Sunday, April 30, 2006

Yet Another View

An Unusual Flower - Parrot Flower from Thailand


Thursday, April 27, 2006

Texan, Southern, or a Strong Dose of Both?

I started the morning off with this test after noting Jonathan's results on the same. It provided a few minutes of fun.


Dixie Royal
You are 89% true Southern!

You are pure belle or gentleman! You know your Jones Soda, Nehi and RC colas, your Moon Pies and sweet potato pie; you'd absolutely die without air conditioners in the summer, and you've seen Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes (or read the book!). Your grandmother lives in an antebellum home and has a cook who makes the best fried chicken and asparagus casserole and summer squash and everything else in the world. And you know the taste of honeysuckle and the feel of grass between your toes. You are blessed.


My grandparents were born between 1890 and 1906 and never lived in anything approaching an antebellum home, although two of them hoed plenty of cotton and one grandmother built several homes herself and was quite accomplished with a shotgun.

Granny Little cooked her own fried chicken in an iron skillet in pure lard and I don't really remember Granny Boyd's fried chicken. She did, however, make 72 biscuits for breakfast in the days when she was cooking for her own children since she had 14 of them. She was in her 60's when I was born and was married to PaPa for 70 years before he died.

I definitely remember Nehi grape soda from the lift-top iced cooler at Aunt Francis' store, Royal Crown colas, moon pies, tasting honeysuckle blooms, and the feel of St. Augustine grass between my toes...also chasing lightening bugs, watching horned toads in the backyard, Sunday "singings" and dinner on the grounds (church grounds, that is). I have been truly blessed to grow up where I did with family and friends who loved me and let me know it and parents and grandparents who lived out committed marriages of the "until death do you part" type.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

My Song

Music has always played a vital part in my life. Perhaps this partially explains why a passage I recently read in a novel by B. J. Hoff resonates with something within me. A school teacher was praying and reading scripture:

"And in his spirit, Truth whispered: The music of life is within you...not in the world, not in circumstances or external things...and not in an instrument. You are the instrument, and I am the music. Whatever road you walk in this life, it is because I have set your feet upon it. Whatever trials you encounter, whatever struggles you endure--your joys, your sorrows--these, too, are My will. I would have you, through the life you live with me, show these children....these people...that the music of life is within, not without...that it comes from Me. I am your hope...your strength...your song. I, the Lord, am your music."

"The Lord is my strength and song, And he has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father's God, and I will extol Him."
- Exodus 15:2

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Spring Beauty