaPa’s old tool barn. “It had to go,” the farmer said sadly, then beaming as he pointed to the new shed and lean-to that he’s been constructing. “Just think,” he said, “of the fish frys we can have this summer.” And so it goes, my husband reinventing himself and his Retirement Headquarters day by day. He still calls the office most afternoons, wondering what’s cooking for supper. Unpredictably, like the other night, he fixes supper. That night he greeted me with a five-pound potato he had baked for me. “Um,” he grinned, “you ought to hug my neck for this.” How can you wring the neck of such a guy?
In our glory years, when we milked cows and grew seed corn, the last man on the totem pole was me. But after 16 years of playing second fiddle to cows named Dolly and Big Bag, I earned a degree of respect when we moved to the suburbs of Hot Water Town. Though not exactly a “soccer mom,” I did carry the titles of “coon hunter’s mom” and “budding violinist’s mom.” (Same family – different offspring.) Then several years ago the farmer figured out a way to return to the land by buying horses and driving carriages. This is good, I said. At least horses don’t come down with mastitis the morning you’re having another baby. A year ago, our son the “budding violinist” turned “guitar picker” told his dad about a stud horse he’d found on the Internet: “Bogie,” short for Humphrey Bogart. The next thing I knew, I was riding shotgun with the farmer in a Ford pickup, hauling our two best mares over the Appalachian Mountains. And Bogie, towering at least 20 hands, was certainly an equine wonder. We left Lou and Lib with Bogie for several months on the horse farm in Abingdon, Virginia. Money was changing hands while we waited on Mother Nature. Finally, Bogie’s rightfully proud owner sent Lou and Lib home, telling the farmer they should foal this spring. Lib is due first, on April 10. The farmer is asking about baby shower protocol. ”I’m 62 years of age,” he says, “and I’ve never had a foal.” Neither have I, but I know when to keep silent. “Is it tacky,” he asks, “to have a shower and hope people bring money for the baby?” In the South, it’s worse than tacky, it’s obscene. The farmer checked with the vet, who has assured him that, unlike dairy cows, horses usually foal within 20 minutes and with hardly a hiccup. “And,” the vet added, “80 % foal between 11 PM and 1 AM. You can’t imagine how much this news has enhanced my standing with the farmer. “At last,” the farmer says, “you will come in handy for something! Being a night owl, you can make nightly runs to the barn as Lib’s due date approaches.” I’ve agreed to play the role of midwife or doula or Paul Revere – as long as there are no rats at the barn. The farmer assures me that the only uninvited guest at the barn is an occasional goat. My sister-in-law is also devising a strategy to get herself invited to the birthing. On a recent trip, Brenda was noticeably silent. Finally, she announced, “I’ve been timing myself and I haven’t said a word for 5 full minutes. Cline, this proves I can be quiet when Lib is having her baby. Put me on the list to come.” We are in the final days of the countdown. For my part, I’ve bought a souped-up memory card for the digital camera so that I can beam baby pictures across the South and possibly the Atlantic. And don’t be surprised if you are among the first to hear. Look for the good news in the Star -- in the New Arrivals section.
Several weeks ago, I spent a few days at an out-of-town meeting in Winston-Salem. At noon, upon checking out of my room at the very fancy conference center, I was met by the bellman who took hold of my 4 assorted bags. It was pouring rain and the meeting was not over, so I gave the bellman $4 and made this simple request: “Please take these 4 bags to my car and bring my briefcase back in.” If he said anything other than “Yes, Ma’am,” I didn’t hear it. In a few moments, he was back with my briefcase and I rejoined the meeting. At 5 pm, the rain was still pouring as the meeting adjourned and I dashed for my car. As I drove away, I immediately became obsessed with worries about my luggage. Had the bellman put the bags in my car? All 4 of them? Despite the heavy rain, shouldn’t I check? “A stitch in time saves nine,” I could hear Grandma say. The more Grandma quoted clichés to me, the more I said to myself, “You are just getting like an old lady yourself, obsessing over every little thing. You paid the guy $4, you asked him to put your stuff in the car, and it’s back there. Get a grip and get a life.” On the outskirts of Winston, I passed a church parking lot and felt led to pull off and count my luggage. But it was fixing to flood and there was no shelter in the parking lot, so I kept driving. By the time I got home that Friday night, I was too lazy to unload the car. The bellman at our house, i. e., the farmer, said he’d bring my bags in on Saturday morning. “Surely with all your stuff, you can make it till tomorrow morning.” Saturday morning, I was having a bad hair day and needed the curling iron. The farmer sprang for my luggage but soon came in with this announcement, “There’s no luggage in your car.” After about 10 minutes of his theatrical display, I decided he was telling the truth. So we called Graylyn in Winston-Salem. The bellman had placed my stuff in storage, not in my car. They implied I should have known this was standard protocol. Unfortunately, standard protocol is not my forte. Then I remembered the friend who had remained in Winston for the weekend. If she would bring my belongings to her home in Charlotte, we’d get them Sunday. My friend agreed. In the meantime, I would make do with the farmer’s toothbrush and cologne. Worried about my coping skills, Sunday after church the farmer drove us to Charlotte. We quickly got my carpet bag, laptop computer, and 2 pieces of luggage. My goal was to get out of Dodge without further embarrassment. As my friend went back inside, the farmer tossed me the car keys. Giddy with excitement over getting my shoes back, of course I was not myself. Which explains why I backed our brand-new car into the Good Samaritan’s high dollar Charlotte mailbox. Her mailbox survived. But my car and my ego? The marks show. And from heaven, Grandma is still pontificating: “I told you so.”
