A Rebel Fan's Blog

Latest Offerings from Tygerheart Fine Soaps

2012-01-29T20:53:00.001-05:00

Blackberry Season at Lawson's Fork, 1776

2011-08-01T22:34:00.003-04:00

The short story I wrote this summer.

Gamecock and Tiger Swirl Soaps

2011-01-15T09:28:00.007-05:00

Sometimes the creative side of me takes over, even over the soap pot. The darnedest things inspire a pot of soap. For this batch, it was who, not what. I wanted to make something to honor Marcus Lattimore's first season with Carolina, you know, back in the fall when we were all in a football frenzy. Even most of us RebelTigers were pulling for the Cocks except for our game. I know a few who weren't, and y'all are welcome to pipe up here. Then I had to give the Tigers equal effort and made an orange and purple swirl batch. So here are the results of that inspiration.

With swirls of garnet and black, Gamecock is scented with Spiced Mahogany from Bramble Berry, and described as a deep, rich woody scent with notes of Italian Bergamot, and Apple Wood to round out the darker, more sensuous Patchouli, Cedarwood, and Oakmoss. Also spices of Cardamom, Vanilla Bourbon and allspice are added. The resulting fragrance is one of sophistication and verve.

The Tiger was scented with Energy fragrance oil, also from Bramble Berry. It is described thus,a stimulating blend of citrus, including grapefruit, lemon, and lime, with hints of fresh cucumber and jasmine, and a touch of pineapple, blackberry and champagne.

And here they are tailgating together.

Tygerheart Fine Soaps

2010-11-28T18:57:00.002-05:00

If you're wondering why I've not written a blog post in a while, it's because I've been making soap like crazy. I've had the soaping bug for quite a long while. I don't think a bar of store-bought soap has touched my skin in nearly a dozen years. My soap is good. Take a look here at my Etsy Shop, Tygerheart Fine Soaps. Locals can get their paws on these bars at Creative Hands Artisan at the intersection of Groce Road and Highway 29 in Lyman, SC.

My Version of Carolina Gold aka Yaller BBQ Sauce

2010-05-08T21:47:00.006-04:00

Since "yaller sauce" is getting kind of hard to find around here, I figured out this recipe after several attempts. We like it better than the store-bought kind. Put this stuff in the blender for a few seconds then store in a glass jar in the refrigerator. Shake before using.

1/2 cup yellow mustard
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 to 1 teaspoon red pepper powder
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

For Gary Carden

2010-04-16T12:15:00.002-04:00

Gary, this is the Wordle of your interview in the Smoky Mountain News.

Wordling Favorite Poems for National Poetry Month

2010-04-14T14:54:00.004-04:00

The Exchange by Ron Rash

Mountain Bride by Robert Morgan

Work by Darnell Arnoult

Good News for Me!

2010-04-14T12:05:00.002-04:00

The good news is that I won the 2010 Hub City Award for Poetry. Click to read the article.
My youngest suggested that mine must have been the ONLY poetry entry this year. Oh, nay, nay, I said. There were prizes offered for 2nd and 3rd places as well. And the icing on the cake - I also took third place in fiction.

Playing with Wordle

2010-04-12T12:45:00.005-04:00

My students introduced me to Wordle.com. I noticed their interesting notebook covers and asked them how they made them. I put in the text to one of my previous posts, Kudzu Cousins and Lye Soap, and got this.

Then I put in Robert Morgan's poem, Honey, and got this.

Go play with Wordle.

Worm Porn

2010-03-07T12:04:00.007-05:00

I dug into the compost pile yeterday and lifted out a writhing red wiggler worm orgy (Eisenia fetida). The warm sun on the side of my compost barrel had them in a frenzy. I was embarrassed, saying, oh, pardon me, and almost placed them back in the black to finish their business, making new worms. But decided, oh, what the heck? they’ll rediscover each other again, and forked them over to the other bin. Perhaps I should start taking my camera to the garden to capture some green porn to share with you.

Photo is from http://www.worms.com/redworms.html which has a teachers guide about vermicomposting.

Worm Porn
http://www.mcb.arizona.edu/wardlab/matingvid.html
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUMyOWR7qaE

smell and memory

2009-12-13T16:31:00.003-05:00

Have you ever run across a long forgotten item or sense that reminded you of something from way way back yonder? For me, it’s smell. I would like to make an incense blend of Swisher Sweets cigars, Old Spice, line-dried flannel, the metal, oil, and weathered upholstery of an old pickup truck, cows, milk, sweet feed, and wet cement, with a high note of manure. And every time I burned it, my grandpa would aromatize out of the smoke and stay with me for the rest of the day. I would keep fishing gear in the utility room so that when he wafted in, we would head up Highway 276 to the creeks in that part of Greenville that points the accusatory finger at something over in Pickens County. Or perhaps we would take off up Old Highway 25, through the watershed area, and he would ask me to keep a lookout for that shed in the woods (it’s out there, you know), to keep my mind off the nausea that always crept up on me on our trips to see his cousins around Tuxedo and Flat Rock. But this time, since I’d be driving, I wouldn’t get car sick.

1940 Cotton Mill Pay Voucher

2009-07-20T15:08:00.012-04:00

I went to the last Tucapau/Startex Reunion back in the spring and I promised that I would show you some of the pictures I took there. Finally downloaded them off the camera. I think this picture merits its own blog post. Below is a picture of a 1940 pay stub from Spartan Mills Startex Division. Knowing who it belonged to, I’d venture to guess that this may be a first pay check. I’ll not comment and let the numbers do the talking.

Hours worked – 32
Gross pay – $10.72

Deductions
OAB – $0.11
Thrift Club – $3.00
Rent, lights, water – $5.73
Store – $0.35

Net pay – $1.53

This year I plan to have a display about the early years of Tucapau in my classroom. This photo will be prominent in the display.

The Tornado that Wasn't and the Wall-O-Maters

2009-07-13T18:05:00.013-04:00

Tomato cages, like atoms, are mostly empty space. I've had my hog wire tomato cages for as long as I’ve lived here, sixteen years. I made them by cutting one-yard sections of the fencing and rolling them to make a tube by connecting and twisting the cut horizontal wires around the vertical wires. They are set in place with green metal fence posts stobbed into the ground. I hadn’t needed the cages for the last three years while they stayed stacked in a pyramid of air behind the garage. I thought I could grow some really fine tomato plants in large five to ten gallon containers around the sides of the driveway where it would be easier to tend rather than tromp out to the big garden at the back of the property. But I was only kidding myself. Even when I did what all the container gardening experts said to do, I couldn’t get a Park’s Whopper much bigger than a lemon. I’m used to growing a tomato big enough to make a sandwich with one single slice. And that Topsy Turvy tomato planter thing is a joke. Don’t waste your money.

Well, sir, I decided back around Thanksgiving that I was through with container gardening. Heck, I have the land and ought to be using it like the good Lord intended, growing something to stuff in my face. But my hog wire cages had succumbed to the elements back there behind the garage, being no more substantial now than so much brown cobwebs. It was the tornado last year that drew my attention to that fact.

The 2008 Brookdale Acres/Gap Creek Tornado that formed over Tab’s Flea Market on Wade Hampton Boulevard, Highway 29, with no warning and undetected by the National Weather Service, shucked off all my shingles, uprooted many trees and bushes (including my thirty-foot pink dogwood), twisted others like licorice whips, turned my eight-foot wooden fence into splinters, sucked the water from the hot tub, smashed cars, spun shingles through the neighborhood like circular saw blades into anything in their way, and sent the metal walls of an above-ground pool whipping and writhing in the air like a streamer of toilet paper to land crumpled on a neighbor’s front steps 100 yards away. The tornado, which the NWS called straight-line winds instead (because they didn’t send out a warning), but the neighbor said on TV he “seen” a tornado coming up the road, lifted the house across the street off its foundation and smashed it right back down, causing the roof to split along the ridge, warp the whole frame, shifting the bricks and foundation. It took the insurance people a couple of days to decide to condemn the structure and rebuild the house.

As Ken and the State Farm man assessed the damage, starting in the front of the house and working their way to the back of the property, while local new teams swarmed the neighborhood, I started in the rear where I discovered the tomato cages, mostly rust dust, smashed to smithereens by a small pecan limb. Oh, well. I wasn’t using them anymore, I thought. I had my containers, right? many of which were shoved over and emptied on the ground by the winds. We found one of the planters cradled in the top branches of a giant white oak in the woods across the street. It’s still there along with a Christmas wreath from who-knows-where. Spring break was just around the corner and I thought I could make some new cages then, but I never did. My rheumatiz-stricken hands couldn’t squeeze the wire cutters as easily as they could fifteen years before. I tried the container garden one more time, but decided to go back to a real garden after that third season of puny produce.

