Shelling Peas

 I shelled a big basket of sweet garden peas yesterday. It reminded me of being at my grandparent's home in Kannapolis, NC back in the good old, magical days of childhood. My grandparents always had a huge garden out back and I remember hulling peas, stringing green beans, and shucking corn. People don't do these things anymore. I can remember sitting in my grandparents' backyard along with my grandmother, aunt, and my mom. There may have also been some neighbors or great aunts or other friends and family there as well. But I can remember as a small child how they would sit around shelling the peas or snapping beans and talk. Nobody had meetings or ball games or bars to rush off to, nope, they were just sitting there snapping beans in the company of their loved ones on a Saturday afternoon.

It seems like such a simple, idyllic time of life. It feels that the world has been spinning way too fast to go back to those kind of days. But I believe those ingrained memories I have (and many more I've forgotten) are the substance my dreams fed on all those years. I've always been a simple country girl at heart. Too much of my life I spent chasing down somebody else's version of a dream. We can't live in contentment if we're forcing ourselves to live a life that goes against our natural state. As my dad used to say, "you can't fit a square peg into a round hole." But we try. We try to be all those things our society tell us to be. Life isn't fun when you're not living it they way YOU were designed to live it.

What type of lifestyle and life would you build if you weren't worrying about mortgages, electric bills, lawn mowers, Rotary Clubs, and Volvos? If you could do anything you wanted to do, what would it be? Tell me! I really do want to know, I love hearing other people's dreams and visions! Instead of planning and anticipating my next vacation, I'd rather build a life from which I don't want or need an escape. Doesn't that sound nice?

An extraordinary life is made up of ordinary moments.

Hot Days in the Country

This week's weather forecast...

Summer in the south is H-O-T HOT! The forecast may "say" 90s but I have seen the mercury on my outdoor thermometers top out at 120 degrees in the sun on the western-facing porch in the afternoon. And it's not a dry heat, as they say out west. Naaaaaw, this is a humid, sweaty, subtropical heat that will melt plastic and anything else you leave outside. Maybe even your face! It's the kind of sultry heat creeks, ponds, and swimming pools were invented for!

This is south Georgia. Spring was over with in March! I've had flip flop tan lines on my feet for a quarter of year already! The pool's been open for a month! There have already been sunburn incidents around here! We are eating fresh wild blackberries right off the vines! Summer starts in April and ends on October 1 here.

We get outdoors and work or play during the cooler morning hours (it's absolutely gorgeous out there at 6:30 in the morning!) and have inside siesta time from 12 to 3. Just a time to literally chill out and take a break from the heat. It may be a good time to start dinner or do some indoor chores or maybe take a little snooze in the good ol' AC. Farmhand Chris usually gets back to his farm work about 5 o'clock and works until dark. See the sunrise and watch it set and work so hard in between that you sleep like a rock...that's a good way to live a life.