Every year, if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, I host our family’s annual Scrabble tournament. Of course it’s primarily an excuse to come together from the four corners of North Carolina and Tennessee. On a scale of 1 to 10, with the ACC tournament being a 10, our Scrabble tournament may only be an 8. But if not heart-stopping, the action at our tournament is certainly gut-wrenching. The gut-wrenching is not due solely to the game but is also due to the vast amounts of snack food consumed during the games. Last weekend, Cynthia, my Tennessee sister, ate an entire bag of Chex snack mix during one game. She lost anyway, when I went out first and she had to eat her letters. Which brings me to the risk middle-aged Scrabble players face when we combine scrabbling with snacking. To date, we have not yet had a player remove a tile from the bag and momentarily mistake the letter “E” for a Frito. However, it’s just a matter of time. Of course, this would stop tournament play cold. It would be impossible to play the game with only 11 “E” tiles. I reckon were this to happen we would do the unthinkable: head to Wal-Mart to buy a new game. The other reason our tournament is gut-wrenching is because it’s heady stuff. We rack our brains trying to beat our 2 sisters. We strategize to make points while not setting up a sibling up for a triple word score. The unthinkable happened last weekend when Cynthia set both Janice and me to triple her high-scoring “Q” word. The clobbering was so serious that II was afraid Cynthia would pack her Scrabble Dictionary and go back to Tennessee. The drama began with Cynthia proudly playing the word “quest.” Though she was relieved to get rid of the “Q,” she worried we would make her word plural. She pointedly asked if I had an “S,” which would allow me to triple the word. While I usually adopt a poker-face strategy, this time I pitifully said, “Cynthia, you don’t need to worry about me. I don’t have an “S” or a “blank.” No sooner did Cynthia lay down “quest” than I said, “No, I don’t have an “S” or a “blank” but I do have an “I” and an “N.” I blatantly turned her “quest” into “inquest” and tripled her/my word. Adding insult to injury, sister Janice had an “S” to tack on the other end, tripling the word again. The reason I give you this play-by-play is so you can see how exciting this game can be. Here are the statistics from last weekend’s tournament: We played 4 games: Cynthia 0; Janice 1; Spencer 1; Kathryn 2. They say I just got lucky and got all the good letters. Cline said it was because I was sitting the way the bathtub sits in the house. Mama said it was because I write all manner of stuff and have mastered the art of twisting words. Cynthia said we should order an “inquest” to make sure I hadn’t looked at her tiles. Maybe next time she should just figure out where the bathtub is and sit accordingly.
