Finding Myself

The sun is shining, O Happy Day!


"Remember life is not about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself." Those words hit me in the face and woke me up this morning. I jumped out of bed at 5:53 this morning to see if the clouds had disappeared. I am so tired of dark, rainy, dreary weather for the past several days, thanks to Hurricane Ida.


Guess what! The sun is "rising" in the east and the sky is getting bright. Now I can ago about my life as if it has meaning. I have good days, bad days, and days in the middle! I'm glad I have mostly good days.


I was inspired by the following info I read this morning in Life's Lessons by Ron Herring (interim pastor at our old church in Paris, TX):


"Life is like that for all of us...some days we soar, some days we run, and some days we can barely crawl! We have days of great inspiration and activity...followed by days of "nothing"!

The truth is, sometimes we don't feel very "inspired". In fact, sometimes we don't feel anything...however, life goes on. Life doesn't revolve around how well we think or feel. The key to success in life is not in soaring along with days of inspiration (don't get me wrong...those days are great). The key to success in life is in the ability to "keep plugging" when there is no inspiration.

Longfellow said it this way, "The heights of great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight; but they, while others slept, were toiling onward in the night."


For days we were so busy putting together our greenhouse kit that nothing else mattered. Then suddenly it was almost completed when the rains set in and we had to stop.


 I scrambled around looking for things to do that were short term while waiting for the rain to stop, i.e. making banana nut bread for Thanksgiving, cutting out the last big Teddy bear from an old quilt (made each of 5 granddaughters one for their 18 birthday and I'm working on Caroline's now altho she is only 14), designing and printing invitations to a DAR Good Citizen luncheon, and completing the church membership roll audit and directory, etc. Yesterday I went to the country to the Farmers Coop store to buy some cracked pecans to pick out, so I can have them for holiday baking. While there, I went down the hill to the cemetery to visit with James a bit. I didn't have to look for projects to do when he was living. He was a big "project" that took up a lot of my time. I just wish I could have done more for him. He loved the costumes I used to make for him. When I would be busy with some of my "projects" he would often say, "Can you stop and spend some time with me?"


I love working on projects, especially when they turn out well. I looked outside this morning and saw the sparkling white greenhouse which looked like a white ghost. We left the heat lamp on all night to check the temperature this morning. It's very humid and warm inside the greenhouse but in the low 40s outside. I think it might just keep our house plants warm and cozy this winter.


When it gets a little warmer outside today, we will be busy building shelves and moving plants into the warm environment for the next few 3 months. That's how long winter is in South Alabama.

Waiting for "Ida" to come blow our greenhouse down

News of Hurricane Ida over the past few days was not very welcome to us since we were in the process of assembling a greenhouse kit we bought from Sam's Club.


Now it has been downgraded to a tropical storm and that means lots and lots of rain. We're hoping the winds won't do a lot of damage here tonight.


Jim is pictured here inside the greenhouse making sure all the nuts and bolts are tight. We anchored the base of the house with metal poles driven into the ground (which is hard clay).


One of the toughest tasks was assembling and hanging a Dutch door. We finally got it hanging so it will open and close.


After "Ida" leaves us, we will build the racks and shelves inside and put all our house plants in the greenhouse for the winter. I hope there's room for the plants I am propogating in some small pots. Plus the many small ferns I have growing - for next summer.


We will be adding a heat lamp for cold weather. I can only imagine the fresh oxygen inside the little house this winter. I will put a chair there for us to go out and sit a spell among all the green plants and get fresh doses of oxygen every day. Maybe this could be our solarium. Too bad there's not room for a hot tub inside the area!

I don't have any other projects planned for the near future. This one just about did us in. We're getting too old for projects such as this.


But we will soon forget the problems we had building the greenhouse when we bring out the beautiful house plants next spring to decorate our back porch and carport.


We placed the greenhouse in the middle of the back yard in plain view of our breakfast room window. The bird feeder will be nearby so we can watch the birds while we eat and read the newspaper.


That's what you are supposed to do when you retire!  Sit back and take it easy?

My new Green House

I have wanted a greenhouse for a long time so I asked Jim to get me one for my birthday on Nov. 25th. Then I suggested he order it (a kit from Sam's Club) now so we could put it together and get all the outdoor plants inside before a cold spell. The kit arrived about 2 weeks ago and we just kept looking at the big cardboard boxes and wondering if we were going to be able to build this beautiful green house. The photo on the right is what it is supposed to look like when we finish.


Tuesday afternoon we opened the big boxes in the middle of the back yard and took all the thousand or more parts out to make sure nothing was missing (found an important template missing today).


