What the Founding Fathers said to the lawyers:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
What the Lawyers said to the Judges: [click to continue…]
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It isn’t Camelot. It’s a farm in Alabama.
There is no Round Table. But a couple of rectangular ones have been the scene for many card and domino games and never-ending meals served up.
There are no knights on trusty steeds. But an old blue Ford tractor gave way a few years ago to a new John Deere, and I can do some pretty mean jousting of sorts with that.
The house has been modeled and remodeled over time. The barn – the second of my lifetime – is showing its age. But cows still graze in the pasture and give birth to new generations, including a really cute calf born recently that the family named “Peanut.” I will not tell you why.
Adventure waits in all four directions at this place – the home of my great grandparents, my grandparents, and now my parents. [click to continue…]
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Behind the home my dad grew up in, and lives in today, my grandfather built a smokehouse around 78 years ago. Every winter, when the weather got extremely cold, my grandparents, my dad and his siblings, and their farm hands would kill 10-12 hogs – 3-4 at a time. I’ll spare you the details (you can thank me later).
My grandmother’s job was to smoke the meat. After the meat had been salted down for 21 days, she would take it out, dip it into warm water to get the salt out of it, then hang it in the smokehouse on poles. She would smoke the meat really slowly for two weeks, keeping the green wood barely smoldering. She wouldn’t let the fire blaze up or have any heat to it. She kept it going just enough to cure the meat and give it that good smoked flavor.
Here’s how she described life with the smokehouse: [click to continue…]
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I’ve done reunions badly, if at all. Never went to a high school reunion. And while I do have my share of sentimentality, somewhere in my brain is a switch that flips with life changes. “Move on,” it says, and typically I do.This year was different. Somehow in one of those once-in-a-lifetime periods of alignment, I had two reunions in exactly the same location within a week of each other. [click to continue…]
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