10:15 p.m. - 2002-08-14
Disjointed Ramblings
Just a few ramblings...I'm really tired.
Packed all day, then Bruce got home mid-afternoon and we went to the house to continue the endless summer of painting. I'm painting one of the closets in the kitchen which I'm hoping to store food in eventually, if I can ever get the nasty stain out that is all over the lower four shelves.
I was gloating to Gregg a couple of weeks ago about how gosh darn clean the house is, golly, the previous owners must have been anal-retentive-obsessive-compulsives to have left such a clean house. That was before I discovered the stain from hell lurking in this closet. My guess is that they had a bad can of beans that exploded and went all over the place and then dripped down to the bottom of the closet before anyone discovered it.
And I can't get rid of it! I've scrubbed! I've used Kilz! It's like the blood of a murdered priest I read about in some castle in England that reappears, no matter how the owners scrub and paint over it. I'm afraid this stain may always be with us, hiding under cans of tomato sauce and peas...
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I pruned the wisteria tonight. I had to get out of the paint-fume-filled house, and the wisteria was calling me. It was on the verge of becoming a seriously dangerously overgrown plant, and I was half expecting to find skeletons of children it had snagged and eaten in it's branches.
Southerners talk about wisteria as though to say, yes, it's very nice, if you like a plant that eats stray cats once in awhile. Up North we think of wisteria as a beautiful, desirable plant, because it's easy enough to keep under control. In the South, wisteria can be frightening. It has a nine month growing season in which to rally its forces of evil and take over your fence, your yard, your house up to the rooftops and beyond, into the 50 year old Chinese chestnut and the dogwood trees. The vines can easily get an inch thick in one season.
I spent about 20 minutes hacking away, pulling the vines out of the surrounding trees and off of the sidewalk. I could almost hear the plant laughing at me though. It'll be just as huge once again in just a couple of weeks.
I still love wisteria though. One of the things I love so much about New Orleans is the wisteria vines, some of which are so old they have trunks like big trees and they climb way up into the live oaks. I have a photo of Bruce standing next to one which is as big around as he is. And my favorite bar in Birmingham, The Garage, has an inner courtyard with a wisteria arbor that is jaw dropping in the spring.
I came in after the pruning adventure and Bruce and I listened to the cicadas. We have an army of cicadas - it sounds like the Amazon back there. Bruce loves them. He feels about their noise the way I do about the sound of the wind rustling the leaves in the fall. A sound from my childhood, strangely comforting.
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One of the things I love about Alabama is the big sky here - you can see for miles (and miles and miles...) Tonight as we were leaving there was a thunderstorm lighting up the sky. It was probably about 15 miles from here, but we could see amazing flashes of lightning from behind the clouds.
I haven't decided whether I find the "severe weather" here more fascinating or frightening. If I don't feel threatened, like tonight, I can sit outdoors for hours and watch the show. My favorite is cloud to cloud lightning, which we have incredible displays of. Watching it from a distance is like sitting under a Van de Graaf generator.
My grandfather was hit by lightning three times. He was what old Yankee farmers call a lightning bug, meaning a person who supposedly attracts lightning. All three times he came out unscathed, although he had migraine headaches after the second time.
This lightning-attracting trait is supposed to be passed from grandmother to grandson and from grandfather to granddaughter, skipping generations and sexes. When I was a little girl, my family was afraid I had inherited it because I was almost hit by lightning when I was about four years old.
The lightning came in through our kitchen window and crossed right above where I was playing on the floor with some tin cans(for some reason I was obsessed with tin cans as a kid) and hit the sink next to me. I remember a beautiful blue streak and then an ear splitting KABOOM! and my mother screaming and the air full of white sparkly things. I was unhurt, except for having dropped a can on my toe and cracking a nail, which my mother promptly removed and put in my baby book.
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