"Ken broke my leg!!!"

My dad grew up with a brother 2 years and 1 day younger than him. At some point in their childhood (I think when he was about 8 or 10), Tim had to have braces put on his legs for about 2 years. Something to do with the muscles in his legs. So, for those two years he had to be very careful and missed out on a lot of sports, etc. So, finally, it was time to take the braces off. That afternoon, he and my dad and a bunch of neighborhood kids played baseball in the front yard. Somehow, the ball ended up on the roof.

"I'll go get it!" Tim volunteered.

So, he climbed up to the roof, retrieved the ball, and said "Ken, throw me the bat. I'm gonna see how far I can hit it from up here."

So, my dad throws the bat at (I mean to) his brother, hits him with it, and knocks him off the roof.

"Ow! Ow! You broke my leg! You broke my leg!!!!" Tim bawled.

"I did not. Quit bein' such a stinkin' baby."

"Get mama! Tell her you broke my leg!"

"I'm not tellin' her I broke your leg! She'll whip the tarnation out of me!"

"Go get mama. Oh, you broke my leg, you broke my leg!"

Sure enough, Tim's leg was broken. Two years in metal braces followed by 6-8 weeks in a plaster cast. And my father lived to tell about it. :)

I think Nan would be proud

I "cooked Southern" this week. I do it on occasion, but it makes A LOT of dishes. This time around we had friend chicken tenders (homemade with free range all-natural chicken because I've gotten freakishly OCD about meat and where it comes from), rice grits with red pea gravy, and green beans cooked with ham hocks. All I can say is, "YUM!" And the best part was, all 4 of us ate it. Woo-hoo. :)



The only thing missing was Nanny's fried cornbread. Shoot. I'll make that next time, for sure. (What's one more pot when you've already used 4??) :)

Sweet Peas

When I wrote the first entry for this blog, and I mentioned wanting my boys to experience shelling peas on a porch in the afternoon, I never really thought it would happen. Well, yesterday, it happened.

We picked up our box from the CSA, and in it was a bag of English peas, still in their pods. I showed Zach how to crack them open and pull the fat round peas out. He loves peas, so he was pretty excited. These peas were so sweet that the two of us sat there and shelled them and ate them raw. It was a very nostalgic moment. I remember doing that with my grandmother one day when I was very little, and now Zach's done it with me. The only thing missing was the screened porch and the rocking chairs.

Southern Showers

I hosted a baby shower for a friend today. She's originally from "up north," but all of the guests she invited (except her mother) were from here in Georgia, so I thought it would be appropriate to host a true, southern shower. (Meaning, get out all my fun crystal and silver that I never get to play with!)

So, I planned out my menu: finger sandwiches (chicken salad and pimento cheese), cheese straws, champagne oranges (using sparkling grape juice so the mommy-to-be could partake of the deliciousness), marinated mozzarella and cherry tomato skewers, petit fours, cupcake bites, madeleines, and this adorable punch recipe I found online (blue punch that you float vanilla ice cream in...when the ice cream melts it looks like bubbles, and then you float a rubber duckie in it --- it was precious). I can say precious because this blog is about the south. I don't ever say my children are precious, but this punch was precious. :)

So, last night I had my husband helping me decorate 36 tiny cupcakes, and we polished silver for 2 hours and washed all the cystal punch cups. We hung a little clothesline above both the windows in my living room and hung onesies on the line with teeny tiny clothespins. It was so exciting and fun.

Then, this afternoon, the guests started to arrive. All of a sudden, I hear an ear-splitting scream...the mom-to-be had neglected to tell me that one of her mother's friends was deathly afraid of cats. A grown woman. Whoever heard of such a thing?? So, we closed the cats in the garage, got the woman some tissues, and thought everything would be fine. Then, uh-oh, someone opened the door to the room the cats were in. More screaming and crying. Oh. my. I spoke to the guest of honor and informed her that this was a pretty key detail that she neglected to inform me of. I felt horrible, my cats were confused, and this woman was terrified. Luckily, we managed to get that somewhat resolved...

Then, when everyone went to fix their plates, one of the guests asked me to go over all the ingredients in everything I had made. Turns out she had some pretty major food allergies. Again, key detail that no one thought to tell me about. She ended up eating oranges and one of the sandwiches, but coughing and choking and blowing her nose throughout the shower because she has gluten allergies. Argh. Strike two.

I think most everyone had fun. I know the mommy-to-be and her Atlanta friends enjoyed it because this was a pretty typical shower for Atlanta. I think a lot of the family from South Georgia might have been a bit uncomfortable, though. I understand now that what we consider "football food" is what they consider "party food" down there. I think they were looking for the meatballs and the cocktail weiners in barbeque sauce and the chips and dip. Lawsie. They seemed to enjoy everything, though, even though it might not have been quite what they were expecting.

Was it fun? Yes. Did the mom-to-be appreciate it? Absolutely. Did she get a lot of nice things? Yes, she did. Did my mother have ulterior motives when she lent me some of her silver, knowing I'd end up polishing all of it for her? Maybe. :) Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. :)

Screen doors & sleepwalkers

My youngest son is a sleepwalker sometimes. We will never have a screen door that locks automatically from the inside. Want to know why? I'll tell you...

