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Great Ice Storm of '09

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Friday, 30 October 2009

I'm back!

Dear friends,

I haven't blogged here on my dear old Annie Mockingbird Xanga site since March 22, and tonight, I just had to face the facts and admit to myself that I miss blogging here.

I stopped mainly because I had gotten hooked on Facebook, which is "Blogging Light." You don't really blog - you just write quick status updates of a sentence or two, but mostly what I find myself doing is reading lots of status updates from my friends, and the comments others put up. I can't explain why it's so addictive - but it is. Maybe one reason it is for me is that most of my many, many Facebook friends are people I know in "real life," many of whom I had lost touch with for years before reconnecting on Facebook, and it's been lots of fun to see their photos of their children and grandchildren and their homes and their vacations. But I've missed posting blogs here about our rambles in the hills and things like that, and I've missed reading your blogs. So I'm back - at least for a while!

Here are a few of my favorite photos from our delightful ramble last Saturday with our good friends Joe and Katherine in the October Ozarks!

Falling Water

Sunday, 22 March 2009

Here are some photos from today ... we took a drive down into the Boxley Valley in Newton County, a beautiful spring day. Then came home and worked in our yard for a few hours. It's taken a lot of work to get it all cleaned up after the ice storm. We're making progress, and are so excited about our first springtime at Squirrels' Leap!

Would somebody please open this gate for me ?
The Rocky Mountain elk were imported into the Ozarks back in the 80s, trying to re-establish an elk population. The native elk were all gone from our old hills. The experiment has worked almost too well .... the farmers complain the elk eat their crops, and in certain places, the highway is often lined with cars, sightseers and photographers stopping to see the elk, which in some spots are getting as tame as cows, they're so used to people stopping to look at them all the time!

I loved the way the forsythia looked against this abandoned old store in Deer, Arkansas...

Back at Squirrels' Leap ...

January 28, 2009 ...

Doyle has almost finished rebuilding the pergola, which we will paint white, and plan to plant a climbing yellow (or maybe pink) rose on....there's a big old wisteria vine on the right front side, which we may let grow as long as it doesn't try to take over the new roof! There's already some hostas and native fern along under the pergola, which I'm adding to. Can't wait to have a pretty shade bed going there by the door we go in and out of ...and picture walking under an arbor of roses!

Ruby (Doyle's mom who lives with us) enjoyed sitting outside this afternoon while we were working in the yard .. she even pulled some weeds for us on pretty afternoons earlier this week, as she sat in her chair.

I planted some azaleas that are already budding out! Hope they'll do well here in the Ozarks...this Mississippi girl longs for azaleas in her yard!

Doyle tilled us a vegetable garden spot ...

Are you enjoying the early springtime where you live? Have you planted anything yet?