In late January, Ken began tilling the old garden spot we had been using for a burn pile. He tilled it about three different times. I expressed my doubts that we would be able to grow anything there this year, thinking it would be too alkaline because of the ashes. And sure enough, as the days warmed, when there should have been weeds sprouting, not even a sprig of chickweed grew. The spot was nothing but a scald. However, I didn’t want to break new ground just yet. So we transformed the old flower beds around the patio inside the new wooden fence (complements of State Farm) into a cool crop garden with lettuces, cabbage, and broccoli. During spring break I planted six Park’s Whoppers I had started from seed back in February in the patio garden. A couple of weeks later we noticed the tilled spot had some little weeds growing in it. I figured all the rain we had in early spring diluted the natural lye from the ashes and decided to take a chance with some more crops out there.

I bought a real cheap nine-pack of Rutgers tomatoes at Walmart, marked down because they were yellow and scrawny as pencil leads. If they died in the ground, it didn’t matter. I had to do this experiment. But how was I going to stake them up if they did thrive? I’d used most of the old metal posts in the patio garden. This is when I realized the tornado had given me an answer. We still had the old drive-through, chain-linked gate leaning against the fence in the back yard, all ten feet of it, the one that was warped when the kids’ trampoline was flung into it. I never did like that gate, it was too heavy, and I had to use two hands to open it. We replaced it with an easy-open double gate.

With the old warped gate and the last three metal fence posts, I created a 5:1 incline for the tomatoes to creep up if they grew at all. And they did grow like crazy after being stunted for about a month. As the vines grew, I lashed them to the fence with some ties I made form an old pair of pantyhose cut calamari style. What I have now is a wall-o-‘maters. They are loaded with green tomatoes, and I’ve been harvesting ripe tomatoes since July 4th weekend. I like this new arrangement very much. And it’s way easier than empty space that takes up so much space.

Here is a slide show of the damage.

The Wall-o-maters.

I saw the signs.

2009-06-26T14:34:00.007-04:00

I saw the telltale signs,
stripped stems and dark green dookie pellets.
So I've been on a tomato hornworm
search and destroy mission.

I miss my little red hens.
They loved to follow me
on a worm-hunting adventure.
I'd pry the fat boys off the plants
and flick them at my girls' feet.

Did I ever tell you about
my first encounter with guacamole?
Thought it was prueed tomato hornworm.
That was back in 1973.

This picture is from Clemson's web site.

http://entweb.clemson.edu/eiis/factshot/images/tomatohornworm.jpg

A Big Girl Now

2009-06-26T08:17:00.002-04:00

This week my baby turned into a big girl, passing her drivers test with smooth, flawless parallel parking, which you only need in Greer, got her first little part-time job making outside money (not from my pocketbook), and filled the gas tank with said money. I am getting old.

975.729

2009-06-25T21:36:00.006-04:00

I’ve been lurking in the 975.729 region of the Dewey Decimals lately. The 975 means
Southeastern US, the .7 means South Carolina, and the 29 means Spartanburg County. I like to see what the historians say about my antecedents. One of the most concentrated of the Spartan District tomes I’ve run across is a little self-published jewel called Indians, Bloodshed, Tears, Churches, and Schools – It All Started at Fort Gowen by James V. Gregory and James Walton Lawrence, Sr. 2003.
The idea for this book began with the authors’ and the National Park Service’s search for the original site of Fort Gowan, one in a string of several forts, all within a one-day’s walk (or run) of each other, built during the times of Tory, Indian, and outlaw gang attacks on the settlers in the South Carolina backcountry. Often mentioned are the dastardly deeds of the outlaw William “Bloody Bill” Bates along the Indian Line (Spartanburg Co. and Greenville Co. boundary). We also had another Bloody Bill in the region, William Cunningham, most noted for his attack at Walnut Grove Plantation near Roebuck. Bates reminds me of the pirate character, Stephen Bonnet, in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series. I imagine his maraudering band to be a lot like the gang of bandits who kidnapped Claire in A Breath of Snow and Ashes. Very nasty fellow.
Much of the information for Fort Gowen was gathered from aerial maps, the SC Archives, Greenville and Spartanburg County records, old newspaper articles, and the writings of local historians Dr. Lyman Draper, Dr J.B.O. Landrum, and Mann Batson. This little book reminded me that some of the greatest suffering and bloodshed before and during the American Revolution was borne by the original settlers of the backwoods Spartan District of South Carolina.

I wonder about that Guy guy.

2009-06-15T21:30:00.004-04:00

s Today we went to Harold's of Gaffney, featured on The Food Network's show with spiky-haired Guy Fieri, for their famous chili burger. No wonder they don't tell you how they make the chili on the show. I need Imodium and Nexium. If Dewy's Duck Inn in Startex were still open, Diners, Drive Ins and Dives would have ignored Harold's - best chili ever in this world at the Duck Inn. I'd kill for that mill hill recipe. We went to the Duck Inn for our dogs and to Walt's Mr. Hot Dog for our chili-cheese burgers. That was twenty-five years ago, so it may just be my old lady innards and not Harold's food. But the amazing thing about Harold's is that it's been in business for 75 years and making the food the same way. Now I'd like to give them a second chance on one of the pinto bean Wednesdays. Pinto beans, fatback, corn muffins, chow chow, and onions sound real good to me.

Our Kuykendall Family Album

2009-05-21T12:06:00.011-04:00

Folks, this album will continue to grow as I scan and upload the pictures to it. If you click the little blue picture icon in the lower right, you can see the complete album with captions for each picture. So, help me out, cousins, if you see something that needs correction, let me know.

Blue Ridge Book Festival

2009-05-17T17:28:00.030-04:00

It was Mother's Day weekend and my girls went with me to the book festival in Hendersonville held at the Blue Ridge Community College. I actually got to have a few impromptu reunions there in the halls of the college. Here is honorary chairman, Robert Morgan, one of the kudzu cousins, introducing keynote Sharyn McCrumb, who spoke on finding truth in fiction. She's a consummate researcher. I was using a new camera that I wasn't used to and my picture of McCrumb didn't turn out.

Louise Bailey spoke on the cultural and historical dimensions of Henderson County. I came in a little late for that one, but was delighted to hear the story about Carl Sandburg having supper at her father's home where he enjoyed the fresh pole beans cooked with salt pork so much, not only did he have three helpings, he turned the serving bowl up and drank the pot liquor. His way of saying Henderson County pole beans are the best in the world, I reckon.

Mountain balladeer and stroyteller, Sheila Kay Adams, entertained us with her story, Whatever Happened to John Parrish's Boy, one of my favorites in her collection, Come Go Home with Me. I was very sorry to hear about the recent passing of her husband and performance partner, Jim.

Gary Carden, spoke on Western North Carolina stroytelling and folklore. He told stories about growing up with his grandparents in the mountains and how he came to study drama at Western Carolina. This session was the girls' favorite. I was going to ask him to tell the story about the trout who learned to walk on land, but we ran out of time. His play,The Prince of Dark Corners, about the Carolina bootlegger outlaw, Lewis Redmond is on DVD. I have a copy which I used in Tech Prep Chemistry when we study distillation.

Getting Back to the Garden

2009-04-17T15:09:00.004-04:00

When Wal-Mart and fire ants came to Greer in the same year, I gave up having a big garden – and I mean BIG. For the past few years I’ve had only a few ‘mater plants because of the travel softball season being all over us. But, you know what? It makes me nervous not to have a garden, depending on so many outlanders to provide what I eat. So we are going back to the garden, starting little and building up to a putting-up garden. And with two acres, it’d be a sin not to. I’ll just keep an EpiPen in my britches pocket.

I planted some broccoli and onions and Romaine lettuce and beets way back before Spring break, and they are up a right nice size now. I started tomatoes from seed, Rutgers and Park’s Whoppers, which are just about ready to put out. The nine-pack of vegetables were a good price at Lowes a couple of weeks ago. I got one pack of Roma tomatoes. I have seeds for cucumbers, birdhouse gourds, crooked-neck squash, and eggplant. They will go out in May. I’ll have to go buy some Jalapenos and bell peppers. As much as I like okra, I’ll pass on it this time. It comes in after school starts when I have no time. But retirement is not too far off.

No corn this time, but I can flat out grow corn. I’ll never forget the year, ’81 to be exact, Uncle Marion and I tended that humongous garden down at the farm right next to the lake. SIX acres of Merritt sweet corn. It was also the summer I first found I was pregnant with Elizabeth. Oh, Lord! I hoed and puked and hoed and puked. Then I pulled ears and puked and shucked and puked and blanched and puked and cut off and puked and bagged it for freezing and puked. Then I ate nary a kernel of it until Thanksgiving when the nausea went away. My uncle said, “You’re just like Momma. Always got to be growing something.” I never told him what a complement that was. He was the same way. What a wonderful trait to pass down. Ah, good times, good memories.

I suspect more and more people will venture out to plant some vegetables with the recession and all, and some may do it because it’s just plain “greener” to eat locally grown foods – a victory garden sort of. But whatever your reasons, I’m just curious to know what you are growing this summer. Tell me.

Video of Hank Garland playing Sugarfoot Rag

2009-04-12T21:06:00.003-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytme7s9pSx0

Startex/Tucapau Mill Village Reunion

2009-03-15T15:46:00.009-04:00

A good many of you run across this blog while searching terms with the words Startex or Tucapau in them. The official mill village site is http://www.startex.org/. Next month, April 18, 2009, the historical society will hold a reunion. So visit the site and read about all the plans for the village. The organizers would welcome any memorabilia you have to share at the gathering. You can contact them from the information on the site.

