About

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The above is quite embarrassing…

I had no idea that this page was available for all to see.  As a matter of fact, I thought I had deleted it entirely.  I didn’t find out this page was still here until I decided to network my blog, and it popped up.  I then tried Googling my blog (Not in vanity!  I’m not even sure why I’ve decided to network it.), and there it was.    Imagine how silly I felt.  So…since it’s apparently here to stay, I suppose I really ought to tell you who I am.  If it seems to be a bit fuzzy around the edges, that would most likely be because I’m still working on pinning that down myself.

Hmm…where to start…I had a comfortable childhood despite growing up knowing just how strapped for money my family really was.  Or at least I thought I knew because of something that I remembered from early childhood. 

My parents had sat my older brother and I down to eat our supper, but they didn’t join us.  Thinking that odd, I asked my parents why they weren’t sitting with us.  My Mother said, “We aren’t hungry right now.  We’ll eat later.”  They never did sit down to eat.  That night, there simply wasn’t enough for everyone, so my parents fed us kids.  I didn’t fully understand at that moment, but I later came to find that the memory had stayed with me.  Although my Mom told me, many years later, it had happened only the once, it affected some of my later behaviors in ways no one could have predicted.

One of my eccentricities was becoming a food hoarder.  That one was helped along by my Grandmamma, my Dad’s mother.  She had grown up during the Depression years, and she’d developed a habit of stock piling food, although her thing was sweets.  Her answer to every life event, good or bad, was food and sweets.  Never once did my brother and I go to my Grandparents’ house and there not be several Tupperware containers of homemade candies waiting to be gobbled up.  Those I remember quite fondly.  The rest of her cooking however…well…let’s just say I have a fondness for broccoli cooked with butter and salt until it’s mud.  Personally, I consider treating broccoli like that to be sacrilege, but sometimes there’s just a bit of wistfulness to be that young again to try things over.  Sometimes it’s just a wistful feeling to be that young and sitting at my Grandmamma’s table again. 

My answer was to keep my pantry shelves full.  In the home I grew up in that was two and half walls of shelving and an upright freezer.  If I still had my own home, I’d probably still be doing it.  However, life threw me a couple of serious curve balls the size of boulders, and I’ve found myself, at 46, living with my Mom and Dad.  Now it’s their limited shelves and upright freezer I keep finding nooks to stick a few items into.  However, it’s no longer to be for ‘just in case’, it’s for cooking good meals.  Most of the time it’s Mom doing the cooking, but every once in a while, I get to fix a few hearty meals from my creative imagination for the three of us.

Anyway, between my childhood and now, I went to high school, I’ve gone to college, I’ve had far too many jobs to recall them all (although a few do stand out for good and bad), I tried to be a school teacher and I ran away from home to become an over-the-road trucker for 8 1/2 years…a career I still miss almost 8 years after having had it stolen from me by those curve balls I mentioned earlier.  Oh, yeah…my family also got to be featured in a print Maytag magazine ad about the greatness of their washers.  There we were Dad, Mom, my older brother, me and my pet chicken, Scarlet.  Yes.  I said pet chicken.  We had some Muscovy ducks, too, but they weren’t nearly as pretty as my all white chicken, Scarlet.

Well, I’m not that kid anymore, but I currently have 18 chickens, 3 turkeys, 2 goats, 2 cats and a dog.  That’s in addition to my parents’ 2 dogs and 1 cat.  I may have a small farm, but there are plans in the works to expand it through breeding, purchasing more chickens and maybe even buying a larger breed goat than what we have and maybe even a cow.  It’s Mom’s idea (with me all for it) to get one of those half-sized cows that puts out as much milk as a full-sized cow.  The cow is supposed to be a secret.  Dad has no idea we’re contemplating getting a cow.  

I’m going to take a break now.  I’ve been sitting in one position for too long, and I am in a great deal of pain.  For those of you who don’t know me, the pain involves the two boulder sized curveballs that knocked me out of trucking.  Anyhoo…there’s more to come.  As I said on my Facebook page, this is a work in progress.  Thanks for reading this much, and I hope you’ll come back to read more when I get it posted.  In the mean time, …

                                                                  To Be Continued…