Friday, 13 March 2009

Freed from the fear of tackiness

Has the concept of “tackiness” been just completely wiped out of our culture?
In my youth, it seems like I spent a lot of my time worrying about whether or not something was “tacky.” Now that I’m eligible to join AARP, the concern about tackiness rarely crosses my mind.
Maybe it was just living in the Deep South. Maybe other parts of the country just aren’t as concerned about avoiding tackiness as I was in my growing-up years, being raised by two expatriate Mississippians, and later in my college and younger-adult years living in the Magnolia State myself.
Mama and Daddy had both been raised in what would be considered “genteel” Southern homes, where good table manners were stressed and linen napkins and sterling silver flatware were part of daily life. Having each graduated from Ole Miss, where they had lived in the rule-bound Greek culture of the Fifties, and then living the etiquette-bound lives of a U. S. Naval officer and wife, they were very aware of the dictates of polite society. Neither of my parents were the least bit snobbish or snooty, but they were products of their upbringing and culture, and they each had firm ideas about the “nice way to do things.”
Our family ate dinner together at the dining room table most nights. We always enjoyed visiting with each other at the table, but we were taught never to talk with our mouths full, and we were encouraged to put our forks down after each bite, and to carefully place our knife and fork across the top of our plate when we were finished. We kept our napkins — and our left hands — in our laps.
Putting the ketchup bottle or the mayonnaise jar on the table was tacky, and was just not done except in the most hurried-up, emergency situations. Mama would spoon relish or mayonnaise into a little dish and put it on the table. We learned not to butter our rolls with the butter knife, but to scoop some butter up out of the dish with the butter knife and put it on the edge of our dinner plate (my grandmothers used bread-and-butter plates), and butter our roll with our own dinner knife. Mama did break with our grandparents’ family tradition and stooped to using paper napkins, but with five kids and no household help to iron the napkins, our grandmothers didn’t blame her.
The concept of not being tacky encompassed not only table manners, but almost every area of life. For example, tattoos, especially for a girl, were so tacky they were off the chart. My daddy even thought pierced ears were not for “nice girls.” As the oldest of his four daughters, I was the one who asked first if I could get my ears pierced, probably when I was about 14. He grinned and told me I could only get my ears pierced if I got a tattoo first, which in those days was a totally outlandish and horrifying idea, so I knew he didn’t mean it. The only people we knew who had tattoos were older Navy enlisted men — certainly not teenage girls.
It was okay for children to go barefooted when we were at home or playing in the yard, but for a child to go to the grocery store or anywhere but the swimming pool barefooted was tacky.
When I went down to Columbus at age 17 as a freshman at Mississippi State College for Women in 1973, I learned a whole new set of rules of propriety. We were not allowed to walk around campus with our hair rolled up. We could smoke in our dorm rooms — and I’m not proud to say I burned through a whole lot of Virginia Slims Light Menthols in those days — and we could smoke outside on the campus, but the rules said we had to be sitting down, not walking around with a lit cigarette. So my well-groomed friends and I would sit down on the curb under one of the ancient magnolia trees and fire up a cigarette anytime the urge hit, and for some reason, that WASN’T tacky.
Most of us “’W’ girls” had been raised by Mississippi mamas, and as hard as we tried to be cool, we still couldn’t get past the major rules that were tattooed into our genetic code. We were so terrified of being tacky, you couldn’t pay us to wear white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day. If we had on a skirt or a dress, we had on pantyhose — it was REAL tacky not to wear stockings. At least we were a little more liberated than most of our own mothers and all of grandmothers, who were still under the impression that a lady wore a girdle at all times, no matter if it was 104 swelteringly humid degrees outside.
And for goodness sake, wearing pants to Sunday morning church would have been the tackiest thing we could imagine. Up until the 90s, we were all wearing heels and our best dresses — and of course, stockings — to the First Methodist Church. I can still remember my shock the first time I saw an out-of-town visitor at a church funeral wearing a dark pantsuit. A lady wearing pants to church! Lawdy, Miss Scarlett.
We’ve come a long way, Baby. Most of the time these days, I live my life free of the burdens of being worried about tackiness, but I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing, or a loss. We use paper napkins at our house with impunity. I’ve been known to put the ketchup bottle on the table (forgive me, Poppy). I wear pants to church all the time, and sometimes even jeans.
I even finally got my ears pierced — but no tattoos for me, Daddy, I promise!

By Celia DeWoody
Published March 11, 2009 in the Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
Copyright CPI, Inc. 2009

