Mad Stalker Skills and a Trip Down Memory Lane

It's about forty-ish in Frog Pond Holler today. My little corner is still covered with a layer of white, while everything is a lovely muddy brown across the road. 40° feels like a heat wave after the hellish cold that we had last week. I've got water, power and innerwebs. It's all good.

My drugs got here from India last week and as far as I can tell, they're the real deal. I ordered from safemeds4all.com  for those of you who might be faced with a similar situation. That's not a paid link, just sharing. I felt much better after a few days back on the C. I guess it took a while for it to build back up in my system. There's hope for this ol' nag after all.

The past week at work was rough, I get more quote requests than I can get to, but Kat's been awesome keeping up with returns and Thelma's been running interference on the phone. As much as I hate to admit it, they've been a lot of help.

I guess Twatwaffle could sense I was having a lousy one because she slipped me a bottle of homemade hooch the other day. One of the welders makes wine that'll make you wanna slap your grandma. It's a sipper. You feel that chit going down. Good stuff. Carlos supplies TW with a bottle with every new batch he whips up, but TW being the high falootin' snot she is, only drinks the stuff they brew over at the Biltmore House. She always quietly passes her Vino de Carlos to me after everyone else leaves.

I guess she's not ALL bad.

I took a drive by Mamaw's house on the way to the grocery store last night. We were out of everything and spending way too much money eating from the DG, so I forced myself to go. As I turned down the old road, down to the holler where Mamaw and Papaw's dairy farm once thrived, for a moment I could still hear the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. When I was little, we used to come down here for vacations and whenever someone died. It was always the middle of the night when we arrived and I was usually asleep in the back seat of our 1968 Plymouth Sport Fury. I could still feel the vinyl seat peel away from my cheek as I'd slowly sit up, hearing that crunch and Ma telling me to "sit up and gitcher shoes on." The car would slow to a crawl, the fog so thick you could barely see beyond the headlights. There was a tiny one room church on the right, with an outhouse a few feet up the bank. I used to tell Ma I was going to get married in that church, but it's since burned down. The outhouse was left standing for years, but it eventually toppled over and disappeared. I still remember exactly where it was though.

I crept up the road, the creek rushing by on the left side of the road, as it always has, and Cousin Miguel's house on the right, next to the old barn where I used to stand, horrified as I listened to my dad and my uncle inside "breaking" horses. I'd hear kicking and that awful scream horses make when they're terrified, the two men laughing and hollering, lashes delivered with an old rope. They used to brag about punching them in the face to teach them a lesson.

I hate that fucking barn.

The Fucking Barn
Originally it was built with rocks where cinder blocks are now.

Cousin Miguel keeps his derpy little horse there now, along with a few calves. I'm pretty sure he's raising them to sell to slaughter. I guess someone has to. Apparently the nut doesn't fall far from the tree because it was only about a year ago that Cousin Miguel lost his coaching job at the high school after having a "relationship" with one of the students.

A couple of weeks ago, the police scanner fired up with a call involving two children who'd dialed 911 while hiding in their bedroom. Their parents were divorced but Daddy had showed up and they were screaming and fighting. They said he'd threatened Mama with a knife.

Turns out it was Cousin Miguel.

Hen House
I'm pretty sure Cousin Miguel added the steer skull.

Next to Cousin Miguel's house, stood Mamaw's farm house. The last renters painted it pink for some ungodly reason, adding to the dilapidated state.

The Old Farm House

I could make it pretty again.

Across the road (and the creek) another house barely stands. My uncle lived there when he first got married. I used to sit at Mamaw's kitchen table and watch his horses on the hillside beside it. There's another old barn there too. I think it's still part of the property. The old bridge has seen better days, but we always drove across the creek anyway. Amazingly, that house's old outhouse still stands. You don't see many of those anymore. It amazes me how far the outhouses were from the house. I can barely make it to the bathroom on the other side of the trailer when nature calls in the wee hours of the morning. I can't imagine hiking through the weeds to pee. I guess that's why Ma always kept an old paint can in the hallway at night when we stayed at Mamaw's house. She did eventually get indoor plumbing, but I can remember when she still had an outdoor potty.

Uncle Mike's Old House
You can see the bridge in the background on the right and the trench where we drove across the creek.

When I was about 13, I spent a couple of summer weeks with Mamaw. This strange old lady with long white hair, layered skirts and work boots came to visit. It was one of Mamaw's sisters who'd moved in to my uncles old house. At 13 I was all angsty and uninterested. I kick myself now.

The Hillside Across the Creek
I used to spend hours on the front porch watching Uncle Mike's horses grazing. If  you look closely, you can see the other old barn, on the far right kind of in the background. It's a few yards behind the old house Uncle Mike lived in.

As I drove by, I got to thinking. There's plenty of flat land beside the old house across the creek. There's an old barn. There's pasture.. access to the creek. If ya know.. unfortunate things happen to my dad and I become part owner of the property, I could move my trailer beside the old house. It's almost paid for. I'd have to get a septic tank dug and get power lines run over there... No one's using that part of the land for anything...

Just a thought.

Anywho... well THAT turned in to a long rambling trip down memory lane.

I'm more wore out from grocery shopping than I should be and I'm nursing a headache.. sinus/allergy junk. I got up this morning and drug about half the unnecessary bullcrap out of the cabinets, so I've got that to finish when the ibuprofen kicks in. Laundry's piled up to heavens gate and I'm still drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, so there are dishes to wash. My weekend is planned. At least I've got everything I need, I won't have to venture out in to public and I'm moving around better than I have since Christmas.

It's all good.

Ya'll have an awesome weekend. We'll talk again soon.

Later Taters!!!!!

P.S. All photos are courtesy of Google Earth and my mad stalker skills. My dad lives somewhere down in that holler and I'm pretty sure if Cousin Miguel saw a strange old fat lady stopped in the road taking pictures I'd meet the business end of a shotgun.