What I wonder about reality TV shows is how they have survived. Who’s watching, and how come? My idea of a good time does not consist of being dumped out in a jungle far from home with people whose mission it is to do me in. If I had wanted this kind of life, I would have stayed in the classroom. But evidently reality shows are wildly popular with viewers -- and advertisers. Even women my age coyly admit to being hooked on watching to see who can survive the latest shocker in TV land. The more bizarre our culture’s TV preferences become, the more the farmer and I are turning counter culture. The farmer says he would sooner watch cats sleep than watch TV programs about folks who eat worms and talk trash. Ironically, if trash talking is your idea of entertainment, you ought to catch the eruption in our den if one of our sons decides to watch a show like “Friends.” It may be family hour all across America, but not so at our house if someone stops for 30 seconds to watch a sitcom. “Turn that thing to Antiques Road Show,” the farmer hollers. “Now that’s a good program. It’s worth watching the show just to see a guy haul in a chest of drawers and find out it would have been worth $180,000 if his grandfather hadn’t refinished the front and replaced the drawer pulls.” Though thankfully “Antiques Road Show” comes on frequently, it’s not frequently enough. So what does my antique watch if his favorite show isn’t on? Basketball, if he can stomach the coach and it’s ACC. And we both still enjoy matching our wits against the contestants on “Jeopardy” and “Millionaire.” Although we are Millionaire wannabees, we would never make it into the contestant pool. It’s not that we don’t know who invented the cotton gin; it just takes us 13 minutes to sift through all the inventors we ever knew and settle on Whitney. Or was it Whitney Houston? Which brings me to the Weather Channel and its cousin, the Weather Doppler Channel. “Pure entertainment,” the farmer says, sometimes following the Doppler so long without blinking an eye that I suspect it hypnotizes him. The other night the TV weather was frightfully uneventful and the only basketball game was from far-off and way-out New Jersey. There was nothing to do but watch one of our 3 DVDs. Even after he beamed the halogen light at the contraption in order to get the DVD player working, it wouldn’t. Finally the farmer tracked a son down in a restaurant in Spartanburg, with the middle-ager’s perennial question, “Son, how do you get this blasted thing to work?” We never did, with the farmer admitting, “I might as well be trying to fly a jet airplane as operate this DVD player.” Which explains what happened next. After searching 100 TV channels, the only thing left to watch was “Jurassic Park III.” “At least it’s not one of those *&#* survivor shows,” the farmer bragged, as Hollywood’s dinosaurs roamed through our den scavenging for humans to devour. If Nielsen analyzed our TV viewing habits, heads would probably roll. Ours.
Hopefully writing columns about my nutty mother is not a violation of the Fifth Commandment. But at 81, Mama continues to be a rich source of personal and literary inspiration. Up till now, I’ve been too embarrassed to write of what happened at Thanksgiving. After our traditional noontime feast, Mama challenged her 3 daughters to keep up with her on her daily 5-mile walk. Certainly we could and we did – until we got to the pecan tree in front of the radiator shop. As we approached the shop, Mama bared her soul. Her conscience was clear, she said, if she picked up only the pecans that had fallen on the sidewalk and on the curb. But what about the pecans that fell in front of the shop? If none of the mechanics who worked there gathered them, meaning the nuts were going to waste, was it stealing if she picked them up? What if she only gathered a few nuts but not all of them? And lastly, she wondered, since we were younger, could we quickly stuff our pants pockets and coats pockets while she watched for the police? We could and we did, which made our walk even more beneficial, weighted down with a few pounds of pecans apiece. The next day, we returned to our homes, leaving Mama cracking out her haul. She continued to wear coats and pants with big pockets and to gather all the pecans on the sidewalk and the curb, and a few in the yard. Her moral dilemma reached a crisis several weeks ago when the power company severely pruned the coveted tree, showering pecans everywhere. Mama knew that taking all the pecans that had fallen outside the perimeter of the radiator shop was not a violation of the Eighth Commandment. But, to avoid inordinate sin, she had to take lots of walks to make off with the ones that had now fallen within the small space she deemed to be the radiator man’s property. The more times she walked by the tree pruned of nut-bearing limbs, however, the worse she felt. She wondered if the pruning was a sign. What about the Tenth Commandment? Or even the First Commandment? Last week, our Sunday School-teaching/Baptist preacher’s wife/Mama could no longer live with herself. She walked into the radiator shop, pecan pie in hand, and asked for the owner. Then she announced, “I’m the squirrel that’s been taking your nuts.” Mama said the radiator man laughed at her, saying, “We knew that all along. In fact, sometimes we would pile the nuts up to make it easier for you to get them, but you never would take the whole pile. So we’d have to scatter them out for you.” With this revelation, Mama said she surely was glad that in addition to the pie, she had brought along an offering of a bag of pecan halves and a thank-you note with $5 in it. The radiator man said that the pecan tree had belonged to his late mother, but with her passing, he was happy for our mother to squirrel away the pecans. I think we all sleep better at night since our mother has come clean -- and can honestly teach her Sunday School class all ten of the Commandments.