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Mysteries continue to pile up at our old house, “Squirrels’ Leap,” like broken limbs after the ice storm.
I hesitate to blame it on a ghost, because I’m still not sure I believe in ghosts. But there’s something fishy — well, squirrelly — going on at Squirrels’ Leap.
Okay, here’s the latest.
During the ice storm, a huge limb from our venerable elm tree fell and demolished the pergola next to our breakfast room, which is in a one-story addition that joins the old two-story house to the garage.
The branches also punched several holes in the roof, and one skinny branch poked all the way through the breakfast-room ceiling, where it is still part of our decor.
After the ice storm, like a good homeowner, Doyle dragged a ladder over to the one-story section and climbed up to spread a plastic tarp over the shallow peaked roof of the breakfast room. He secured the tarp on the north side of the house by hooking the grommets over nails, then draped it over the peak of the roof and down the south side, where it completely covered the holes and came neatly down over the entrance and part of the smashed pergola, where he attached that side of the tarp.
One day last week, after our insurance adjuster had come, my husband tore down the ruins of the pergola, which left the south edge of the tarp unattached.
A few nights later, a big windstorm came along. The wind blew the tarp from the south side of the roof all the way over the shallow peak, and left a big, wet wad of plastic hanging by one nail over the edge of the north porch. To spread the tarp back out was going to involve climbing back up onto the roof, which Doyle had every intention of doing before it rained again.
My son Jamie, who had been living with us temporarily, is always willing to lend a hand when he’s not at work at one of his two jobs or out pursuing one of his many other interests.
Friday, before we went upstairs for the night, Doyle asked Jamie if he would mind taking Hagrid, our Great Dane, outside one more time before going out later that evening. Jamie cheerfully agreed.
The last time we looked Friday night, the tarp was still hanging sloppily over the north edge of the porch roof, only attached by one corner.
The next morning, Doyle looked out of our upstairs sitting-room windows, which overlook the breakfast-room roof.
“Jamie must’ve climbed back up on the roof last night and spread that tarp back out for me,” Doyle said with a big grin. “I really appreciate him doing that for us. He must’ve done it late last night.”
I looked out the window to see the green tarp spread back over the whole section of roof, neatly smoothed out, no wrinkles.
Downstairs a little while later, Doyle thanked Jamie enthusiastically for going up on the roof in the dark the night before and spreading the tarp back out for us.
Jamie looked blank.
“I didn’t fix the tarp,” he said, puzzled. “When I took Hagrid out about 9:30 last night, it was still all hanging down over the edge of the porch, just like it has been.”
We were all just bumfuzzled. Jamie and I even walked out to see if the ladder was where he had left it the last time he had used it, several days before. It was — on the far side of Doyle’s shop building, lying on its side.
Okay, we know Doyle didn’t get up on the roof and spread the tarp out. I didn’t. Jamie didn’t. Ruby certainly didn’t. We don't have a pet chimpanzee to do handy chores like that for us. The only other alternative that occurred to us was that one of our friendly neighbors had decided to do us a good turn and spread the tarp out for us. But would anybody come over to a neighbor’s house late at night and climb up a ladder and get onto their roof — in the pitch-black dark — without letting them know they were going to be up there?
Oh, one other possibility was that the wind blew the tarp back over the house. But the wind couldn’t have spread it out perfectly neatly, with no folds or wrinkles.
And I’m pretty sure the wind couldn’t have hooked one of the tarp's small corner grommets back over the nail to hold it in place.
Who spread the tarp back out on our roof? If you’re the kind soul who did it, please call me at 743-0613 and let me know, so I can thank you, and so the mystery will be solved.
If it wasn’t one of our neighbors, who was it? The same “person” who bakes apple cakes in an invisible oven to fill the house up with their aroma, and snitches hard-boiled eggs out of our kitchen, and pushes our Christmas tree over in the middle of the night, and plays faint music even when the radio is off and walks across the floor in empty rooms?
We're still scratching our heads in puzzlement.
How in the world did our blown-off tarp get spread smoothly back out on the roof in the middle of the night?
The Mystery of Squirrels’ Leap continues ...

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2009 Harrison Daily Times

Thursday, 26 February 2009

A powerful prayer for our children - from "St. Augustine's Prayer Book":

"O Heavenly Father, I commend the souls of my children to thee. Be thou their God and Father; and mercifully supply whatever is wanting in me through frailty or negligence. Strengthen them to overcome the corruptions of the world, to resist all solicitations to evil, whether from within or without; and deliver them from the secret snares of the enemy. Pour thy grace into their hearts, and confirm and multiply in them the gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that they may daily grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; and so faithfully serving thee here, may come to rejoice in thy presence hereafter. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen."