Today is so danged cold! I have been up here in Illinois for 11 years and I am still not used to these winters. Oh, to be back in the south where it is warm. I know, you folks are probably saying, "What's stopping you from leaving?". OK, I'll shut up and stop bashing the north. It has it's good side too.

I am going to start out with a recent tale of two sisters who got lost in their granddaddy's woods. These sisters aren't young, they happen to be mommies whose kids were extremely amused that they had gotten lost in the first place. Can you say, duh?

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It has been a long time since my sister and I have gotten in trouble together. Here we are, almost middle-aged parents of two children each, separated by hundreds of miles. You would think we were over causing our southern parents any grief. The way I see it is …you really never quit causing your parents grief. New Years Day of 2005 was such a day.
But I’ll get to that in a second. First you need a little bit of background to appreciate my family. People always say they have a crazy family. A good southern family always has it skeletons, it’s black sheep, it’s comic secrets, it’s "Stories". My sister and I have heard many such Stories throughout our life such as the one about my grandmother (we call her Nanny), her two sisters, and what they did with three pairs of striped long-johns. Or the time two of the same said women sabotaged my cousin’s wedding simply because his bride didn’t invite the groom’s own sister. I could go on, and will in good time. Just hold on.
I started my parents on the way to griefhood early in my teens. Then had to cap it off when I married an Illinois-German/French yankee. OK, I said it. Oh, did I mention he is Catholic? Not that there is anything wrong with being Catholic, but to my Southern Baptist parents from Alabama, it was a shock to say the least. Then I did the unforgiveable. I moved to Chicago.
Now, my sister. She sort of did the same thing a month later. She married a New Jersey-German/Italian Catholic yankee. So my parents ended up traveling to Chicago for my wedding in May, then had to go to Annapolis, Maryland for my sister’s wedding. I have to give them credit. They have adapted quite well and have taken numerous trips up north to visit both families.

The whole debacle began when I insisted to my husband, David, that we take a quick trip down to Bama in order to visit with my sister and her family who were visiting from South Carolina (her husband, Mike, is a Marine navigator so they go from base to base). Luckily he had a long weekend coming up or otherwise I would have left his butt home and gone by myself with the boys. I just knew that I would regret not going.
It was a great reunion. Six adults and four children all in the same house. My mom and dad couldn’t have been happier. Then.
After a traditional southern breakfast of eggs, biscuits, gravy and sausage, we decided to play in the yard a bit with the kids. Nanny just got a brand-spankin’ new golf cart for Christmas and was having the time of her life riding all the kids around the farm. Just imagine…Nanny doesn’t like to drive a car, but she loves her new golf cart. She calls it her Jalopy. Then she changed that to Nanny’s Cadillac. A while later my sister said Nanny was calling it her Limosine. Christy, my sister suggested to Nanny that she call it her Go-Go. I said why don’t we just stop the nonsense and just call it Nanny’s Hummer. I have no idea what she is calling it today.
Anyway….that afternoon, we all decided to take our traditional walk in the woods in order to walk off all those carbs. Nanny was leading (she always did, even when we were kids Nanny would be taking us on treks through Grandaddy’s fifty, wooded acres), the rest of us straggled behind and enjoyed the rugged hills and valleys of northern Alabama. Eventually we ended up at the bottom of a valley that we called the Strip Pit (there was a coal mine there sixty-or-so years ago). While the daddies and kids decided to go back with Nanny and my mother and an aunt or two, Christy and I decided to follow the creek and see if we could get as far as Case Rock, two old boulders on the bank of the Warrior River.


to be continued......