a weekend at the homestead

Mama and them were out at Dog Island this weekend, so I packed up my laundry and went out to keep an eye on the dogs and chickens and so on. There's never much to say about a quiet weekend, but I took some photos. So:

The bottle tree is blooming. Oh, and I just remembered that I left a green glass ginger ale bottle in the monkey grass that I intended to hang with the others. Sorry, mama! Didn't mean to leave trash in the yard.

Elvis and his ladies went over to visit the neighbor chickens. "Cluck, cluck, how's clucks?"

I just took this one because it seemed so cheesy country. Chickens and pickups!

Then I decided to make my wee nephew Owen a tent, because what kid doesn't love a place of their own? So I found an ax in dad's garage and set out into the bamboo forest to cut me some tent poles.

I dragged the poles up on the porch and lashed them together. I left one long for a flagpole. I'd bought a plain sheet at goodwill and cut it down for the cover.

And done! I fastened the cover with a dinosaur button, so Lily can leave the frame outside and just bring in the sheet when it's not in use. I left it blank so Owen can decorate it himself.

And here's Shane. He's really in tents.

Then some of my friends came over and we drank a lot of beer and had a good ol' time. And that was my weekend at the homestead. I love it.

Dog Days

There's some thing you just never expect to come up. A woman just walked into my office and asked me, "Do the names Cheena and Miss Jewel mean anything to you?"

See, way back in the way back, when my mom and dad lived hippie-farmer style out in the pine woods of Lloyd, we had a pair of pit bulls. A small one named Miss Jewel and a bigger one named Cheena. Photos from that time show little naked me or my even littler naked sister (okay, there may have been a cloth diaper or a tshirt involved - the under five set just don't need to wear much during a hot, Florida summer), hanging out on a blanket on the grass in the shadow of a pair of muscled, smiling dogs.

Those two thought we were their pups and would have died to protect us from the dangers of country life: snakes, critters, any car that pulled into the driveway and needed chasing, snacks that should be tested for poison. Family legend has it that when mama was 9 months pregnant with my kid sis, not-quite-two-year-old me decided to walk up to the mailbox and check it myself. They found me, bareassed, happily strolling down the dirt road far past the mailbox, Cheena and Miss Jewel flanking me and keeping me safe. (Mama damn near had a heart attack, and I'm still amazed she ever let any of us out of her sight again after that, by the way. And I'm sure she'll chime in here if I've scrambled the facts any.)

Back around to the woman who asked me about them - turns out, she's the ex of a friend of my family. And sure enough, when my folks got divorced and mom moved into town, she and her hubby gave those pups a home at their spread. Cheena either wandered off or got swiped, and I hope to god nobody used that good dog for fighting. Miss Jewel lived to a ripe old age, as she deserved.

I loved those dogs. I'm mighty glad to live in a town where, out of the blue, 25 years after the fact, someone can pop up and tell you what happened to old friends you never thought you'd hear about again.

Out in Lloyd

No big punk shows this weekend, no keggers, no heavy-drinking house parties. Instead, I've once again been invited to dogsit at a 150-year-old cracker house out on Lloyd's main drag.

When I'm there, sipping a cold one, sitting on a glider on the wide porch in my cut-offs, I wonder how many more generations will be able to enjoy that feeling. How soon before there's a WalMart where the old railroad station now stands? How soon before Lloyd is just another Tallahassee suburb, SouthWood II (or III or IV), generic houses with generic yards and generic children who never see the sun?

But as evening comes on and the heat slowly lifts, all I can hear are train whistles, the burble of the neighbor's turkey and chickens, a far-off dog barking, mockingbirds taunting each other in the pear trees. I can walk through the yard and touch a massive, gnarled live oak that grew there through the days when the home I'm watching was a photo studio, a dental office, a house of ill repute, a temporary Civil War hospital ward, and simply a farm house. That tree may have shaded men who first laid the train tracks that made Lloyd a happening little place in the way back. Heck, it may have been there when the Spanish first made their deadly inroads into the state. And it's not the only giant in the neighborhood.

Spending a weekend in Lloyd heals me. Being around those trees helps me forget about all the live oaks in Tallahassee that have been slaughtered to make room for big box stores and crappy developed neighborhoods. Hearing the wind in the pines reminds me that North Florida should not, naturally, be stocked with palm trees like some Disney park. Feeling the heartwood boards beneath my feet connects me to the other people who fell in love with this area, lived here without air conditioning and ice makers, and still managed to keep from clearcutting the landscape.

We can live with nature, folks. The day the oaks of Lloyd become so much scrap hauled off from construction sites, I'm taking my books and my fishing pole, and I'm haulin' ass for Tate's Hell.