Thunder in January

2009-01-04T17:05:00.004-05:00

Sara heard thunder last night while I was sawing logs. She was just dozing when she detected a flash behind closed lids. Thinking Mary was taking pictures of her slobbering, with her mouth hanging open (they do that kind of thing to one another), she jumped up to swat at her, but nobody was there. That’s when she heard the thunder. “Oh, that’s a sign,” I said when she reported it this morning. It means that there will be snow in 10 days – the day before final exams for first semester, how lovely. Thunder in January is supposed to wake up the snakes, too. I ain’t about to go out in the woods to check.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T20:21:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year! We watched the Bowl games today and all our teams lost. :-(
We ate the traditional southern NY's Day fare, black-eyed peas and collard greens (you do know why we eat them, don't you?). I've learned how to gussy up the greens from my fancy chef son-in-law, though I still favor just a little bacon grease and chow chow on the side. On Tuesday, we smoked several pork loins with hickory, apple, and pecan woods. I let the loins soak up their juices for two days in giant zip-lock bags. OMG! they were delicious with the greens, sliced paper thin and piled on rolls and a little daub of Dukes on the bread. My youngest said it was the best meal I had made all year. Ha Ha Ha.

I will never make another pumpkin pie.

2008-12-15T18:29:00.005-05:00

You won't either if you try this recipe over the holidays.

Pumpkin Cheese Cake
Preheat oven to 350

Crust in a 9 inch spring form pan
1 3/4 cup of mixed graham cracker and ginger snap crumbs
3T. light brown sugar
1/2 t. ground cinnamon
1 stick melted butter

Filling
3 eight ounce pk cream cheese at room temp.
1 15 ounce can pumpkin puree
3 eggs and 1 yolk
1 1/2 c. sugar1/4 c. sour cream
1 1/2 t. pumpkin pie spice
2 t. all purpose flour
2 t. vanilla-

Combine crust ingredients in a bowl and press into 9 in. spring form pan.
Beat cream cheese until smooth, add pumpkin, eggs , sour cream, sugar, and spice.
Blend, add flour and vanilla, and beat until well combined.
Pour into crust and spread evenly.
Bake one hour and 350 F.
Remove and let stand 15 minutes.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 4 hours

I had never made a cheese cake before because I didn't have a spring form pan. But I went out a few weeks ago with buying one on my mind. I found a set of 3 spring form pans at Big Lots for 7 bucks. The recipe is my variation of Paula Deen's recipe. She uses separate spices instead of pumpkin pie spice and plain graham crackers. I changed it to half graham and half ginger snaps for the crust.

Congrats to the Rebels

2008-12-07T20:05:00.008-05:00

The Byrnes Rebels won their 6th 4A State Football Championship in seven years yesterday over at Clemson. Here they are just beginning the celebration before the presentation of the Championship trophy.

Sara was happy to be there, but her feet were cold. I wore my snow boots and my toes were toasty.

Mary and Dad snuggle to keep warm.

Rash at the Hub

2008-12-06T09:43:00.016-05:00

Ron was at the HubBub Thursday night to do a reading of Serena. Of course he started with one of the best opening paragraphs of any novel ever (in medias res), where you know that blood is not far in coming.

Byrnes High faculty was well represented in the crowd that was treated to glimpses of training an eagle to hunt rattle snakes, and some other tidbits about how those golden eagles from Mongolia are bred and trained to hunt. He read the scene where Rachel plants her father’s headstone and remembers some loving moments with him which were few and far between.

Then there are the delightful continuing conversations of the loggers which remind me very much of some of the bird walks we take in my Tech Prep Chemistry class. Yesterday I got this from a girl out of the middle of nowhere, “Do you believe in the Big Bang Theory, Mrs. I? I don’t. I was taught creation.”

“Me neither. Jesus put me here. Hallelujah!” said the boy behind her, tongue-in-cheek and a dip in the other, which I’ve grown to ignore because apparently he needs one after lunch or he’ll be disruptive in class.

“I think it’s kinda both. Don’t you , Miz I? What if it was God that made the Big Bang to happen?” said another kid.

“I think you’re probably right. You know how I always say that chemistry is God's science. Now, look at calcium on the periodic table. I’ll use the laser pointer and let’s say the electron configuration together. Ready? 1s2..2s2…what comes next?”

Good News

2008-11-21T20:51:00.003-05:00

One of my stories has been accepted to appear in Hub City's newest anthology, The Essential Fiction of Spartanburg, to come out in April 2009. It is edited by C. Michael Curtis, the senior editor of The Atlantic magazine. He is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College.

Serena's Coming!

2008-10-08T16:26:00.014-04:00

I'm excited as a mill-hill kid during fair week and I got my free ticket from my school teacher. Hey! I am a mill-hill kid and it IS Piedmont Interstate Fair week. But the reason I'm excited is that my copy of Ron Rash's latest novel, Serena, is on it's way. Should get mine today or tomorrow. You can read the first chapter if you go find the Serena page on Amazon. There is also an interesting essay by Ron on the page.

The book actually springs from a short story published in Ron's anthology, Chemistry. The story, Pemberton's Bride, features evil Serena and her new husband, and is set in a Western North Carolina lumber camp in the 1930s.

I like how he writes a short story and then it grows up to be a novel. That also happened with the novel, The World Made Straight. Perhaps one of my stories will grow up to be a big book some day. Ha.

Our school was fortunate to host Ron last spring when he came to speak to our students about writing. I was honored when the librarians asked me and a few other teachers to join them and Ron for dinner the night before. You know, everytime I see that guy he ask me what I'm working on - I know Ron from the Wildacres workshops. And he did that for our students, too. You don't get that very often with famous writers. After dinner I just had to ask about training an eagle to hunt rattlesnakes - you'll know what I'm talking about if you read the short story or novel. A very lively discussion about how he learned about it and researching for fiction in general followed.

This one is going to be big, folks.

Talk Like a Pirate Weekend

2008-09-18T19:34:00.006-04:00

Since it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, Sept. 19, I decided to visit the blog of my favorite pirate romance author, Darlene Marshall, and was happy to see that she has finished her latest novel, A Sea Change. I can hardly wait for that one.

Tomorrow the Byrnes Rebels will host Florida High School football powerhouse, the Lincoln Trojans. It should be a good one. A Florida team up in South Carolina on TLAP Day. How appropriate. Arrr.

Henderson County Genealogical Society 25th Anniversary

2008-08-25T11:14:00.011-04:00

A crowd of nearly 100 celebrated the 25th anniversary of the HCGHS on August 16 at The Chariot in Hendersonville, NC along with guest speaker, poet, novelist, and Daniel Boone biographer, Robert Morgan. Ron Rash once told me he thinks Morgan is "the greatest". I have to concur.

Currently the society is working on transcribing the court records for the first thirty years or so of the county's existance. I have a huge folder of 1858 records sitting by my Lay-Z-Boy. It ain't easy, let me tell you. I've read these photocopied microfilms till my eyes cross, transfering into composition books before typing them. The going is lots slower than I thought it would be.

Got published

2008-07-31T16:33:00.002-04:00

My essay, "Ray and Me", about my relationship with my cousin with cerebral palsy, and my poem, "When I Plant Corn" have been accepted for publication in the second issue of The Petigru Review, South Carolina Writers Workshop's literary journal. Readers will be able to see these pieces in print near the end of October.

You can read about the judges in the contest here. http://myscww.org/anthologyjudges.htm

Thank y'all for reading my stuff and commenting on them.

the inside flap of her birthday card

2008-07-23T14:31:00.006-04:00

My first memory of you
is not your face or voice,
but rather your hands and
forearms, slick and soapy,
holding me for my bath
in the kitchen sink.
I clinked measuring spoons.
A Startex calendar
towel with roosters and
chickens hung on the wall
over the stove. White light
flowed through the one window,
warming the counter top.
Have you noticed how I
always stare at you hands?

Slobot's Visit to Berry Shoals and the Tucapau Dam

2008-06-17T12:13:00.008-04:00

Slobot goes to Berry Shoals Dam and Startex

When I got new glasses in the 5th grade

2008-06-16T11:47:00.003-04:00

My cat-eyed glasses always dipped
below my right eyebrow because
my ears are set sigodlin on my head.
I cried when my teacher asked why
I couldn’t keep my glasses straight
on my face. I tucked a Kleenex wad
under the ear piece but it fell out.
Mavis Crisp called me four eyes and
laughed, showing green teeth, see-sawing
her hands in front of her own eyes.
I begged for contacts at the eye
exam. Not old enough he said.
Then he bent the ear piece down some.
Sliding the new pair on my face, he smiled.

Just wanted to show these two off.

