It has been a busy week, weatherwise in the mid to eastern half of our great country. Such is spring which is known for its' capricious nature and dangerous storms. We've worn shorts and sweats this past week and have hit the AC on more than one occasion. It's a southern spring thang, ya'll. It breaks my heart to see tornado damage because it's so random and ruthless, splattering people's lives all over the landscape like an IED. Only we don't have tanks. One of my adopted daughter's great grandma died in the last big one around here. My brother and his family live in a valley in the foothills of Virginia where flash flooding took everybody by surprise just like it did here last week. I reckon it worked its' way from west to east out into the ocean toward Europe. As for me, I'd just as soon see a big tsunami hit the OPEC countries and go back to a bicycle. That would be some real karma from believers in the new american way. Yeah I know....in your dreams.
My friend the eagle scout used to quote this commercial from a Memphis media station featuring some shyster used car salesman saying "It's all good." In our world it was, because it was totally about our time spent together roaming the farm on a four wheeler with our brown labs. This guy actually cleaned a freshly killed dove on my back porch (with no window) so I could see what hunting was all about. Needless to say, that didn't last. Once he and his son spent the night so they could duck hunt in the bottoms the next morning. There was all kinds of tales about broken ice and turkey tracks. I think it was Christmas and I had to work at the sawmill.
Ya'll mostly know that cynical spirituality is a pretty smart theme to embrace. If we insist on demanding that there are a brazillion different gods to which the rules of EVERY religion are unbendable, we will surely get an old testament kind of whipping from BE for not obeying the top ten. Thou shalt not and all that. As for me and mine? We believe the hymn of promise. I can still do the alto part to this day thanks to Mark and Cooper and all the ones before them. Miss Charlene, bless her heart, talked me into playing the piano at church when I wasn't EVEN ready for that kind of thing. Usually I sneaked into the sanctuary sometime when I had a spare minute and played from the UM hymnal that was perched on the music stand.
On a happy note, BG found her car key in the back hosta bed after a week of vehicle sharing on a budget. I think she was so damn bored that she looked one more time just to get out of the house. All's well that ends well, I say. My long lost cousin from Kingsport called this weekend to say she's coming back to Tennessee and she's so tickled she could just die. According to her, Florida ain't all that when it comes to planting cool weather bulbs like the ones her mama used to grow. Madeline was a nurse, and my mother's inspiration to begin nursing school at UT Martin as a high school grad. I've got an assignment to find out birth and date deaths for all the relatives on the Agee side. That should be a marvelous adventure considering how much I love my cousins. It's a curse, believe me.
My best friend got a cheap diagnosis of the state of my lawnmowing problems which is a very loud and vibrating push mower and a weedeater that still works. Plus Daddy's John Deere for those pesky summer flareups of orchard grass. The pile still stands as a monument to dude's tenure here as the dirt mover when he spent an entire month carving out a driveway from decades of buried gravel. When the time came to repair that levee that last May's epic flood blew out, the job went to somebody else. Daddy told me about how Son Johnson shared with him his days helping to build the haunted dairy barn and the silos that have towered over the farm since 1918 and the heyday of this little piece of earth's history. You can't make that shit up, even if you try.
The sun has decided to come out and blaze the falling horizon of this current cold front that passes almost always across the Big Muddy to parts unknown. No couch fires tonight, and not anytime soon considering the amount of rain that could fall. Not to mention the deadly threat of tornadoes. If I'm not here tomorrow, either the big one got me or ATT caught up with us.
Time will tell ^j^
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