Then we selected a spot to place the greenhouse. We wanted it in an area where we could see it from the back porch, or from the breakfast room window.


That done, we had to dig up a redbud tree and move it to another place. That little tree had roots all the way to China! Then we started putting the frame of the greenhouse together. What a chore! It's bad when you can't follow directions using drawings and pictures. They leave out a lot of steps, or at least for us it seems they do.

We laughed when the instructions stated that 2 people could put this greenhouse together in 1/2 day. It took us that long to unpack it and just lay out the parts. Today we finished "snapping" the frame together. The more you add, the heavier it gets. The next step is to start putting the "glass" into the frame. It isn't really glass but some kind of special material that looks like glass and can take the high temperatures. 


We probably will have it finished by this time next week. Can't wait to put all of my many green pot plants inside the greenhouse for the cold winter. We will have electricity and water connected to it (will have to pay someone to do that).


I'm thinking that on a cold winter day I will take a cup of coffee out to the greenhouse, a good book, and a chair with a cushion and spend some time in my "solarium" - and breathe in some good oxygen.


An added note: The banana tree we dug up last winter and took to a dump behind our house, came up this summer and I hadn't noticed it until a recent frost turned the large leaves yellow. It really stands out with all the tall weeds and trees. Maybe  next summer it will have some bananas on it.

Leaf Peepin' in North Alabama

We spent 3 days this week on a trip to north Alabama to visit the Bankhead National Forest area where we used to live in the little town of Haleyville in Winston County. It was raining when we got up Tuesday morning and it rained all day. We stopped along the way several times and arrived in Haleyville just as it was getting dark. We were amazed that the Imperial Inn was still operating and the Galley restaurant was just as we had left it 22 years ago.

We met some old friends, Nancy and Tom Stovall, for breakfast and got "caught up" on Haleyville news of the past 22 years. Tom told Jim he really didn't think he wanted to go back to the plant where they used to work - that it was so sad to see how the building had deteriorated over the past few years. Yes, it was very sad but we had to go see for ourselves.

Everything in the town looked pretty much the same; not many changes over the years. Later that morning we drove northeast of town toward the Bankhead National Forest to look for our old house. Had to get a map of Haleyville to find out way around and locate the road leading to our house! Once we started driving the 6 miles we remembered many of the landmarks along the way. The autumn leaves were beautiful, just as I remembered it in October 1986 when we moved to Haleyville.

We found our house and it looked pretty much the way it looked in 1987 when we left except for the landscaping. All the beautiful azaleas were gone, as were other flowers and trees. You could hardly see the house when we lived there. We had to hire a yardman to take care of all the flowers and big lawn. I guess the new owners didn't have time for all of that. 

We had a catfish pond at the edge of the yard and it was surrounded by azaleas and other flowering shrubs and trees. Not so anymore. There was a beautiful balsam tree at the edge of the water that I didn't remember.

We continued east from Haleyville to Double Springs, the county seat. It looked the same as when we lived there. We traveled on to Corinth National

Recreation area on beautiful Smith Lake and enjoyed the beautiful leaves while we had a picnic lunch. The weather was beautiful.

We continued east until we got to Cullman, and then headed south to spend the night in Opelika, AL.

The next day we spent going to cemeteries in that area, looking for graves of my ancestors.

More about that later.........

Down in the Boondocks!

That's one of two songs that we recognized when we went to a concert to hear BJ Thomas and Billy Joe Royal tonight. The other was "Raindrops keep falling on my head". These guys came along when our boys were growing up and I guess we never listened to their music. It was b-o-r-i-n-g! Besides they are getting old now and it was hard for them to jump about on the stage and hit those high notes. Their band was fantasic, especially the drummer from Pembroke, NC who has been with BJ Thomas for 28 years and the bass guitar player from Fayetteville, NC who has spent 30 years with him. I spent the evening watching the drummer perform.


There was a big crowd of people who grew up with these guys and they enjoyed singing along and clapping, and some even got up and danced! The auditorium was packed with seats added to the aisles. A full house!


We're looking forward to the February concert, "Three Redneck Tenors" from Paris, TX (where we lived in the 60s and 70s). I wonder if they are really from Paris. Google these guys and listen to them on U-tube. They sound like Pavorotti (however you spell that name).


We're so fortunate to have an Arts Alliance in our area to bring a variety of concerts during the year. They alternate playing in Elba and Enterprise.


When we got home, I had an email from a friend with a link to a website for Il Divo, and we both said we would have rather heard Il Divo sing; more our kind of music!  Google them to hear them sing (Il Divo.com) on UTube.