In our own ways, columnists are in the entertainment business. That’s why the farmer said it would be A-OK for me to put my two cents in about the Super Bowl Halftime Show Incident. Since I write a family column, you’ll have to read between the lines to get all of what could be said. First of all, let me carefully set the stage for how this incident played out in our den. The farmer and I were home alone. I had not invited the children over to watch the Super Bowl with us because I was afraid they would come. The farmer had said it would be better that way, since we could turn the TV up as loud as wanted to and doze off as often as we needed to. We used to shake our heads and exchange knowing looks when we visited his aging parents and their blaring TV. Now our children exchange those same knowing looks. The Super Bowl should not be a time for old folks to go on a guilt trip. Nor did we need an invitation anywhere else. Several years ago we had splurged on a TV with a screen big enough for us to see. Therefore, Sunday night we parked ourselves in front of our big screen and put the volume on “deafening.” However, once the halftime show came on, the farmer hit the “mute” button. Rhetorically speaking, he wondered who in his right mind would enjoy a show like the one we were being forced to watch. Although I agreed that the show was b-o-r-i-n-g, I asked him to turn the sound back on. “Surely there will be some redeeming social value to the words of the songs,” I said. “When pigs fly,” the farmer said, echoing what an up-north TV commentator had said about the Panthers’ chances of winning the Super Bowl. So there we were. Super Bowl Sunday night, staring at a whopper of a TV, bemoaning the half-time show’s lack of sizzle. Finally, the farmer said, “Why didn’t they invite George Strait? At least you can understand what he’s saying, and he doesn’t prance around like a cow on wild onions.” What could I add to that? So I cupped my ears, listening to the words. They might as well have been singing in Croatian. We were already full of moral indignation by the time Janet Jackson showed up. Not having anything else to say, we sat there staring at the big screen, counting the minutes till the football players reappeared and rescued us from our misery. In other words, a confession: although the farmer and I both have new pairs of high-dollar bifocals, we missed the entire Janet Jackson incident. Imagine our shock the next morning when the newspaper was abuzz with the scandalous performance. Which means that we are appalled that it happened and appalled that we missed it. Makes me wonder if it’s safe for us to be at home alone.
The Ice Storm of January 2004 couldn’t have come at a better time. Just when this state was fixing to explode with Super Bowl Fever, the ice cooled us down, mercifully forcing us – and the media -- to focus on something other than today’s game. When it became obvious that last week’s storm would result in serious icing, I parked my car in the garage and myself in the house. For 2 glorious days. When I’d traded cars earlier last year, the salesman assumed I’d want the 4-wheel drive version of the Toyota Highlander. “You don’t want four-wheel drive, lady?” he’d asked. I reckon he’d properly sized me up as country. I looked like the type who’d jump at spending the extra thousand in order to do some serious mud-bogging. “Between the men in my family, there are at least 6 trucks with four-while drive,” I explained. “Been there, done that. If I need a 4-wheel drive to get there, I don’t want to go.” The car salesman, who appeared to be from the same place as the Patriots, just wouldn’t turn it loose. He implied that as a good mother, I’d need 4-wheel drive to navigate through snow and ice in order to get bread and milk. I came close to saying something unkind about his mama not being able to make biscuits. “A country girl can survive,” was all I said, keeping my storm secrets and my recipes to myself. In the end, I drove off without 4-wheel drive, with the salesman smiling broadly. For sure he’d found a way to tack that thousand on anyway. Do I regret foregoing the 4WD version? Do I regret having to stay home during a winter storm? Do I mind being trapped inside with my favorite stuff: the refrigerator, the piano, and the computer? No regrets for me -- not as long as this country girl is married to a country husband who views ice as an opportunity to put his Ford through the traces. If I were to run out of molasses, he’d drive to Casar and back for me. Although I don’t have the research to back it up, I believe that every local male who owns a Ford, and possibly a Dodge, pickup is wired like this. While my husband, age 62 going on 17, was cresting hills and testing bridges, I opted for a different challenge. The break from work and the Super Bowl meant I could tackle our new computer with its cluster of peripherals. Would 2 ice days be enough time to learn the Palm, the digital camera, and the Zip? Not to mention the new scanner, printer, and software? If the bread supply held and I didn’t have to stop to make biscuits, maybe. So many gizmos, so few brain cells left. After a couple of days of importing, downloading, and formatting, I wondered if perhaps the Patriot car salesman hadn’t been right. Mud-bogging may be more my speed. When the ice cleared, what a relief to return to work and normalcy -- and lots of Panther Fever!