2008-05-25T19:52:00.004-04:00

Mary and Sara

Some Great Lye Soap Making Videos

2008-05-02T14:52:00.006-04:00

These videos are on ExpertVillage.com and are very well done. I thought I'd do some myself, but there's no use with these great instructions. However, my handmilling technique is different. I use the microwave. That we need to get on a video.

http://www.expertvillage.com/video-series/171_make-soap-video.htm

Kudzu Cousins and Lye Soap

2008-04-09T19:51:00.008-04:00

I’ve always said that my genealogy charts looked more like a laurel thicket than a family tree. And when I saw Robert Morgan’s poem, “Kudzu Cousins”, in the Fall 2007 issue of Southern Quarterly this week, I had to laugh. I like his images in Kudzu Cousins better. It’s interesting that the original relations that make us all kudzu cousins back in that neck of the woods were established way before there was ever any kudzu in the place (ca.1880).

I’ve read Morgan’s latest book, Boone: A Biography, twice and recommended it to everybody. Let me tell you, I read lots of biographies, mostly of scientists, but Boone is by far the best I’ve ever read.

The vignette about soap making was especially interesting to me since I’ve been a savonerie for over twenty years. It started one day when I wanted to make soap in the chemistry class. I thought it would be fun to make some for Mother’s Day presents, like the plaster of paris hand prints you do at Bible School. But when I looked through all the chemistry lab books I had for saponification labs, they all said to throw the soap away when finished since it would be too harsh. Most gave the amounts in volume measurements, not mass. That didn’t make sense to me because chemistry is all about stoichiometric relationships. I wanted my students to be able to carry home a chunk of lye soap to use. Back then, I could only find one book on making lye soap at home with lard or tallow and Red Devil Lye. Now there are dozens of books from the experts (will list my favorites in another post).

I started with my Chemistry II class. That first batch was plain lye and lard, measured to the nearest tenth of a gram, a perfectly balanced chemical reaction. We added about a half cup of olive oil for extra moisture. When it was stirred enough, the hot, lye-fat mixture resembled custard. One kid said it made him hungry for banana pudding. We poured it up in a Rubbermaid shoe box, wrapped it up in an old quilt to insulate the exothermic reaction, and left it on the lab bench till class met again on Monday. It was hard for me not to peek, but I promised them I wouldn’t. When the first of the students came into the classroom, I had to swat a few hands (you could do that back then) to keep them from peeling back the quilt before everyone got in the class.

I pulled the still-warm box from its covers and lifted the lid. The hardened block of soap had pulled from the sides of the mold like a cake pulls from the side of a pan. It looked and felt like greasy provolone cheese. We flipped it out of the box and cut it into bars with a butcher knife (something else I can’t have in school nowadays). The book said to let it cure for a couple of weeks before using, to dry and harden. We laid the bars out on borrowed, green plastic lunchroom trays and placed them on top of the storage cabinets to dry, out of sight out of mind. I did manage to sneak a bar and kept it under the big lab sink. I quickly learned that if you wash your hands with a good, balanced lye soap you don’t need hand lotion.

Well, that was the beginning of my obsession with lye soap making. Once I tried to make soap the old timey way, by leaching the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes. I saved our fireplace ashes all winter in metal buckets in the garage. A lady who did lye soap demonstrations at Walnut Grove Plantation and Musgrove Mill told me how to do it ,but didn’t tell me the amounts. My experiment was a mess. I was able to make an egg float in the ashes-water, but without the precise lye measurements, I wasn’t sure about how much fat to use. The soft soap was excessively greasy. And within a few months it smelled rancid.

Once I mastered formulating, I entered some of my recipes in a contest at the South Carolina Soap Makers Conference. In 2000, I came home with Best All Round Soap in SC for my multi-layered Oatmeal Apricot Scrub Bar and The Ugliest Soap for my unscented Goat’s Milk Castile, which was baby-poop yellow. The White Tyger Bath Soap got second or third in something, but I can’t remember what. However, I figured out that those contests are better left to the folks who do it for a living. It’s just a hobby for me. I do it more for the students. Soap making is a good culminating lab in chemistry.

It looks like I got off on a tangent here, but lye soap and kudzu cousins really are related in my mind. These days people who don’t know any better will crinkle their noses at the idea of either one. They just don’t understand what makes a high quality product.

Weeds I Like

2008-04-06T11:57:00.006-04:00

CHICKWEED - Stellaria Media

Cooling, antiseptic herb used to treat inflammations, relieve itching, blisters, boils, and abscesses. The fresh plant is edible in salads or as a cooked green. You can find chickweed growing in your lawn, garden, or meadows.

This is what David Hoffman says in The Complete Illustrated Herbal.

Chickweed finds its most common use as an external remedy for cuts, wounds and especially for itching and irritation. If eczema or psoriasis cause this sort of irritation, Chickweed may be used with benefit.
Internally it has a reputation as a remedy for rheumatism.
External Use - To ease itching, a strong infusion of the fresh plant makes a useful addition to bath water. Chickweed may be made into an ointment or used as a poultice.

This is a healthy stand of Chickweed I allowed to grow in my flower beds next to the carport.

A nice close up of a sprig of Chickweed.

Chickweed Salve

Pack these dried herbs in quart canning jars
2 parts Chickweed
2 parts Plantain
1 part Comfrey Leaf
Cover with Olive oil and let sit at room temperature for at least two weeks.
Beeswax at a ratio of about 1 to 1.5 ounce to every pint of infused oil.

More to come.

Science Fiction Author Dies

2008-03-26T10:26:00.003-04:00

Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001: A Space Odyessy, died last week at the age of 90. You know, he’s kind of the reason I’m here today. I read his fiction when I was in high school and decided I wanted to study science. I know some people don’t read science fiction because it’s “not real”, but I can’t help but wonder how many “real scientists” there are out there because a fiction writer like Clark inspired them.

Rash is PEN/ Faulkner Finalist

2008-03-19T14:38:00.009-04:00

With over 300 submissions, Chemistry and Other Stories, Carolina writer, Ron Rash's, short story collection was a runner-up for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. I read it when it first came out and loved the stories (especially Chemistry). And I love the cover. This collection is on the shelf in The Middle Tyger River Library. It will be well worth your time. Congrats to Ron.

One Foot in Eden

2008-03-03T17:45:00.005-05:00

I read it for the second time last week because our faculty Chat-N-Chew group will be discussing Ron Rash’s work this month. I have all his works, been reading them ever since Eureka Mills was first published by Hub City Writers Project back in 2001. And on April 30, the author will come speak to our students.
One Foot in Eden is one of those rare books that raise chill bumps on me when I’ve finished the last page and let it sink in. Look, even now as I think about it and type this, the fine hairs on my arms are sticking straight out. I’ll not give you a synopsis here and just say go to Amazon.com for that. But I will tell you that One Foot in Eden, which is Ron’s first novel, can take you through the whole gamut of emotions in about 200 pages. It haunted my dreams. Dang, that man can write!

Waterfall Videos

2008-03-01T22:41:00.002-05:00

Take a look at Waterfall Rich's videos on YouTube. Very well done.

http://www.youtube.com/user/waterfallrich

My Ain True Love

2008-01-25T19:58:00.000-05:00

This YouTube video combines features from several of my favorite things, so I thought I'd share it.

That hair.

2008-01-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

I've seen women at the beauty shop spend hundreds of bucks to have hair fixed like Mary's. She came that way. I had heartburn up to my eyebrows when I was pregnant with that one.

Mary and Jazmine - New Year's Eve

Happy New Year

2007-12-31T19:55:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year, y'all.

Elizabeth sent me this picture of the family.

I'm watching Clemson play Auburn in the Chick Fil a Bowl.

I predict the Tigers will win. Ha Ha.

Today is Mary's Birthday.

2007-12-28T21:30:00.001-05:00

She's 19.

One Gorgeous Girl

2007-12-27T21:16:00.001-05:00

This is the granddaughter, Emma.

Vanishing Oatmeal Cookies

2007-12-22T09:22:00.000-05:00

I know grocery stores are loaded with pre-mixed cookie doughs these days. Heck, Pillsbury and Hershey's both have those chocolate-chip-cookie dough blocks you can just cut into chunks and there you have 2 dozen cookies in 10 minutes - and they are 3 for 6 bucks right now. But there's nothing like the real thing, made from scratch. These oatmeal cookies are my favorite.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Ingredients

2 sticks butter or margarine, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt

3 cups quick or old fashioned oats
1 cup raisins

1. cream butter and sugars in a large mixer bowl
2. add eggs and vanilla and mix well
3. add the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt to the mixture in the bowl and blend well.
4. stir in oats and raisins
5. drop teaspoons full on an ungreased cookie sheet.
6. bake 10 to 12 minutes until golden brown
7. cool on the cookie sheet before removing to a cooling rack.

makes about 4 dozen

When Fall Comes Down the Mountain

2007-12-04T19:22:00.000-05:00

One Sunday in November, Momma, Marion Ann, Mary, and I took a ride up to Henderson County to see the fall foliage. MA drove. We went up highway 14 and got on I-26 at Landrum, with plans to come home via Highway 25.

