Front Porch Stories

The last few days have been very troubling for me.  As I sat and watched the tornadoes roar across Alabama all I could think about was the safety of my children and grandchildren.  I knew that my oldest son has a basement and that is where he and my oldest grandson would be.  My youngest granddaughter and her mother were tucked safely into a storm shelter.  However my most precious daughter-in-law was working in Atlanta and my son told her to get a hotel room that the roads were to dangerous. Then there was my youngest son and his two boys whom I thought would have been with the oldest in his basement was not.  I did not find out until after the storms had passed that he and the boys had ridden out the storms in a camper trailer!  I was furious!! He knows better than that and I chewed him out for putting himself and those boys in such danger.  I still haven't heard anything from my oldest granddaughter's dad.   Then as I was calling more of m...

The hot topic on our front porch today was gas prices.  How in the world are the folks who make minimum wage or just above gonna buy gas to get to and from work?  There are all these government handouts for people who want to milk the system but there is no help at all for the working poor.  There won't be any government grants or bailouts for the folks who get out and put in forty plus hours per week, work two jobs so their kids can play ball or be in the band.  It takes gas to get to all these places!  Inflation is starting to creep up and who knows how high gas and groceries will go.  I can remember when gas was a quarter for a gallon.  I even got in trouble one time for putting high grade gas in because it was thirty-five cents.  Daddy said I would burn the valves running that high price stuff.  People are not going to have any disposable income to buy anything but what they have to have.  There won't be family trips, or eating out a...

I hope that you take the time to tell your children the real meaning of Easter.  More children need to know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, so that we might have eternal life in heaven.  Easter was one of my Mom's favorite holidays.  She really enjoyed having all the kids and grandkids all over the place.  We always had a blast!  I can remember when we used crayons to color the eggs. She always made a big dinner with all the fixins. I sure do miss her, and I miss being able to gather everyone together.  Now that I live so far away I don't get to enjoy the holidays anymore.  They have become just another day.  I wish I were going to be with my family tomorrow, hunting eggs and chasing kids.  Enjoy your family while you can!

I'm sorry that I haven't written in a while.  Sometimes life just gets so complicated and it seems as though if it isn't one thing it's ten.  They changed Pop's medicine and so that changed the time frame of his medication and it just gets me unsettled trying to get things on the proper time line.  Warm weather is here and weeds are growing and I work outside a lot and I seem to stay tired all the time.  I will be able to get back on track with my writing. Thank you so much for stopping by my blog to check on what's happening.  Oh yeah, we went back to the back surgeon this past week and although Pop does not have substantial fusing on his left side, they said it was just enough to skate by without having to go through another surgery.  Praise the Lord for that!  Neither Pop nor I were looking forward to him having to go through that again.

When my oldest son was little he stayed with my mom and dad when I worked.  He was my dad's shadow! My dad worked second shift and since my mom didn't drive I would go over most Friday mornings and we would go do the grocery and bank type things.  This particular day as we started to pull into the driveway my mom ask my three year old who lives here?  He said, "peanut"! She ask him who is peanut?  He patted his chest and said he was peanut.  My mom called him peanut for years!  I have a quilt upstairs that peanut helped her quilt. When I thought about that today, I text my son and ask him if he remembered her calling him that, and I got and lol I sure do.  It's crazy how much little things come to mean.  I wouldn't take a million dollars for that quilt, just because my mom and peanut made it!  Thanks for stopping by my blog.

The first time I saw this flowering bush it was blooming on the property that my Mom had bought us.  My dad had passed away and she bought the property next door to her for me and my family.  When we saw this beautiful bush my mom said she would like to dig it up and take it up to the house.  So my sister and I started the process.  What a job it turned out to be! We dug and we dug, we wound up getting the tractor and finished by pulling it up.  We cut it in half and my sister took part of it to her place and I planted the other half at our house.  My Mom called it a tame honeysuckle.  After I moved to Middle Georgia, I went back to the old home place and dug up some sprouts and got them started here.  A friend said she thought it was a Native Azalea. She sent me a link to a web site that has pictures of a lot of the different Native species, http://www.earlsommerville.com/  .  According to the pictures this is a Native Azalea.  I ...

Have you ever had a car that seemed to have it's own personality?  I owned one and met a few!  The first one that comes to mind is the one that belonged to the young man who took me on my first date.  He had a '55 Chevy that he had worked on since before he got a learners permit.  She was a beautiful car!  Our date started out great and the car ran like a top.  Then when we started home we kissed a little, and the car wouldn't start.  I moved over to the passenger side and she started right up.  Fluke!! NOT!  We were riding down the road and I slide over next to him and the car died!!  We laughed, car jealous!  No joke as long as I was on my side of the car she ran great!  Hey, if the car doesn't like you, you're history.  We joked about it all through school,  we were good friends but we didn't date.  I had a '69 Ford that was fickle.  I had to talk to it like it was a human just to get her to run, but run ...

It used to be that every car and truck had a CB in it.  I loved it!  You could keep up with traffic and talking kept you going on a long trip.  On this one trip I had gone to take my daughter and her son back home to North Carolina.  On my way back home I struck up a conversation with some truck drivers that were going my way.  We talked about our families and were they were going and they kept me from crying.  My grandson was only about a year old and they had lived with us a lot.  I really didn't like leaving them there but once children get so old you can't control them.  Then it started to rain.  I had a really nice car but it liked to hydroplane.  I had to slow down and lost contact with that group of drivers.  Then a little later they were passing word back to other drivers to watch out for me.  Some of the drivers ran through a place where a creek was flooding over the road and they radioed back for the other drivers to ...

I know how hard it is to have a family member deployed.  My youngest sons wife is deployed to Afghanistan.  They have two boys and the youngest one is only 20 months.  His mom has missed his first steps, his first words and those are things that you can't get back.  Then I take a look around and I know that she is not the only mom that is deployed.  These are the women who will come home and teach their children that this is the greatest country in the world.  Then if you take a look on the other side of the street you see people who abuse the freedoms that we have here and don't appreciate living in this country.  There are those that would like to see this country go belly up and we have got to get to work to stop the downhill slide that we are on.  Thank you for stopping by my blog.