THIS 'N' THAT

Gee, it has been a month since I've been back here. Too long. I'll try to do better. Yeah. Right.

In the meantime, I have found a new place to rattle people's cages. While surveying someone else's blog I discovered a new forum that has just been put up (a few weeks ago) that replaces the old and new WV Bloggers. It is called Straight outta Appalachia and can be reached at appalachiastraightup.com. Most of the old group have come back to this one. A lot of good discussion going on there. If you are into pristine English with no profanity, this is definitely not the place for you. But if you can stand the occasional profanity, it should work. There are about 30 to 35 different topics so just about anyone can find something they like to rant about.

I continue my hallooing on the Herald-Dispatch forums and on Jim Ross' Hot Topics blog. Sometimes the forums get rather heated, but that is what it is all about. The topics never are new, just different stories with the same old trite comments. But I like to shake 'em up every now and then. Sometimes by completely reversing my normal positions just to get a rise out of some of them.

Cold. And wet. That is the way it has been lately. So I began feeding the birdies again a few weeks back. Still haven't seen the pileated woodpeckers that we usually see, but they'll get here after it starts snowing regularly and being nice and cold all the time. I have seen a hawk a number of times, but the other birds run and hide when it comes around. So far he hasn't gotten any of them as far as I know.

I went out this morning to get a haircut. When I approached the barber shop, I could hear a banjo being picked on some old high lonesome song. I figured he had the radio on. Upon opening the door, lo and behold, there sat my barber picking it out. He started to lay it down but I told him to just keep on picking. So he took off where he' d left off and finished out the song. Then he cut my shaggy old hair off. Boy, I feel bald as a peeled onion now. I left a couple of extra bucks for him as payment for the entertainment. I came home and washed the dishes and turned the tv to the bluegrass channel and have been listening to it for about three hours.

My doctor tells me that my breathing is that of a young man. Wow, and I am on the downhill side of 65 to boot. But I am trapped in this body while my mind is still back in the early twenties. Life is pretty good, especially when I consider the alternative.

So the country is going through the changeover of administrations, our eight year travail. And I sure don't envy the new kid his job. And I surely don't like the way the economy has nosedived. But it could be a lot worse. I don't know how, but people keep telling me that they haven't changed too awfully much of what they were doing six months ago. That is probably a bad sign if you are a pessimist. I am not. I am an optimist.

The Optimist

The optimist fell ten stories
And at each window bar
He shouted to his friends
"All right, so far."

How can you not be an optimist? I have two kids and six grandkids. The youngest grandkid has now started school and the oldest has just graduated from high school. Can I really think that they will have a worse life than I have had?

I only got one pair of shoes each year. I took lard on a cold biscuit to school to eat for lunch lots of times. Meat was something we had to shoot or catch on a hook or wring it's neck if we were lucky. School was a mile and a quarter away, walking all the way, no bus until in Junior high school. No car in our household until I was in the tenth grade. Church was three miles away and, yeah, we walked. That was what you did when you lived at 40th and Plum.

There was no mall, but there were five old time grocery stores within walking distance. If you had the money you could have a ham for Christmas, if you ordered it two weeks in advance. And you didn't get to select which one, either. Mail was delivered six days a week by an old guy who drove a worn out jeep or battered pickup that wheezed and smoked. Newspapers came by mail, usually a day late, except on Sundays you had to hoof it out of the hollow to buy one at the store (actually, if the store was closed, you took one and paid the man later in the week when you went to the store.) Groceries came on credit and got paid off as you got the money to pay it.

Vegetables came out of the garden (s) and were canned for winter use. Same with fruits. Chickens were grown for their eggs (trade for cash at the grocery store) and then the chickens were slaughtered (again for trade at the grocery store.) We were limited to two eggs per day and had a chicken on the table about once a month. Squirrel hunting was not only fun, it was a necessity for meat in the fall. Just like rabbits. And catfish was a summertime treat, as was the fishing for them.

Two acres on a hilltop for the vegetables. Carry them half a mile or more to the house, prepare them, put the big old copper kettle on the outside fireplace to boil and can them up for when there was nothing else.

Hoopy hide in the evening, or catch lightning bugs. In the daytime, catch a June bug and tie a string to it's leg and watch it fly in circles. Use a sickle to cut the weeds off the banks around the house, or a scythe in the honeysuckle. Gather walnuts and hickory nuts in the fall, or maybe those great hazelnuts above the chicken coops.

Do I really think my grandkids could cope with all that misery? How about you? How about your kids?

And you know, we didn't really think we were poor. The folks that lived around on the river bend. Now that was poor. Not us. Heck, our daddy got to work a week or two a month most of the time. All they had was too many kids and two old mules. Man, that was poor.

Some other time---