I love the way you can plainly see fall coming down the mountain in certain spots in that loop. One of the prettiest sights was from the base of White Oak Mountain at Columbus. You have such a good view from the interstate. The top was ablaze and the bottom was mostly green. The day was clear and golden. It probably would have been better if it hadn’t rained so hard that Friday, knocking off some leaves. I get a good dose of fall shades in my own neighborhood off Gap Creek Road from the woods that lead down to the South Tyger River right across the street (if anybody develops that, it’ll kill me.) But it’s nothing compared to the rumpled-quilt effect you get on the Saluda grade or in the Green River Valley.

When we were outside Columbus, Momma thought we were on Highway 25. She asked several times, “Are we on 25?”

“No, Momma, we’re on the interstate,” I said. I thought she just didn’t hear the first time. After she asked the third time, MA and I gave each other silent, side-ways “uh-oh” look- raised brows, eyes wide.

The amazing thing is that she, at eighty-years-old, can still recount all kinds of stories about her great-aunts, the Ward girls, and their families. She told me something that day that I didn’t know (or maybe didn’t remember) while we stood in the middle of the Ward Cemetery at Double Springs Baptist where Gap Creek Road meets Old Highway 25 near Tuxedo, North Carolina. My great-great-grandpa, Calvin Ward, a Civil War veteran, had 17 children. Only one of them did not live to adulthood. This girl, Fanny, died at age twelve of pernicious anemia. Momma said the child still didn’t have a marker on her grave, over a hundred years later, but most all of her generation, only a handful left, can pick out the location of the little girl’s grave.

Now how do they know that? Is it because their parents told them? “This is my Aunt Fanny’s grave. She died of pernicious anemia when she was just twelve-years-old.”

Or is it because our great-grandparents told their children? “I had a sister who died when she was twelve. It was the awfulest thing. We buried her here, right beside Grandpa. She was such a sweet girl, but always frail. One of us always had to stay home with her. She couldn’t stand to ride in the wagon and was always out of breath.”

When I was little I was drawn to the tiny headstones, the ones shaped like hearts and lambs and angels. Sara likes to visit real old graveyards with me. But she says it breaks her heart to see the baby graves.

“That used to happen a lot back then, before antibiotics and vaccinations,” I told her one day when we were in the Woods Chapel Methodist Cemetery near Greer. Those are my daddy’s people out there. “Some families lost several children. Remember when you had Strep throat?" I reminded her. " Back then, that would develop into more serious diseases like rheumatic fever which can cause permanent damage to the heart, or scarlet fever, or blood infections, or kidney disease.”

“How do you know all that, Momma?” Sara asked (she’s thirteen).

“I’m old… plus my momma used to tell me that stuff. One of her friends had scarlet fever when she was young and ended up having to get a new heart valve when she was about forty because of it. Had to go to Texas to get it done back then. It was mechanical and clicked loud enough to hear.”

I guess you can count the family of Calvin Ward as very fortunate.

We had lunch that day at the Double Olive on Main Street in Hendersonville. Every time I go up there, that restaurant has a different name. Just about everyone that worked in there sounded like a Yankee. I think we kept the waitress entertained drawling out our orders. It sounded to me like she was trying cover up her own native sound. As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear anybody all day that sounded like us – in the restaurant, at the gas station, on the sidewalks, even at the apple stand on the down side of Flat Rock. The woman checking us out sounded like New Jersey. It made me feel like the Henderson County winesaps or the Blue Ridge sourwood honey she was selling me weren’t genuine.

Once, a few years back, Greenville Technical College offered a business class called “Get the South Out of Your Mouth” to help native business people cultivate a way of speaking devoid of culture and heritage. I was insulted just reading the description in the course catalog. I distinctly remember there being something about us sounding uneducated. The class was discussed on one of the morning country radio shows. Most of the listeners who called in were as appalled as I was. I doubt if the class ever made. I never saw it offered in subsequent catalogs either.

Take your kid to a conference.

2007-11-06T19:38:00.000-05:00

Sara and I enjoyed a late October stroll on Myrtle Beach between working the BookNook and sessions with the faculty at the South Carolina Writers Workshop 2007 Conference. We belong at the beach in fall, don't you think? Her hair is the color of the sea oats and mine the sand's. ha.

During the Poetry and a Sense of Place session at the 2007 SC Writers Workshop at Myrtle Beach, Robert Morgan read his poem "Mowing", about his daddy mowing grass.

Selling books at the SCWW Book Nook was a pretty good gig.

Some good South Carolina writing

2007-11-04T18:34:00.000-05:00

The winners of the 2007 South Carolina Fiction Project are here.

Gabaldon titles Book Seven

2007-11-04T11:12:00.001-05:00

For someone like me who has recently discovered the joys of genealogy, I was pleased to read the title of Diana Gabaldon’s seventh book in the Outlander Series, An Echo in the Bone. How about it, folks-who-like-to-chase-dead-people, don’t you like that one? Read about how she came up with that title here.

The family face?

2007-10-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

While driving home from the SCWW Conference Sunday, it echoed around in my cranium. I am the family face… I am the family face… What is that? Where have I heard that? Then I could see myself in Dr. Stevenson’s poetry class at Converse 33 years ago. That’s all I could remember. I googled that phrase when I got home. It’s Thomas Hardy’s poem, Heredity. Yeah, yeah. I remember now.

And what fanned this spark? At the conference I met a distant relative who shares several physical traits to those in my Kuykendall/Ward line - my brother's chin and eye-tooth gap, the head shape of my best fishing buddy, Papa, my uncle's eyelids, our long slender fingers, broad shoulders, good cheek bones.

I have a picture of my grandpa sitting in his momma’s lap and his brothers are standing between her and my great-grandpa. All those children look like we did when we were tiny and they look like my babies too. Momma said that we all look alike when we are babies, then we individualize, then we favor again when we get old. Daddy said we looked like Winston Churchill. They Law!

Heredity

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance--that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

by Thomas Hardy

The Coach

2007-10-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

My high school chemistry teacher dropped by my classroom to see me yesterday. We called him Coach, not Mr. Collins. He's been retired a good while now - was it back in '94? Anyway, he was here to mentor one of our students. It was after 1st lunch, and the students were rounding the corner at the end of the hall to come back to class, catching us in a reunion hug. You should have seen the jaws drop. Ha! I introduced him, patting his back. "This is my chemistry teacher!" I said to each student as they entered. "This is the feller that got me started in chemistry." A long time ago.

Startex Tucapau Historical Society

2007-10-21T14:01:00.001-04:00

I was happy to see how the society has grown by leaps and bounds when I visited the web site today. Here are the people and places that trigger so many memories that end up on a jump drive. Hopefully there will be a collection worth publication someday.
http://www.startex.org/index.htm

Morgan reads from his book, Boone: A Biography

2007-10-07T20:31:00.002-04:00

http://www.hendersonvillenews.com/article/20070917/NEWS/70917005

Counting the days.

2007-09-30T15:05:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not counting the days till school lets out in May. I'll start that after Spring break. I'm counting the days until I hit the highway for Myrtle Beach and the 2007 South Carolina Writers Workshop Conference on October 25. I've volunteered to help this time, attending half the sessions for free and working the other half. I just hope that my schedule allows me to attend most of Robert Morgan's workshops. Many of you know he is one of my favorites because he writes about my people. Well, Ron Rash does, too, but I found Morgan first.

That Boone book

Earlier this month I drove up to Hendersonville to hear Robert Morgan speak about his latest book, Boone: A Biography. The passages he chose to read were interesting and quite delightful. It will be published in a few weeks. I plan on getting a copy at the conference. There were a few advanced copies at the lecture at the Henderson County Library. A tall, thin, white-headed man sitting beside me had a copy in his hand. I asked him to let me look at it. The bulk of the thing surprised me – like a Gabaldon it was. I didn’t think that poets were so long-winded. But Daniel Boone is an awful big subject, just like the song says.

http://www.hendersonvillenews.com/article/20070914/NEWS/70914003

Now, THAT'S Dry.

2007-09-05T16:50:00.000-04:00

In all my 52 years I've never seen a summer where kudzu stopped growing until this year.

My newly-wed house out in the country, which I still own, and where my oldest daughter lives, borders an abandoned kudzu-covered pasture. We battled that stuff the whole time we lived there. If the summer was wet, it'd grow 2 feet a day - at least. But this year, the tips are absolutely desiccated.

But the real kicker is the story I heard yesterday about the Rock Springs Community in Cherokee County, SC, just up the road. The Baptist Church has cancelled baptisms. Now, that's dry!

http://www.wyff4.com/news/14044103/detail.html

Buttermilk Biscuits

2007-07-23T21:32:00.000-04:00

I saw a recipe for buttermilk biscuits in the June issue of Southern Living that looks almost identical to mine. The thing that makes mine (and theirs) different from most all other biscuit recipes is the extra amount of kneading. As a matter of fact, I read the recipes on the flour bags in the grocery store yesterday. Most will caution against kneading very much, recommending only 3 or 4 times. But the method I use, that I learned as a girl from Momma, is to knead about 20 or more times, working in some more flour every time I fold the dough over. You know it’s ready to roll out when the dough springs back when poked. I cook in an oven set higher than normal, and even though I use self-rising flour, I still add some more baking powder, resulting in fluffier, higher rising biscuits.

