Blogosphereons:
I am frazzled. Albert Gore, Jr my fellow Tennessean, with his funny ideas about global warming has caused some of the coldest temperatures and snowiest days here in West Tennessee. It was 4 degrees F this am when my bladder signaled my sleep was ending. My mind needs eight hours of sleep to feel rested, but my bladder is ready to get up in only six hours. I wish my organs would compromise and split the difference. I feel so tired all the time. Snowed on Monday, about 3 inches in a couple of hours, surprised the school folks and they called school off at 10 am.
My sister, Notill, is younger than me by about 12 yrs. Mother was in the change of life when she was conceived, and Mother thought she was dying with a tumor for several months after she began to swell and throw up. Mama was 49 when Notill was born.
Like all babies in the family, Notill was doted upon and was spoiled from the get-go. I do not think she ever cried and my mother and her mother kept Notill happy by feeding her candy any time she cried out. Notill learned how to get candy at an early age. She was a big baby!
I always hated it when Notill would come into my room. She had the stickiest hands on any little kid I ever seen. Her favorite thing was to slip up on me while I was sleeping and put her sticky little hands all over my face. It was so disgusting! It was as though she washed her hands in maple syrup and let them air dry.
The cats and dogs soon learned to be very wary of Notill. If she ever touched them, she would come back with gobs of fur stuck to her hands. For a while our animals appeared to have the mange, but it was just sweet little Notill being playful. I learned early on to keep my baseball cards safe I had to keep them up in the closet out of reach of Notill.
When she was a toddler my friends and I used to place bets on whether Notill could put something down after she picked it up. We would laugh and laugh as she would study the object we would give her, usually a small piece of paper or a small cut of mother's yarn, while she passed it from sticky finger to sticky finger, hand to hand, and, after losing interest, try to throw it and shake it free only to finally in a fit squat down on the floor and smear it onto the floor. Some times she had to use her foot to peel it off her hand and then she would stand up and triumphantly and ignorantly march away with the object stuck to her foot or shoe. Notill was our video game.
To my great relief and that of the family pets, Notill grew up to be a beautiful young woman, and she graduated from high school and married the Warner boy. They had
three delightful daughters, Harriet, Hilda, and Bob. Notil's husband, Robert, wanted a son so badly, when the third daughter was born with slightly ambiguous genitalia, he went with it and named her Robert Jr.
Bob was raised as a boy in all respects. He played with boy toys, helped his father work on the farm, and became quite the little misogynist. He would talk down to his mother and sisters and strike them if they crossed him. He lifted weights and wrestled in the 125 lb weight class and won state in his senior year. He dated the prettiest cheerleader. He is a Junior at the Ag college in Martin Tennessee and will be returning to work the farm with his daddy after graduation. Still thinks he is a boy. Doc Dalton gives him hormone shots so he don't have a period.
Anyway, I was up with my bladder this am and checked the temp outside, 18 degrees F, a heatwave! Had a new calf night of 4 degrees F. Larry Simmons built it a bed of hay and checked on it yesterday and it was up and feeding off its mother. Cows is tough, especially the ones they make into steaks at Walmart. Shucks, last time I bought a Walmart steak, I had Larry Simmons over and we grilled it and I took a bite and chewed it as much as I could until my jaw started aching, then I passed it over to Larry who has a new set of false teeth and he chewed on it for 10 minutes til he got chest pains and gave up, then we passed it off to the dog who chewed on it for half an hour before he left it in disgust, and I picked it up off the floor and chewed on it for another good 10 minutes and passed over to Simmons for one more try and we finally gave it up and ate our salads. Larry says the cow that steak came from had too much "string". I accepted his explanation, but hate to waste $5 on a chopped steak.
I was pissed off and Larry said we should take it back for a refund. On the way to Walmart, Larry slid his truck off the road and got us stuck. A fellow with a 4x4 pick up came by and offered to pull us out. We didn't have a tow strap, but Larry, who is smart this way, took the chopped steak and cut it in a long thin strip and tied one end of it to our axle and the other to the fellow's hitch and it held and got us pulled out of that snow bank! We was just glad to get out of that snow bank and weren't so upset with the Walmart meat department anymore.
$5 for a bad piece of meat seems criminal, but not a bad price for an indestructible tow strap.
Jackson D. Maybolt, President Global/Urban Poverty Law Centers
"If you are too fat to tie your shoes, buy a pair of loafers, lard-ass." Mother Maybolt, 1921-2008
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