Saturday, February 25, 2012

Half and Half

It seems I'd forgotten I actually had such a thing as a blog for awhile there...sorry about that.

So, I was doing some thinking last night and ended up doing some reminiscing about what life's been like these past several years, and I came up with some mildly interesting observations. I might have been born a Yankee, but ten years south of the Mason-Dixon have a way of working on you. I strongly suspect that I have adopted some distinctly Southern qualities and morphed into a pseudo-hillbilly.

How do I know this? Let me share a few tidbits as I make my case.

 - We have had the dubious honor of living along a dirt road with an honest-to-goodness moonshiner for a neighbor. No joke. He drove an El Camino you could hear coming from a mile away, and he lived next door to a junk yard. You get some interesting neighbors in the sticks, let me tell you!

 - We have lived with goats as pets...inside the house. Yep, two little kids by the name of Tag-Along and Shadow. They wore diapers and were the cutest things you ever saw, especially when they played with our red-bone coon hound and got him on the run. Eventually, they got too big for the house and had to stay in their pen outside, but for several months, they slept on their designated blanket in the kitchen. Don't worry, they were clean for barnyard animals!

 - We have driven an excess of five miles on a flat tire through no-man's-land to get a replacement. It wasn't even a chain garage in the city, to be clear. It was hardly more than a shed in a little podunk town so small it didn't even have a post office. It wasn't even on the map, for crying out loud! And those five miles were the longest you could imagine, seeing as we couldn't go too fast on that flat. Why didn't we just use the spare, you ask? Didn't have one! The car itself wasn't in good shape (see below).

 - We have owned a car that had to be started with a screwdriver. As in, pop the hood, break out the Philips-head, poke around in the engine block, and you're good to go. It wasn't that bad, really...unless it was raining. Or really cold out.

- We have gone off-roading in the dumbest vehicle imaginable. Namely, an 80's model Chevy Celebrity, and my Lord, how we hated that car. To be fair, though, we didn't choose to pull a Dukes of Hazzard  stunt like that, but...we were trying to beat a tornado home and the traffic was horrible, so...we pulled across the median. That at once sounds not so bad, and even worse. Mom, bro and I were almost wiped off the face of the earth in that very heap, but that's another story.

 - We have gotten the back bumper of a pickup truck stuck on a tree. Yes, you read that correctly. I still have no idea how that happened, but Dad was trying to back out of a halfway cleared clearing while sis and I guided him out, he got too close, we didn't signal fast enough, the truck rocked, and there you have it. A sapling not ten inches around wedged between the tailgate and the bumper. It takes a special kind of doofus to pull that off, but we managed between the three of us. We finally got it free again (no idea how that one happened, either), and as a direct result it fell off a week later and landed neatly in a roadside ditch.

So it seems I'm neither a pure Yankee nor a true redneck, but I'm happy having bits of both. I've got an understanding of things the Southerners don't, like hot tea and snow, and I have yet to hear a Northerner use the phrase "fixin' to." I'm a scrappy, motley, mixed-up little weirdo, and I'm rather proud of that.

Your pal,
Angels

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