Have a Wicked Good Holiday!

I would like to personally thank all those folks that have made 2006 an interesting and busy year. If I had stayed in Lake City, we would have been neighbors, so this true little story is for Don Kuse over in Live Oak, Florida.

After the hurricane that flooded Columbia County, Florida in the late ‘40’s, neighbors depended on neighbors and folks made do with what they had. This is a true story, as I remember it from my childhood.

You could smell the heat it was so intense. The smell of mud coming up from below into the train trestle was like some sort of herbal remedy and if you smelled too long it would just make you faint away. You wouldn't want to do that... Just looking down through the ties on the railroad trestle into the water was enough to make you feel faint.
It must have rained for a month. It felt like the water coming out of the ground from the sun was giving you a hot bath and the flow of heat from your head went right up to the sun.
I guess that I was about five or six years old, and Mammy and I were off to see a friend of hers....it was the sort of thing we did occasionally. Granddaddy wouldn't know we were gone until supper when he got home from the sign shop in Lake City n his old red GMC pickup which would be covered in red clay from the hurricane ruined roads.
It was a sort of high adventure and the neatest things would be sure to happen. Why, just this morning starting out , we had come to an impossible old dirt bank and there was just no way up it at all! Mammy had just reached down and picked up a stick and declared it was full of magic.
It was the most magical of things it turned out and that stick got us up that bank lickety split. Later, the magic stick got tied up with a kerchief to hold some fruit a neighbor gave us as we passed by, and at the trestle where anyone could see you'd fall through and into the water below, that big old stick was just right to keep you stepping right over those gaps in the ties and on to the next one.
A long about dark we came to an open field. The rain had flooded over the road and the only way to the little house in the middle of the field was to wade. Mammy took off her stockings and carried her shoes in her hand and we waded on through the water and up the driveway. A nice enough lady with a couple of children met us just outside the door of the house. She was a uncommon sized woman, in that she was as big around as she was tall. I thought that was mighty strange, but hunger was first and to go play before bed was second.
That night as I was getting ready to go to bed, I heard Mammy tell the fat woman that everything would be okay and not to worry. I remember that someone was crying in my dream that night, but it wasn't until morning that I found out that a baby boy had been born that very night.

The next morning Mammy and I left for home. After a long days walk, we got there and Granddaddy was waiting. The next day was Christmas.

Have a very Merry Christmas and a Wicked Happy New Year!