Alabama Poll Tax

Here's a Poll Tax receipt where my Great Uncle Joshua Drayden Smith paid his Alabama poll tax on December 9, 1920. I remember my dad and granddaddy paying poll tax so they could vote, but I don't remember any women in the family going to the polls in the late 30s and 40s when I was growing up.


He was number 61. You had to bring receipts to the polls so they could check to make sure you had paid your poll tax. If you skipped a year, the tax accumulated even though you didn't vote.


I copied this info about the passing of the 24th admendment to the US Constitution in 1964 to abolish poll tax or any other kind of tax to keep people from voting.
"The poll or capitation (head) tax in the United States was a lump sum tax levied by state and local governments on individuals, who often had to pay the tax in order to vote. Popularly associated with racial and class restrictions on suffrage in the South, it actually expanded the suffrage when it was introduced shortly after the American Revolution, it unintentionally discouraged voting by white women after 1920, it was exaggeratedly blamed for many of the South’s ills in the 1930s and 40s.


The Twenty-fourth Amendment (Amendment XXIV) prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964. Poll taxes had been enacted in 11 Southern states after Reconstruction as a measure to prevent African Americans from voting, and had been held to be unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. At the time of this amendment's passage, only five states still retained a poll tax: Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. However, it wasn't until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966) that all state poll taxes (for both state and federal elections) were officially declared unconstitutional, because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

I remember that when we moved from Kansas to Decatur, GA in 1957 in order for Jim to go to college, we went to the court house to register to vote. We had to read a part of the US Constitution and then copy it on a blank sheet of paper so they could tell if we could read and write! I couldn't believe this. I remember thinking we're back in the "ole' South". 

I don't think I've ever missed voting in a Presidential Election or a state election when electing a Governor. I always try to make it to the polls for all elections. Our son liked to vote and wanted to go to the polls early, often being first in line. I had to help him with his ballot but he told me who he wanted to vote for. He was proud of his "I voted" sticker and wore it all day on election day.

A Gathering of the Grimes Clan

Yesterday was the annual Grimes family reunion. It is always held on the first weekend of October (since 1918) which began as a celebration of my great grandmother Malissia Grimes' birthday. The 14 children have continued the tradition for the past 91 years.


I'm pictured here with my cousin Peggy Grimes Shirley from Montgomery. (She's the one with the gray hair!) We always enjoy spending time together at the reunion. Several of her children and grandchildren always come with her.


The past several years we have gathered at the picnic pavilion behind the New Ebenezer Baptist Church near the Grimes home place. Many of the Grimes family are buried in the church cemetery with Malissia's husband, James Shorter Grimes being the first person buried there. That's where we chose to bury our son James this past February, near my parents.


Now you know where we meet. Who's in charge? Nobody wants it to be "their time" to host the reunion! In years past, all you had to do was bring paper plates, cups, and eating utensils. This year my grandmother Fannie Grimes Wilson's descendants were the host family. Of her two children and their many children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, only two of us (my cousin Linda and I) were involved.


When I passed on the sign-in book and a few left over supplies, I also gave Uncle Toby's children a typed sheet of "instructions" on what they were supposed to do to get ready for next year's reunion. First of all you have post cards printed with a notice about the reunion (time, place, etc). Years ago it was word of mouth, reminding people about the reunion coming up. Each family was supposed to remember! Then an announcement was sent to local newspapers in later years.


The next step is to purchase supplies. These include good quality paper plates, tall plastic glasses, heavy duty plastic forks, knives and spoons, nice tablecloths for 12 large tables, big napkins, ice for drinks, name tags and pens, flowers for each table, paper towels for cleaning up, large 55-gal. trash bags for the 3 big barrels, plastic wrap or baggies for left overs to take home, and anything you want to have printed to hand out. This year I furnished a list of names and addresses of those on the mailing list (around 100).


You go to the area the day before and take soap, scrub brushes, brooms, hoses, leaf blower, etc. to clean the picnic area which is need of a good bath since it's not used very frequently.


On reunion day, you arrive early to get ready for those who want to come early and visit awhile. These are usually people who drive a long distance to get there from GA and FL, and other cities in AL. Some come the day before and stay in motels nearby.


The next time you hear of a big family reunion taking place, just know that a small handful of people are usually the "worker ants" and responsible for the work being done behind the scenes.


Times change and we can't go back to the "good ole' days" when everybody planned for weeks to get ready for the Grimes reunion, even buying or making new outfits to wear (we talked about this yesterday).


Those of us who attend every year still enjoy seeing all of our cousins and eating all the good food on the table, and hoping our family will have the most present. This year with 38 attending, we had the most with 9 present (incl. 3 children).