This is my version of buttermilk biscuits, perfected for my oven and my family’s taste.
3 ½ cups self rising flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup butter flavor shortening
1 ½ cup whole buttermilk
1 cup flour set aside for rolling and kneading

Roll to a rectangular shape roughly 8 by 12 inches. Use a pizza cutter to cut 2 inch squares. Separate by about a half inch on the baking sheet. Place in an oven preheated to 500 degrees and bake for 10 or 11 minutes. Makes two dozen.

New garden friend.

2007-07-16T14:45:00.000-04:00

I met a handsome feller while weeding the comfrey patch today. He watched me work for a while and listened to me tell about the red tailed hawk that dropped a snake behind center field during a 14u softball game last month. It must have upset him because he left me pulling up poke sprouts and yanking Virginia Creeper off the fence. I hope he comes back. He was very good looking. Kinda like this.

from snakesandfrogs.com

What was I thinking?

2007-06-18T23:19:00.000-04:00

The AP Chem teacher at school warned me. It’s the most intense class I’ve ever had, she said.

Pour moi? Non. No chemistry class is too intense for me. Piece of cake, I thought.

She was right. They Law, I’m too old for this! My brain is fried.

AP Chem Institute in Aiken

2007-06-17T20:22:00.000-04:00

Well, I made it to USC-Aiken in a little less than two hours today. The last time I was in this town was about thirty years ago. Sure has changed. I don't remember it being as hilly though, almost as hilly as it is at home. For some reason I was thinking the topography was more like that around Orangeburg.

I haven't been in a dorm room since brother Keith was at Clemson twenty years ago. The dorm I'm staying in is called Pacer Commons. It's only about two years old and very nice. Now let's go check out that single dorm bed. Oh, joy.

Poplar Legs

2007-06-15T11:03:00.000-04:00

My papa, Charles P. Kuykendall, told me his daddy had “poplar legs.” I thought he meant “popular legs” – an awful weird thing to say about your daddy.

One spring day, Papa and I were walking through the woods to go trout fishing and came up on a yellow and orange, tulip-like blossom in the path. I picked it up and took a whiff. It smelled sweet. I thought about touching my tongue to it to see if it was sweet tasting, like honeysuckle, but it was loaded with little black bugs and I thought better of it.

“That came from this poplar tree,” he said and patted the rough, dark gray, straight trunk.
I just about fell backwards straining to see the blossoms silhouetted against the blue beyond the canopy way above my head.

“Oh! Legs like a poplar tree!” I said. “I get it now. Your daddy had very long legs, right?”

“Right.” Papa smiled, nodded, and we kept walking.

Robert Valentine Kuykendall lived in Hendersonville and was about 6-feet 5-inches tall. And that’s where I got my long legs, everybody tells me. Great Granddaddy’s parents were Henry Pinkney Kuykendall and Cynthia Carolyn Capps Kuykendall. He was from a long line of Kuykendalls who settled in Carolina backwoods when it was still wilderness, about twenty years before the American Revolution.

I had seen a couple of pictures of my great grandfather as an old man when I was little. In one, he was sitting on an apple crate with my then six-year-old Uncle Johnny in his lap. He could have gotten three more younguns in that lap. In the other picture, he was standing in front of my grandparents’ farmhouse in Greenville, near Parris Mountain, wearing overalls. His plow mule was behind him, all hitched up. I swear he made that mule look like a pony.

At one point, he delivered mail in the mountains. I recently acquired a picture of him sitting in his mail wagon. He really fills it up, too. I wonder if I got my wild imagination from him. Papa said he was a real storyteller, and he sang little songs he made up all the time. I wonder if the brain in that big Kuykendall head was just clicking away with stories, poems, and lyrics while he was riding those mountain roads. Mine goes into overload when I’m driving alone or on the tractor cutting the grass.

My uncles told me he once knocked out Jack Dempsey cold when Dempsey came to Hendersonville to train. It seems they needed a big fella for him to punch on. After that, they told Gramps to go home; they didn’t need him any more.

All those Kuykendalls are naturally strong, big size or not, even Momma. When we were almost grown, she could still scoop us up and throw us over her shoulder like we were small sacks of chicken scratch. She’s pushing eighty now and still strong.

My favorite of all the Kuykendall pictures is one I found in a box of genealogy stuff I inherited from Momma’s Aunt Helen. I calculate it to be about 110-years-old. Robert Valentine is sitting in a chair in a photographer’s studio with two toddlers in his lap. I think they are his first two tow-headed sons, Rufus and Roy, and I figure Robert is about twenty-six-years-old in this picture.

Knowing that back in those days you had to sit still a while to have your picture made, I’m absolutely fascinated by this picture. First of all, there are two toddler BOYS in his lap who had to sit still for about ten seconds. How the heck did he accomplish that? His lips are parted under a (I imagine copper and gold) handle-bar mustache. I bet he is whispering, “Be still. Be still,” to them. I think the older boy, Rufus, was able to comply, but not the least one — his little feet and face are blurry.

When I was making out the invitation list for my wedding, I sat in Papa’s kitchen going over it with him to see if I left anybody off. He was stirring his coffee with annoying clinks and staring at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You know, you favor my daddy more than any of us.”

Well, that just threw me for a loop. I had only seen the pictures of him with the mule and the one with Uncle Johnny before then. He was a bald, pot-bellied old man. I teared-up a little. How could Papa say such a thing? And how can looks skip three generations, anyway? That hurt my feelings. But I didn’t let him know. Papa died of a stroke a couple of weeks after that. He never got the chance to show me the other pictures he had of his parents when they were young. My wedding day, one month later, was bitter-sweet.

I never saw those pictures till last year when I got the box of stuff that belonged to Aunt Helen, and there was the 110-year old picture. Those cheekbones, that nose, that forehead, and lips – all mine (and my brother’s) sans mustache. And I’ll be darned if looks can’t skip down three generations.

http://teachers.spart5.k12.sc.us/islercj/fam/images/RobvTwoBoysP.jpg

Long time no rain.

2007-06-14T22:41:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed the rain today. I sat in the rocking chair on the porch and watched the early evening storms while eating cantaloupe wedges from a Tupperware bowl. They weren’t bad storms, the wind wasn’t even blowing hard. The porch hardly got wet. The lightening streaks seemed to just jump from cloud to cloud. I think we got a half inch yesterday and an inch today. It rained steady for about two hours tonight. You could almost see the grass stretching and greening up. And just in time for the new flower pots I put out last night.

Let it go.

2007-06-13T22:21:00.000-04:00

She asked for my senior citizen’s card that Wednesday morning. I had run by the bakery at the Bilo in Lyman to get some muffins for my department meeting that afternoon. What prompted her request, I have no clue. Except, perhaps, it was because I had pulled my shoulder-brushing bob cut back and pinned it on the top, exposing the newly emerging silver at my temples. She didn’t look any older than the 9th graders I’d been teaching that semester. When I said, “What?” she promptly explained that seniors get a 5% discount on Wednesdays.

“How old do you have to be to get a senior citizen’s card?” I asked.

“Fifty-five.”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Uhh, Fifty-five?”

“Sorry, hon, but I have nine more years to go to be considered a senior citizen at the Bilo.”

“Sorry.” She looked at the register screen. “That’ll be $12.60.”

I scanned the store. At 7:00 am, it was deserted. “Wait just a minute, okay? I’ll be right back.” The checkout was right in front of the pharmacy, and the Clairol Natural Instincts boxes were

only a few steps away. I pulled a strand of still wren-brown hair from over my ear and held it in front of my eyes while comparing it to the pictures of luxurious locks on boxes. Toasted almond appeared to be the closest to my natural color.

The box sat on the counter in my bathroom for about six weeks before I got the nerve to do the deed. By then, school was out for the summer. I was right about the color, it was a near perfect match the natural shade of my youth, which still ruled the back of my head.

I only used the color about every four months until the rate of white hair growth increased. I began to get what I have always referred to as “skunk head syndrome”. That’s the white streak you get at your part when the color grows out. It wasn’t so bad when the white was just in the front. Then I increased the coloring rate to once every six weeks. I quit using it the summer I turned 51 years old. Right after my husband told me the gray shone like polished silver in the moonlight spreading slats through the mini-blinds in our bedroom. Let it go, he said, let it go. So I have for the past year. But I’m not ready for that senior citizen’s card yet.

Wood's Chapel

2007-06-06T16:36:00.001-04:00

Great-grandma Johnson was a Westmoreland before she married. And her mother was a Wood, the great-great-granddaughter of Rev. William Henry Wood, an American Revolutionary War Patriot and pioneer Methodist minister in the South Carolina backcountry. Last month the Mecklenburg Chapter, (NCSSAR) of the Sons of the American Revolution honored his memory with a marker ceremony at the Wood’s Chapel United Methodist Church cemetery on Brown Wood Road, Greer, SC. That’s right near the intersection of Interstate-85 and Highway-101, practically across the street from the BMW plant entrance. (Yes, they build German cars on top of my ancestral stomping grounds.)

