as long as you're happy

It's been a hard week on a lot of levels which I won't go into because it's beer thirty and that makes me go on and on.  It's still cool and breezy so I'm hunkered in front of the huge picture window overlooking the dairy barn and asparagus bed.  Umm...plus the propane tank. It's surrounded with fence wood and autumn clematis that my parents gave me ten years ago for my birthday.  You seriously cannot kill that shit.  My friend Darlene came out once to get a scoop plus some buttercups and I'll bet they're still blooming in Lauderdale county.  We worked together, back in the day.

We moved into this old house in April of 1988 when BG was almost four.  Noler worked at the rubber plant and kept long hours there on OT in the carbon to help us maintain a lifestyle that we both enjoyed.  Nothing pleased him more than to come home from that filthy ass plant and go fishing in the slough across the road called "the riverbed."  He and GeneO got dumped from a boat back there one time and had to go fishing for Gene's gun.  I think there was a log involved and probably a turtle or snake or two.  Memory fails me.  I've spent thousands of hours in the Camry just driving up and down and all around the sandy banks that surround Calcutt Farms.  Once upon a time I had a boyfriend who drove 80 miles to see me and had an ATV plus a beautiful brown dog chocolate lab.  It was love at first sight for both Faith and myself.
Faith and Beau would run behind us on the four wheeler while we explored turkey tracks and deer.  There were bass there on one particular day while I was walking around looking for ferns and whatnot.  We collected grapevine which still grows on the elm out back.  When I'm pissed off I chop it with Daddy's clippers.  I prefer not to do that anymore because my joints are failing.  Perhaps I should pick up some glucosamine?   Daddy was a fiend for it along with saw palmetto and every other little thing on the schedule.  Mom had to have the eye vitamins and all that CHF and COPD stuff.  Medicare and BC/BS retired federal employee version paid all of it directly to providers as long as the premiums were deducted from their income.   I hate to be the bearer of bad news but those days are " no more" as Old Horsetail Snake would say.

I'm content for the first time in years...though not in a way that I think I've got the world by the tail.  Faith has led me this far in life even when things seemed impossible.  As a spiritual sort of gal, I look to the Native Americans for guidance because they're the ones who really got the shaft, not anybody since then.  As a people of many tribes, they were rounded up and offered reservations with casino employment as a career option.  That is seriously not cool when they shared corn and turkey all those years ago.  But that was then and this is now.

The great country of USA is at a turning point.  The systems that govern our lives are all in the bed with big money while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet.  I have a college degree that I worked for and don't make much more than a living wage.  I cannot imagine trying to survive on minimum. Corporate America demands that everybody be drug free and felony free just for the privilege of working at the 'gentral,  They are convenient but they are "the devil" just like WaltonWorld.

We shall overcome ~ MLK