One winter night in the late 1950s, in a small house in a rural railroad town, there were two boys asleep in their twin beds in their underwear. All was quiet and calm. The evening air was still and cool. Mom & Dad checked on their boys before turning in for the night.

A few hours later, they were jolted awake by the sound of an intruder banging on their window trying to get in. Talk about a panic! My grandfather didn't know if he should grab his pants or a baseball bat first, and he probably fell on the floor in his rush to get out of bed. My grandmother most likely had the covers pulled up to her nose, staining the hem of the top sheet with lipstick in the process (a fine Southern lady such as herself always put on lipstick right before bed, after brushing her teeth). Sheer terror whitened both their faces until they realized what the intruder was shouting as he tried desperately to get in...

"Mama! Daddy! I'm locked out!"

"...Ken????!"

"Yes, it's me. Please let me in.... It's freezing out here."

They crept to the door to see their eldest son, their pride and joy, standing on the front porch shivering in his skivvies. He had been sleepwalking, went outside, and the screen door locked automatically when it closed behind him. As soon as the cold air hit his bare skin, he woke up and knew he was in a heap of trouble, for his parents were very sound sleepers, and his younger brother, if awoken by the noise, would be way too busy laughing to let him back inside....

"Well I'll be John Brown!"

My Nanny had a colorful vocabulary. She didn't swear often (and when she did she usually apologized beforehand so you could brace yourself), but she did have many expressions she liked to use.

One of her favorites was "Well I'll be John Brown!" She typically said this when she was amazed or impressed with something. When I called her my sophomore year of high school to tell her I was the only 10th grader to have made the yearbook staff, her reply was "Well I'll be John Brown! That's wundaful, dahlin'!" Not sure which John Brown she was referring to or why he was always so amazed, but I will always remember that as one of my grandmother's favorite, most-used expressions.

Another of her favorites was one she used when she thought we were making things up. If she didn't believe something we were telling her, she'd say "Kiss my foot," or, the full expression, "Well, anybody believes that can kiss my foot." If she truly thought that what we were saying was ridiculous, she'd follow it with "...and I don't see any feet going up."

How I miss that fine southern lady!

The flooded creek

I grew up in a huge neighborhood. There were about 400 houses, and probably at least that many kids. It took two whole school buses to bring all the kids in our neighborhood home from elementary school -- just to our neighborhood.

In the center of our neighborhood was the recreation area. We had a pool and tennis courts, and a big park with play equipment. And running through the center of that park was a creek. There were two bridges that crossed the creek so you could get from one side of the park to the other, and there was also a pipe that crossed it.

One spring day after a lot of heavy rain, that creek flooded.

And that pipe made a magnificent waterfall.

It took probably about 2.4 seconds for all of us kids to get home from school, change into old clothes, and jump into that creek to splash and play and pretend we were riding the rapids of some huge river as opposed to a little old neighborhood creek. Someone rigged a rope to a nearby tree and we took turns swinging out over the water and letting go. There were probably 100 kids in the creek that day, and tons of parents sitting on the sidelines, taking pictures and holding towels and bringing snacks. We were out there for hours.

It was an impromptu block party, where all the kids were laughing and splashing and having fun while their parents caught up with all the neighbors on what was going on in everyone's lives.

What happened to neighborhoods like that?

"What is the little good ride?" you may ask

The "little good ride" is a game my dad, his brother Tim, and his cousin Mike used to play at their grandmother's house when they were growing up in the south in the 1950s. They would go to the linen closet and pull out all of the spare pillows and blankets, pile them up high, then climb to the top, slide down, and declare, "THAT was a little good ride!" Not a good little ride, but a little good ride.

As a 21st-century mother, life is moving at a faster pace for my children than it did for my father's generation, or even for my generation. We have so many conveniences and so much technology available to us that because things are faster and easier, the world expects more and more of us. It's odd that because we've advanced so much in the last 50 years, we now have less time than we did before.

Despite growing up in this modern, fast-paced world, I want my children to have some of those experiences of days gone by. I want them to learn to appreciate produce when it's locally grown and harvested at its peak, rather than eating strawberries in October because somewhere in this world, they're being grown and shipped to us. I want them to know what it's like to sleep in a southern home that was designed to allow drafts to pass through and cool it in the summer before there was air conditioning widely available. I want them to camp out in the backyard and sleep on screened porches and play catch-and-release with lightning bugs. They need to learn to shell peas and snap beans and make Nanny's fried cornbread.

I know that I cannot change the world and make it simple and safe like it used to be. But I hope that I can help my children appreciate what they've been given in this wide world, and that I can help them appreciate their roots while looking ahead to their futures.

This blog is about the past...memories of my grandparents growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as my father's stories from the 1950s and 1960s. It's about my childhood growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s. It's also about the present, as it will be peppered with stories of my own children taking place in the here and now. And it's about the future...laying the groundwork for what is yet to be.

Thanks for stopping by.