Born December 16 (same as brother, Keith), 1756, in what is now Warren County, NC, he served in the struggle for American freedom as a member of the Third Division of N.C. Militia under Lieutenant Henry Shurrin and Colonel Hebert Haynes. He participated at the battle of Guilford Court House and other engagements during his service in the Revolution.

He married Elizabeth Mayfield in July 1777 in Warren County, N.C. She died soon after the marriage and he remarried Nancy Burns. He and his second wife moved to the Spartan District in South Carolina after the Revolution where he started a Methodist meeting house near the Greer area which is now called Wood’s Chapel United Methodist Church.

In 1803 during a trip through South Carolina, Bishop Francis Asbury wrote in his journal that on Nov. 1 he rode to the Reverend’s home and preached there the next day. William Henry Wood lived in the same home until his death on June 12, 1843.

All my life, I’ve lived within 8 miles of Wood’s Chapel but have not attended services there. I’ve been a member at Startex United Methodist, now First United Methodist Church – Startex.
I’ve visited the Wood's Chapel graveyard several times, especially when I lived in Greer. I told my children the same thing my Papa Kuykendall used to tell me whenever we visited the graveyards at Mud Creek Baptist in Flat Rock, NC or Double Springs Baptist down the road from there. “You’re blood kin to most of these bones under your feet.” The exception being that these bones are on my Johnson side, not the Kuykendall side.

2007 SC Writers Workshop Conference Brochure

2007-06-05T14:18:00.000-04:00

The PDF version of the conference brochure is here.
http://www.myscww.org/quill/07%20brochure.pdf

Two down and one to go.

2007-05-23T09:28:00.000-04:00

Got the middle one graduated from high school last night. Thank the Lord.

This is us after the ceremony. Faculty are required to "dress out" too.
Photo taken and shared by Rhonda Dodson.

The Best Writers Conference of 2007

2007-05-01T08:56:00.001-04:00

Join me in the fall for the Best Writers Conference of 2007 in Myrtle Beach.
The 17th Annual South Carolina Writers Workshop Conference - October 26-28, 2007.

Former Byrnes Teacher Wins National Award

2007-04-20T07:56:00.001-04:00

My former 11th grade American Lit. teacher won an award for her YA historical fiction novel about local Revolutionary War heroine, Kate Berry. Sheila Collins, now Sheila Ingle, was fresh out of college when she taught English at James F. Byrnes High School back in 1970. I loved her class.

http://www.hubcity.org/accolades/hub-city-author-wins-national-award.html

One of my fave authors gets award.

2007-04-15T15:16:00.001-04:00

Robert Morgan, novelest (Gap Creek, Brave Enemies), short story writer, and poet, had been awarded a 2007 Literature Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. That kind of make me proud.

By popular demand

2007-04-07T11:51:00.000-04:00

Dadgum! I'm getting request from folks to read the essay I sent to Hub City. As soon as I figure out how to put "Read More" breaks in a long post, I'll post it for a short while.

What McLean Made Me Think About

2007-04-04T20:35:00.000-04:00

Read this entry first if you haven't already. Rebel Fan 1973's Practice Blog: I Read The Bed She Was Born In on March 23, 2007

When I read about the traumatic birth of McLean in The Bed She Was Born In, I knew what was going to happen to that little child. See, I had a palsied second cousin about four years younger than me. We lost him at the age of forty – pneumonia claimed his precious heart. With Board's story taking place about 100 years ago, I knew they would lose McLean early. I knew before I read it that pneumonia or the influenza outbreak during World War I would take him.

We have similar family stories about influenza. At the age of 19, my grandpa’s older brother, Roy, went to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg for basic training and contracted influenza within two weeks. His headstone in the Mud Creek Baptist Cemetery in Flat Rock, North Carolina is bigger than his parents’ and grandparents’ headstones.

My second cousin, Ray, who had cerebral palsy, was my grandpa’s baby sister’s first grandson. Her son-in-law’s family had a huge truck farm near Holly Hill, South Carolina. When I was about twelve or thirteen, they had another baby, Darrell. I started going down there in the summers when Darrell was a toddler to help my great-aunt, Helen, tend to the boys while all the packing was going on. Their mother, Momma’s double-first cousin, Lois, was needed in the packing house (guess that made Ray and Darrell my double-second cousins.) She had been a home-economics major at Winthrop and a Clemson Extension agent before marrying Raymond West in 1958, and he took her down to his family’s farm in the steamy, hot Low Country.

Boy, did I ever get a crash course in canning tomatoes and green beans that first summer. By that time, Ray was spending the weeks at the Coastal Center for the handicapped in Summerville and coming home on the weekends. During the height of packing season, there was no day off for the packing house, not even Sundays. I learned how to tend to a severely handicapped boy while I kept the canner boiling all day.

That scene in The Bed She Was Born In where McLean had his accident was like looking at a rerun of the summer Ray hit puberty. It took both Aunt Helen and me to clean him up from an accident that was completely my fault. In this case the culprit was fresh Georgia Belle peaches I had brought down from Robinson’s peach shed in Greer. His momma warned me not let him have too much. But he loved them so much. I mashed a thin sliver of peach with a fork and spooned them in. After a few bites, I said, “Okay, that’s enough.” But he went, “Mmm mmm,” meaning he wanted more. So I stuffed him.

His humiliation was evident by his teary eyes and that strangled “uhh” sound he made for no when we heaved him off his pallet. It just broke my heart. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry. But you can’t stay in this mess till your momma gets home,” was all I could think to say.

On better days, he was fond of Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour novels. His daddy had a bookshelf that sagged with western novels and short story collections. It was a great gig for me. I got to read westerns out loud as Mason jar lids sealed with pops and pings, cooling in the pantry and kitchen.

I guess the worst part of being down there was the fire ants. It was easy to spot a mound in that Bermuda grass. They rose overnight in the black, loamy soil, little grey mountains springing up. Lois poured boiling water on them when she cut the grass. Sometimes she would burn one out, but they popped back up somewhere else the next day. What worked best was a 50/50 mixture of Borax and powdered sugar. They stayed gone for a few weeks after that treatment .

After living down there a couple of weeks, I started to pick up their almost-Geechee sound. And it took me about two weeks to sound “right” after I got back home. ("Right" being western Spartangburg County mill village.) Some of their words were indistinguishable to me and I had to hear them in context to figure out what they were talking about. One example was paper and pepper. They both sounded like pehpah. I made up a story about a little boy going to the store for his mother and told it to Ray and Darrell all the time. It went something like this.

Once there was a little boy who lived on big truck farm. One day his mother asked him to ride his bike down the road to the country store and get a few things. So he rode his bike with a list in his hand and went up to the counter and read the list to the clerk. “My momma sent me after some boottermilk, some beking soda, and some pehpah.”
“Well, what kind of pehpah is it yo momma want?” asked the clerk. “Ret pehpah? Black pehpah? Green pehpah? Banana pehpah?”
The little boy thought and thought and finally said, “Toilet pehpah.”

That used to crack Ray up so, he’d almost strangle, laughing. When the natives weren’t around, I would imitate them, and Ray loved it.

Sometimes I’d drive their daddy’s Deville over to the uncle’s house in Providence, 5 miles away. Raymond’s brother ran the country store at the crossroads next to his house. You could find or order just about anything you could get in all of Greenville or Spartanburg in approximately 2000 square feet.

Those other cousins had an in-ground pool that Ray loved to get in. I tied him to me with an old robe sash and eased down into the water. I’d inch in the cool water and he’d gasp, inch and gasp, inch and gasp, until the water was to his armpits. At first, I swam with him facing me, but I got the feeling he was enjoying that too much and I turned him around. He was so stiff and dense, he’d slide down, and I’d have to hitch him up by his cocked elbows every now and then. “Boy, if I turned you loose, you’d sink like a cinder block,” I said.

“Uh huh," he agreed.

Once it got over 100 degrees for about a week while I was having to can tomatoes and beans. The blue, speckled canner jumped and bumped, and the pressure canner hissed and blew steam. There was only one window air conditioner in the whole house – in the master bedroom. The rest of use had to do with fans. I had them all going. Ray was on his pallet in the den watching an old cowboy movie. He glistened with sweat, so I stripped him down to his diaper and rubber pants, thinking he would be more comfortable. And you know what? He fussed at me, grunting and growling, until I put his cotton/poly blend, plaid, button-up shirt and elastic-waist, jersey-knit shorts back on.

I didn’t like the way his shirts got twisted around when he wallowed on his pallet, trying keep up with the goings-on in the rest of the house. Sometimes the buttons on his shirt dug into his tender, transparent skin. But it was too difficult to get his stiff arms into a pull-over t-shirt. I often gave his shirt collar a tug and a twist to straighten it so the buttons lined up down his front.

From the nose up, he looked normal, even handsome. If he had been born right, I’m convinced he would have been the tallest, prettiest, smartest one of us. Actually, I think he was the smartest one of us; he just couldn’t get it out. Ray’s eyes were the blue-grey of Carolina granite. His hair was the same color as the sable collar on Momma’s red coat. It would have been wavy if his daddy didn’t take him to the barber shop every two weeks.

