well bless your heart....

So many moves in my life and the last time I actually lived in the south I was too young to understand all the differences in life and we only lived in Florida for less than a year.
Ten months ago my husband and I decided to move back to sea level where we feel our bodies are happier. Living 9000 ft above sea level was way too much for us both. So here we are.
We bought a log house...no not a cabin a log house with almost 3 acres of property filled with tall yellow pine trees, twenty of them. Twenty of the at least 60 trees on the property have been cut and logged. All so we would have some sunshine in our lives. We needed more sun so we could garden. Edmund made himself a huge garden with an electric fence around it to keep out intrepid little animals seeking free food.  
Almost everyone has porches here in the south. It is a piece of the southern landscape you come to expect to see and comes right along with spanish moss and a genteel hospitality the lost art of refinement.
. I planned and planted a meandering perennial garden in front of our front porch facing Broad Creek and a cutting garden and perennial garden along the back porch. Next year my gardens will be fuller and flowing...perhaps overflowing like a perennial garden should be to my way of thinking.

Our front yard has many bird feeders and bird houses compliments of my husbands’ creativity in his workshop.  The birds love our property and to date we have added twenty to our life list of birds we identify. We sit each morning on our porch and watching the antics of the birds, enjoying their songs, quirks and lives. It is peaceful... to say the least.

Each evening we walk along the Neuse River.  Ed is always commenting on the cloud formations, the wind direction and the sea air. He used to live in Charleston and was, among other things in his life, the Manager of the Ashley Marina in Charleston along the Ashely River.  He will sniff the air or turn his head and look upwards saying..."it is times like this when I just want to be out on the ocean...sailing around, but, I am too old and dried up to do it now, so I make do with my little 17’ boat and putter around the creeks and rivers here remembering days gone by.”  He does love being out on his boat.
I like this area. The town is small with less than 1000 people living here and 70 percent of the people here are retired and believe it or not “not from here”.  So when you meet people the questions are, “where are you from” “do you live here year-round”, “how long have you lived here” and of course, Oriental, being the sailing capital of the Carolinas..."what kind of boat do you have?” Seriously I have met few people that are actually FROM Oriental, because it is the poorest county in NC. So there is no industry or business’s around for young people to grow up and look forward to having good paying jobs, so they move away.  This place offers a kind of restful, laidback peace least for now.
Getting comfortable with myself in a new place is always tricky but in the south! wow! Imagine and thick, feminine,southern accent, with words so drawn out you hardly know if the next one is coming, from a well meaning, good-hearted friend, ”well, honey we cannot leave yet...you are not ready...a lady doesn’t go out like that! (said with such distress) where IS your lipstick? get some color on your lips and find some shoes that match that skirt...oh bless your heart you have so much to learn about being a woman in the south!”
Really? it is that different? OMG...I was just getting comfortable with learning not to care about what others thought of me...and here it seems to be a requirement...yes, it is.  The ladies here apologize profusely if you catch them without make up or totally matching outfit...hair done and nails polished...They dress up to go food shopping, for women’s club mtgs or going to hairdresser.  I smile and say oh my goodness don’t worry one bit about how you look, it is who you are that matters, and the looks I get...well...it is what I hear that makes me kind of laugh... “ well bless your heart honey...you do have a lot to learn"...
and of course the phrase has multiple meanings. It can be used as a sincere expression of sympathy or genuine concern or it can be used as a precursor to an insult to ‘soften’ the blow.  Bless your heart.

Tell me more Mom...

Last summer my husband Edmund and I took a walk with Ben and Deryn to a Mason’s Cemetery near their home in Eugene, Oregon.  We spent time walking through the cemetery reading gravestones and sharing interesting dedications with one another.  Along the way there were these little trees, dotting the landscape. Italian plum trees, the purply elongated kind. They were ripe, many having dropped to the ground below the trees here and there around the cemetery. I picked up one tossing it to Ben saying, “try this!” Then I threw a couple for Edmund  and Deryn to try because they loves plums. Consensus delicious.
However, it reminded me of a time that wasn’t so happy. I asked Ben if he wanted to hear a story. After telling him the story, he looked at me, genuinely surprised, he said, “Mom, I have never heard that story! I bet you have lots of stories that you have not shared with us, right? I, for one would like to hear them and I think the other kids would like to as well. You should write them down.”
so here I am, writing some down. This is that story.
When I was in 6th grade my dad, his wife Georgine, who was my second step-mother and I all moved to a nice neighborhood in Rockledge, Pennsylvania. Next door to us there was another stuccoed spanish style home, like ours with a lot of wrought iron porch furniture and fencing. The yard was home to 5 Italian plum trees…tantalizing and delicious…I knew because they often dropped into our yard. Finders keepers right?
  One day Georgine called me into the living room and said “ Go into the top drawer of the sideboard  in the dining room and bring the pink envelope to me. “ I checked both drawers…there was no pink envelope. I told her I couldn’t find it. I was frantic. I heard her coming from the living room all along the way telling me how stupid I was and asking if I was blind? I knew I was going to be punished. She came in the room, roughly pushed me aside, opened the drawer and grabbed a yellow envelope, opened it and lo and behold there was the pink envelope that she wanted! She was furious that she had to come to get it herself and that I “lied” !
I didn’t lie…there was no pink envelope to be seen immediately upon opening the drawer.  No matter to her... I was sentenced to sitting on the dining room floor between the wall with windows facing out to our neighbors plum garden and the dining room table. I had to sit cross-legged or indian style as we said as kids, with my hands on my knees.  I had to have my head straight a head and not move. If I moved I got kicked in my lower back…to this day I have issues with being still and with my back. At any rate…because i had to sit there for over four hours…I used my eyes to hunt around. I counted the plums I could see…I counted the panes of glass in their windows, I counted the lines between the tiles on the kitchen floor and the wood slats on the dining room floor. I counted leaves on the trees…I spent a lot of time counting and finally was allowed up off the floor just before my Dad came home from work.