Skip to main content

Sassafras

    Sassafras grows wild in the woods behind my house. I have mentioned before that the old-timers made tea from its roots. This tea is pretty tasty and I like it. You can see in the enclosed picture that sassafras has three types of leaves on every bush. It has a leaf with one lobe, others with two lobes and still others that have three lobes. Cool, huh?
    The picture with the blooms is mountain laurel, which blooms in the spring. We have thickets of the stuff and deer like to lay up under it because it gives them good cover and no doubt a feeling of security; sort of like humans and their split level homes.
    I'm pretty sore this morning. I spent yesterday up on a roof making repairs. In a brilliant maneuver, I drove a roofing nail into my finger, which I can't recommend for entertainment value.
     So, you're going to see Johnny Depp get his pirate thing 'on' again this weekend? Guess I won't go to that one. In an odd omission, I have never seen any of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. Neither have I seen any of The Lord Of the Rings flicks or any Harry Potter films. When our kids became adults I guess I felt like I had served my time with this genre by seeing each Star Wars show 30 times each. Not to mention Indiana Jones and Back To The Future. Those were all great shows; don't get me wrong.
    I think it was on HBO the other night that I was watching a special with a dude named Colin Quinn, a comedian. He had a different style because he was doing a show that dealt with the great empires of the world, complete with big-screen maps and other visual aids. I felt that it was entertaining and interesting. It was titled Long Story Short. I particularly liked the closing song which is by Tommy James and the Shondels, a favorite song of the era when I was a teen. The song is I Think We're Alone Now, amusing because the first words are "Children Behave". Those words went so well with his subject matter. I fear that the race of man does not behave terribly well.
     Duty calls, so I must go. I hope you have a great day and I'll probably post again before the weekend is over.
    I'm CE Wills.
P.S. I'd like to thank my wife, Carley, for all the pictures she takes for me and the editing of posts. She also gives me a lot of ideas for articles.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The White Chicken Mystery

    The other night I happened to come home very late. It was the middle of the night and I was driving up a steep mountain road. Near the top I saw something white in my headlights. It was standing in the other lane, standing very still. It was a large white chicken. It was probably a rooster because I thought I could see his comb as I whizzed by at my customary pace. He never moved a muscle. This is weird, don't you think?      After a couple of days to consider this phenomenon, I have come up with some plausible answers for his bizarre behavior. 1. He was conflicted whether or not he should cross the road. 2. He was feeling cocky and decided to play chicken with the traffic. 3.He was being hen-pecked at home and had decided to end it all. 4. Someone had egged him on to do it. 5. He had just watched the movie Fantastic Four and decided to try to stop a truck the way that Ben Grimm did on the bridge. 6. He had driven himself crazy wondering if ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Egg Art

     Hey, everyone. One of the odd customs in America is the Easter Egg Hunt. Here at the Green Retreat, we do a hunt every Spring. I just ran across some of the pictures from this years hunt and it is obvious that an artist had sneaked into our midst. The orange egg is a rendering of one of the Angry Birds of gaming lore. If I were a bird and had to pass an egg that size, I would be angry too. Ha, ha.      We typically will dye about 10 dozen eggs and people get quite creative with their quotes and colors, as you can see. Many of the eggs are a bit risque for these pages. After having a few laughs, we hide the eggs. All of them are never found, which is cool. It is amusing to see old men (me) and all ages of folks, walking around with a basket on their arm. Some of the hiding spots are dastardly. Like eggs hidden in the guttering downspouts and ten foot up a tree. The kids are perhaps the most devious at hiding the colorful orbs, goi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Biscuit

    Hey, everyone. What a relief that Christmas is over, huh? I don't think it was meant to be the way it is.     I started thinking about the so-called good 'ole days today. My wife says that at her house, they would take a left-over biscuit and shine their shoes before church. I one-upped her by saying, "Oh, yeah? I ate the biscuit when everyone got finished with it. And I was grateful for it." Truly, though, you can and people did, shine their shoes with a biscuit. Hey, they were greasy little buggers.     Speaking of greasy little buggers, I remember when everyone had wells and were very conservative about water, particularly those of us who had to crank a handle up and down to get a bucket of water. There was no daily bath. (No showers in those days, mate.) About twice a week we took a bath and here's the recipe: The oldest kid took a bath first, then the next oldest etc. You can see why younger siblings hated the older. Bathing in the...
Post a Comment
Read more