I told him that he could stir up some gale force winds if he’d bat those long, thick lashes fast enough. Sometimes, I flopped in the rocking chair beside him in the den. “Whew. It’s like a sauna in that kitchen,” I said, tugging the soggy t-shirt from my chest. “Fan me, Ray.” He blinked his eyes at me and laughed when I went, “Ahhhh.” That was our private joke.

Hub City Writers article in SHJ Apr. 1, 2007

2007-04-04T19:39:00.001-04:00

Area writers win awards, workshops.

teaching with turtles

2007-04-02T14:09:00.002-04:00

My fondness for alliteration got me in trouble that first year I taught. It was the only year they let me teach biology. I’ve been teaching physical science and chemistry ever since – 27 years. It was this time of year (maybe May) and I had taken my only biology class down the trail behind the school through the woods to the Tyger River. We were on the ridge looking down at the river when a stirring in the leaf mold drew a student’s attention. She squealed thinking the warm day had brought out the snakes. I used the fallen hickory limb I was carrying as a walking stick to lift the leaves. There before me and about a half-dozen 10th grade girls were two box turtles in a depression, the female with her head in the hole (which I think she had dug herself,) and the male playing piggy-back.

After being in the bright sun and stepping in the shadows, the students’ eyes hadn’t yet adjusted. One of the girls said, “What is that?”

“Aw, it’s just a couple of cooters copulating,” I answered.

They told me that the phone lines between members of a certain Baptist Sunday School class were burning up that evening. It wasn’t long after that that Mr. McGinnis asked me if I would just consider teaching only the physical sciences. That was fine with me.

Speaking of cooters, Hilton Pond had a good article on Yellowbellied Sliders last week.

It's spring break, and I need to get away.

2007-04-02T12:52:00.000-04:00

No trip planned this time - just staying home and doing the taxes and trimming the hedges. I have six Better Boy tomato plants, two Park's Whoppers, a couple each of bell, cayenne, and Jalapeno peppers to put out, and I have to work on my SCWW anthology submissions.

For the fun it, I'm going to start rereading Darlene Marshall's novels - historical fiction and romance set in steamy hot Florida. Good stuff. Good escape.

Oh my! I won third place.

2007-03-30T16:29:00.001-04:00

I didn't expect to win a thing this year. I had forgotten all about the annual Hub City Writers contest. I hadn't seen anything about it on their web site. When I asked Betsy Teter if they were still having the contest, she told me that the deadline was only a few days away (the web site was being redesigned and not updated.) I didn't have time to produce something from scratch, so I pulled out an old piece I had started and tweaked it - staying up late the night before it was to be postmarked. I thought they'd throw it out. Really.

Having won first place in 2005, I got spoiled. A week in the North Carolina mountains at Wildacres retreat is a wonderful way to pamper a new writer. I wasn't allowed to enter last year. That's the rule, winners can't enter the next year. So I forked out the bucks. Both years I had to miss big softball tournaments my youngest daughter played in. I really don't want to do that again this year. The third place prize gives me a big discount to the Writing in Place conference at Wofford. Which is also enjoyable, just not a week long.

Oh, well. I'll keep trying every year for the scholarship to Wildacres.

I Read The Bed She Was Born In

2007-03-26T09:17:00.000-04:00

Last month I heard an author speak about her historical fiction novel. Jeri Fitzgerald Board spoke about Picking the Bones of Historical Fiction, using her new novel, The Bed She Was Born In. Ms. Board's book has been nominated for two prestigious awards, including the Pen Faulkner Award.

It takes place in Eastern North Carolina in the time period between the Civil War and World War II and explores the lives of 5 wonderfully strong Southern women, black and white. Board illustrates, in a way I haven't seen before, the intricate relationships (that I've always know existed) between the races in the Carolina Low Country. The characters lives' weave in and out and support each other just like the cords in the intricate weave in one of my hammocks.

I was most touched by the relationships between the women and the handicapped son, McLean. More on that later.

I read Zoro's Field

2007-03-26T09:11:00.001-04:00

One of the books I had anxiously awaited publication last year was Thomas Rain Crowe's Zoro's Field. I followed it a little on the Smoky Mountain News website, but that's not quite like having the whole thing in you hands in one sitting. I especially liked the Tools chapter. More thoughts on that later.

Texas?

2007-03-26T09:05:00.000-04:00

I get this all the time when I go out of town. “Are you from Texas?” people ask me. I just shake my head, “No, honey. I’m from Spartanburg, South Carolina.” I don’t even attempt to answer with Startex, or Greer, or Lyman – all of which have been home to me at one time or another and are all in Spartanburg County. One man even replied, “Are you sure?” Like I don’t know where I’m from.

Adrenaline

2007-03-23T16:00:00.002-04:00

You remember it. Anyone more than twenty years old must remember the hairdo. It was the late 1980’s and every teenage girl sported it at one time or another. At that time, the best stocks to own were shares of hair spray companies. The girls wore bangs, lots and lots of big bangs. Rising early every school day, young women washed their hair, blow-dried it, scorched it with a curling iron, teased it to the point of embarrassment, and made major contributions to the depletion of the ozone layer.

Being concerned with the safety and well being of my students in the science classroom, every new term I carefully and painstakingly instructed my students on the proper behavior and dress requirements in the laboratory. One of the most important rules is to tie back long hair. The bangs of this popular coiffure (which reminded me of the mushroom cloud that emerges after a nuclear explosion) sat precariously on the foreheads of countless freshmen female physical science students. Even if the student pulled her long locks back with a banana clip, the long stiff bangs were impossible to contain.

All the students awaited the physical science activity that introduces them to the Bunsen burner, some with unbridled eagerness and some with great fear and trepidation. I preferred the latter. We prepared for the event by practicing the hook up of the burners and equipment with the main gas line shut off. It took a whole class period to share the finesse involved in the art of obtaining an igniting spark from a flint striker. Before proceeding with the activity, each lab group had to obtain permission with an inspection of their set-up. We were ready.

There was Jane, one of the most academically gifted students I had in a long time. Every test and quiz paper she completed was perfect. She mastered the most complicated concepts in chemistry and physics effortlessly. However, she had no desire to master the practical application of those same concepts. Jane was perfectly content to observe her lab partners manipulate the equipment with skill and confidence. Oh, and Jane had the hairdo. Even when decked out in full lab regalia, Jane’s bangs radiated out several inches past her safety goggles.
It came time for the Bunsen-Burner-Lighting Quiz. I circulated among the lab tables and checked off a student’s name when she successfully demonstrated skill in connecting the burner, lighting it, and adjusting the flame. A well maintained and adjusted burner burns cleanly and with no odor. While I observed students at one table, partners at other tables practiced and helped one another. With coaching from her partners, Jane was attempting to light the burner for the first time.

An unexpected odor caused me to look up from my clipboard with a start. "Something’s burning!" I yelled. Instinctively students stopped in their tracks and started looking for papers burning on the lab tables. Most had the presence of mind to turn off the gas. All the tables were clear of unwanted combustion. Then I heard Bill, Jane’s lab partner, scream "FIRE!" I turned to see Bill backing away from his partner and Jane yelling, "Where? Where?"

In a split second I assessed the situation and calculated steps to the fire blanket and the extinguisher. Both were too far from the action to be of any help. You see, Jane was six feet away from me and her bangs were ablaze. Apparently, after obtaining a flame on the burner, she positioned her head down to get a better look at the flame adjustment valve and got too close. Her hairdo was a Bunsen burner flame magnet. Without hesitation, I dashed to her side, ripped my papers from the clipboard and used them to beat out the flames on the cowering coed. Gritting my teeth, I went after them like an arachnophobe after a house spider. It's amazing what you can do when the adrenaline is flowing.

For the first time in her life, Jane was clueless. She stood there stunned that her teacher would repeatedly smack her in the head with a stack of lab reports. When I collected my wits, I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and explained, "Your hair was on fire, honey!"
"Oh my God!" she wailed as she groped for her bangs that were no longer there. The tears began to puddle up in her safety goggles and she bolted from the lab running toward the restroom to assess the damage. Jane’s mother was at the school in no time flat to take her home.

That night I worried about Jane’s condition and state of mind but soon her mother called to thank me. "For what?" I asked.

"For acting so quickly." She explained.

She was convinced that if I had taken the time to fetch the authorized safety equipment to put out the flames, Jane would have suffered terrible burns to her scalp. The next day Jane appeared with a new, shorter hairstyle. It framed her face and drew attention to her beautiful eyes and cheekbones. Jane appeared unscathed as she accepted compliments about her new looks from her classmates.

I forgot all about it for years until this past summer when I was cleaning out a closet in the basement. I rediscovered a stack of old Souvenirs and decided to use the yearbooks to refresh my feeble memory. There I found in the pages of the old volumes, hundreds of mug shots featuring the hairdo. When I flipped back to the autograph pages, the memories began flooding back. There were several notes reflecting on the event, but the kicker was the one that read,

Dear Mrs. I.,
It was great having you as a teacher in physical science this year. I learned a lot. Have a good summer.
Bill-Class of 1990.
PS. I’ll never forget the day Jane’s hair caught on fire and you put it out. For an old lady, you really move fast.

It had to be the adrenaline.