I'm Backkkkk

Back from Arkansas. As I expected, there was no time to blog or check blogs. I spent the days visiting with mom and family. And doing a fair amount of eating. My favorite pie is lemon, so family members baked me not one, but two lemon pies. I think I’ve had enough lemon pie for a while. I also ate home-grown steak and ground beef, which was nice and lean, and a variety of vegetables from the garden, including green beans, tomatoes, corn on the cob, potatoes, purple hull peas, and spinach. What I didn’t eat, although I was offered them about 100 times, was okra and onions. My mom and brother Paul David just love okra, but they must have gotten all the okra genes in the family because the stuff reminds me of something that might have been edible eons ago but which has been mummified in dry desert air for a few too many millennia.

One thing I didn’t get done in Arkansas is any real writing. I tried a couple of times to sit at the laptop but in a small town where everyone knows everyone there are always visitors dropping over. Besides that, about a quarter of the town of Charleston is related to us, if not by blood then by marriage. That’s a lot of family to see in a short time.

As always when I go home to Charleston, I was overwhelmed by memories. On a couple of afternoons I rode around in the countryside with my brother and it seemed like every field and woods and dirt trail were haunted with the ghosts of the past. I imagine that would settle down if I moved back to the area permanently, which Lana and I have talked about doing after I retire from teaching. We have land there, some of which I’ll eventually inherit, and I wouldn’t mind building a house along the creek where I spent a many hot summer day.

Rita, my sister-in-law, asked how I’d get in and out if I lived back along the creek and I told her I only needed to get in. She asked what Lana thought of that, and I had to tell her that Lana loves the idea. My wife is not a social butterfly. She and I are both pretty intense introverts.

Well, it’s off now to do a little catch up blog visiting, but I’m sure I won’t be able to comment on every post I’ve missed. Seems like most of us here in blog land are pretty prolific posters. Plus, I’ve got to turn up the back-to-school engine big time to get syllabi and other such tasks done before school starts next week. When I got off school in early May it seemed like the days stretched out forever in front of me. Now that the summer escape is over it sure did seem to go fast.

Later