Not for a moment would I purport myself to be a diehard Panthers fan. When the PSLs were being sold, the farmer said he’d rather put his money on a buggy. Nevertheless, football is my favorite spectator sport. All I know about football I learned from my alma mater, Wake Forest. Thirty-five years of supporting the Deacs on the gridiron teaches you optimism. Indeed, the opening of WFU’s football season is akin to the opening of farm season. If all the elements come together, seeds sprout and good stuff happens. If not, oh well, there’s next year. Wake Forest fans know that either you believe or you don’t. During the Panthers’ early years, who had the constitution to cheer on both WFU and the Panthers? You can only take believing in miracles so far. But when the Panthers moved toward a championship season, we noticed and rearranged our priorities accordingly. We won’t be heading to Houston for the Super Bowl, but we will batten down the hatches and turn the TV up really loud. The farmer will expect me to cook something special. Heck, I may even do fried chicken – from scratch. I’ll know my husband is serious about the game if he turns off his cell phone and unplugs the regular phone. The test of my support for the Panthers will be whether I sit still for the entire game. During last weekend’s championship game, while stuffing the leftovers in the refrigerator, I got distracted by the refrigerator itself. The first half of the game flew by as I listened to the action and sanitized the Frigidaire. When the second half began, I joined the farmer in the den. I reckon cleaning the refrigerator had charged my adrenaline. I was mesmerized. With the Super Bowl approaching, the farmer is stacking firewood by the back door and catching up on his sleep. I’m deciding which household task I could tackle during the game. Or, for once, maybe I’ll just sit still and contemplate the meaning of life between plays. One thing’s for sure: we will never again make fun of my Knoxville sister and brother-in-law for their state’s obsession with the Vols. When we visited them recently on a football Saturday, we were flabbergasted. Vol flags were everywhere. Inflatable orange Vols were staked in front yards – in nice neighborhoods. We even visited a gift shop in the Big South Fork National Park, and among the Vols’ mountain crafts for sale was a hand-quilted UT wall hanging. Thank goodness, I told my sister, people in North Carolina are not obsessed with a football team. I shudder to think what might be for sale now at the crafts stores along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Panthers’ corn shuck dolls? Bobble heads? Stained glass ornaments? Don’t tell my sister that I spent last week’s Martin Luther King holiday shopping for a Panther’s NFC champ sweatshirt. It’s just as well the search was fruitless. Groundhog Day is coming. What better way to spend February 2 than to come out of the closet and shop for Super Bowl gear! If you know where I can get an inflatable Panther, holler.
For those who’ve mentioned that my column disappeared for a couple of weeks, thanks for noticing. My post-Christmas column got lost in cyberspace. Just as I never intended to start writing a column, I am not yet of a notion to stop doing so. Actually, it was just over 30 years ago, in 1973, that I began a column called the “Farmer’s Wife” for a Boiling Springs paper, “The Foothills View.” The editors of that paper, the late Tommy and Diane Holland, were influential in my life by allowing this outsider to write a homespun column for the homefolk. Ten years later, in 1983, I joined the Shelby Star. So, I’ve just completed my 20th anniversary as a country columnist for our uptown paper. After 30 years of writing, even I wonder where the columns have come from. Sometimes folks ask, “Do you ever run out of ideas?” My answer, “Of course, but I write a column anyway.” Being a columnist is akin to being a preacher. Every Sunday, we hope to come up with a few good lines. And we pray that you will find the best truths: the truths between the lines. In the old days, writing a column took an entire week. Oh, I had a heap of subject matter, but with ‘em a heap of interruptions. Except for a few summer months, every hour I stopped to check on our 4 boys while loading my arms with the firewood they had “busted.” No sooner did I feed the wood stove than someone would come in the kitchen, needing to be fed. Once it was even a goat. For the first 18 years, I wrote columns with such challenges, and my subject matter, swirling around me. As for writing tools, the ones I had were rudimentary: scrap paper, a pencil, and for the finished product, the Smith Corona portable typewriter that had taken me through Wake Forest. During this period of my life as a columnist, my biggest fear was not literary. It was literal. We lived at the end of a dirt road with acres to be explored. While I wrote, our boys roamed. If I got too engrossed in writing, 4 little boys might end up at the South Carolina line. Days later, with the column neatly typed on clean paper, they rode with me to Shelby to hand deliver the column. Their reward? A stop at the library. As soon as they were old enough, the boys spent their days at the barn, helping their father milk cows and do other farm chores. Now I had subject material by the bucketsful. Since my focus has always been humor, much of the harder edge of our lives has never been told, but maybe you knew it anyway. It was there – between the lines. Week after week, year after year, decade after decade, I’ve shared with readers the experiences along the way. What surprises there have been! Thirty years later, we have a thermostat and it’s just a few steps away. As for the Smith Corona, that went for $3 at a yard sale. It’s been replaced by a state of the art home computer, with enough random memory to store our lives and enough speed to finish the column before I get through. Then, in a nanosecond, my words fly through cyberspace to the Shelby Star newsroom and ultimately into your home -- hopefully with a bit of meaning wedged amongst the keystrokes. After all these years, thanks for reading!
The recycling bin tells it all: I have cooked my way through Christmas. For our family’s Christmas Eve lunch, I almost upstaged the President, producing a turkey meal with all the trimmings. The family said, “Gee, what a nice surprise, but when can we open our presents?” Do you reckon the troops told their Chief, “Gee, thanks, but when can we get back to peacekeeping?” As the cooks of Christmas know, the speed with which a meal is eaten is inversely proportionate to the amount of time spent in its preparation. If you race the clock, the turkey menu will take 4 hours. Not counting the blessing, the turkey menu can be consumed in 20 minutes. This includes feeding the carved bone to the family dog. The ratio for this menu, therefore, is 24 to 1. You do the math. There was a brief respite from the kitchen on Christmas Eve night, as we enjoyed the traditional oyster stew and barbecue dinner prepared for the family by the farmer’s brother and his wife. If you think our traditional oyster stew and barbecue combo would never appear in a Southern Living holiday spread, imagine the aromas when Totino’s pizza rounded out our Christmas Eve menu. This year, after faithfully sticking to my low-fat diet, I gobbled up the cholesterol-rich oysters and stew. One never knows when this might be one’s last Christmas, I rationalized, savoring the forbidden seafood. Christmas morning came all too soon. “Joy to the World” would have to wait. Breakfast for 18 had to be on the table by 9:30 AM. This year the farmer and our 2 youngest sons offered genuine help. Is there kitchen help, you ask, that is not genuine? As the cooks of Christmas know, it’s not authentic help when your spouse responds, “So you want me to cook the grits, huh? Where are the grits? And what is a saucepan? Can’t I just cook ‘em in the frying pan?” I suppose my Big Christmas Morning Kitchen Blowup of 3 years ago taught the Hamrick men to get real or to get out. To paraphrase that great kitchen cliché, they learned, “If you can’t turn on the heat in the kitchen, huddle until one of you figures it out.” This year, Baby Miles was so serious about helping his mama that he gained access to a dehydrator at NC State and dried a bushel of apples for our fried apple pies. Christmas morning, he and Brother Spencer carefully watched me fry the first dozen and then took over the respective tasks of rolling out the dough and frying the pies. As the cooks of Christmas know, there’s a bit of melancholy in relinquishing to the young the recipes that have been yours for so long. By the time the holiday meals were over, the boys played their ace: they’d be going back to Raleigh soon and some regular home cooking would taste wonderful. That’s how I ended up baking lasagna one night, and fixing pinto beans with all the trimmings the next. The farmer is in hog heaven. As soon as the boys leave, he knows I’ll take the tree down and put up the cookbooks. What’s cooking for 2004? Veggies with a Hint of Chicken and Fresh Fruit for dessert.
Kathryn, a freelance writer, wrote a weekly humor column for 30 years! From 1999-2005, she wrote a quarterly humorous column for Baptists Today. She is the mother of 4 sons, Jason, Leif, Spencer & Miles, and the wife of Cline Hamrick, a former dairy farmer turned "buggy man." Cline and Kathryn are grandparents, with the arrival of granddaughter Morgan Elizabeth on September 24, 1999, and a grandson, Aaron James, on September 26, 2001. Morgan and Aaron's parents are Jason and Stephanie Hamrick, also of Boiling Springs, NC. Then a third grandchild, Levi Mercer Hamrick, was born July 22, 2005. His parents are Leif and Robin Hamrick of Boiling Springs, NC. In her professional life, Kathryn retired in 2006 as agency manager for MetLife Financial Services in Shelby, NC, where her primary responsibility was the recruiting and training of career agents. She is a trustee of the North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. NC. She is privileged to teach a ladies' Sunday School class at Boiling Springs Baptist Church. In her former life, Kathryn was a full-time farm wife for 16 years, and enjoyed entering her 14-day pickles and blackberry jelly in the Cleveland County Fair.
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