Grampa Guthrie died a couple days ago. He's the husband of Grandma Guthrie, the little old lady I help take care of.
For a little over a year, Grampa Guthrie has slowly withered away in a nursing home 30 miles from here. He went from being a big, strapping galoot to a frail, bed-ridden shell of a man. I often took Grandma Guthrie to visit him at the nursing home. Sometimes they were sweet and tender. Sometimes they fought. Often during the same visit.
Today is the funeral. I'm trying to whip myself into presentable shape. Scrape the chicken shit off, comb the twigs and leaves from my hair, paint my nails to hide the always-present dirt beneath. The hardest part is deciding what to wear.
Most of my wardrobe came from Alaska with me. The only new clothes I've acquired since arriving in Alabama are shorts, t-shirts, overalls, work boots and flip-flops. There is very little in the closet appropriate for a church funeral on a very hot & humid afternoon. All I know for sure is there's no way in hell I'm wearing pantyhose.
And I can't just duck in and out. I'm sorta "on call" during the funeral. Grandma Guthrie probably won't have the stamina to stay for the complete church and graveside services. When she is ready to go, I'm to swoop in and carry her home where we'll wait together for the others.
This is going to be a trying day. There had better be food.
But rather than leave this post on a downer note, I'll show you these pictures of three baby birds that recently hatched in the old electric meter box on the back of Frankencoop.
I think they're nuthatches. At least that's what the internet told me when I first tried to identify the tiny eggs.
I hope they don't fall out of the nest. The chickens below would probably gobble them up.
Damn. I always thought Ted Stevens was too ornery to die. I was wrong. But then again, I'm wrong about a lot of stuff.
If I was back in Anchorage tonight, I'd head downtown to one of my favorite watering holes and get drunk with friends while swapping Uncle Ted stories. Everybody in Alaska has an Uncle Ted story.
But I'm not in Alaska. I'm in Alabama - in a county with no bars. Nobody here knows who Ted Stevens is which means nobody wants to hear my Uncle Ted story. Instead, I am drinking a strong coffee and watching my tape of the 1996 debate between Ted Stevens and Theresa Obermeyer.
I was surprised to find that I couldn't find any of the debate posted online. So, in honor of Ted, I'm posting one of my favorite moments. Sorry about the quality. It's an old VHS tape and I'm just recording it off the TV with my digital camera.
Spent most of the day with Grandma Guthrie. Recently, there have been visits from physical therapists and nurses who lead her through simple exercises and check her blood pressure.
This afternoon, I was present for the physical therapist's visit. He asked her a few general health questions and then had her do some exercises that are probably designed to increase mobility - or at least prevent atrophy. (I don't think they realize just how mobile this little old lady is. She has no off switch.)
The best part though was that he pulled out a gleaming accordion and provided music for her workout. He played Rocky Top, The Tennessee Waltz, Golden Rings, Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain and - for Grandma Guthrie's rest period - Amazing Grace. Sadly, he knew neither Freebirdnor Lady of Spain.
A free accordion concert in the middle of the day is a pretty sweet treat - like finding money in an old coat pocket.
Today, Tom and I went a mile or so down the road to watch the giant McMansion get auctioned off to the highest bidder. There are many places that this 13,000 sq. ft. house would fit right in. My neck of the backwoods is not one of them. I'm not going to use this blog to spread small-town gossip about why this mansion was built in the first place or why it's being sold only a few years later. Gossip like that is better spread in-person over a cup of coffee or a couple beers.
Not many people came out for the auction - maybe 75 at best (and that's including kids in tow). I bet more than half were looky-loos like myself and most of the rest were thinking about bidding on some of the contents. If you were looking to buy, bargains were to be had.
The only item I would've really liked to have was this little mostly-finished cabin. I could've turned it into the most awesome chicken coop ever. Already on skids and ready to move - a mere mile from my property - it went for $600.
The McMansion itself sold for a little more than a third of the original asking price. Along with 13 acres of land, it went for $450,000.
My entire crappy mobile home might fit on that second floor balcony, but I still have the better view.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
A couple nights ago, clear skies allowed the Talladega Mountains to cast their shadows across the sky at sunset. According to Wikipedia, it's the very tail end of the Blue Ridge Mountains - located about 40 miles to the west. On a clear day, you can see Mt. Cheaha from my place - the highest point in Alabama. (At 2413 feet, the Alaskan in me has trouble calling it a mountain. If trees can grow on top of it, it is not a mountain.)
If you click on the picture for the bigger version, you can see Venus just above and to the right of the new moon in the upper left corner. I took this picture from inside my livingroom. You won't see anything like this from the big McMansion (which is located in the darkness a little above and to the left of the dot of light in the bottom right corner).
After the McMansion had a new owner, we went to my neighbor's place to pick their excess blueberries. We filled a two-gallon bucket before a sudden downpour drove us back to my house.
But the rain stopped as suddenly as it started and we took off back down the hill to the East Alabama Goat and Poultry Auction. Again, neither of us were looking to buy anything but I always enjoy checking out all the different kinds of chickens (and occasional guineas, turkeys, quail, pheasants and even pigs and bunnies).
Here's a little taste of good old-fashioned auctioneering for ya:
During my time here in Alabama, I have been on the lookout to accumulate authentic rural southern experiences (ARSE). I have butchered hogs, sorted eggs in a factory farm, played dominoes with old men in a shack in the woods, attended cockfights, spent a night in the pokey, traipsed through the woods with my faithful yeller hound dog, eaten boiled okra (the nastiest thing I've ever eaten - far more disgusting than pig lungs or intestines) and, of course, drank my fair share of moonshine.
Well, add a new one to the list because I finally actually got to witness the production of moonshine. Yep, one of the locals trusted me enough to show me his still. Even let me take a picture of it. He went so far as to offer to let me take a picture of him standing next to it but I declined. See, his trust was not misplaced.
In case you don't know how this works, let me give you the basics. The modified beer keg on the right is holding homemade apple wine made last fall. It's heated by propane (the keg is out of frame but you can see the tube leading away from the keg). The alcohol in the wine is the first thing to evaporate and it rises up the copper tubing on top of the keg that leads to the blue barrel full of water. The water cools the alcohol which then condenses back to liquid form, finally dripping out the pipe into the jar on the left.
Notice how the moonshine is blue? At first I thought it was just reflecting the color of the barrel but it was explained to me that the color is actually caused by the corrosive alcohol dissolving the copper, giving the first jar of moonshine a blue tint. The color fades as more alcohol passes through the tubing.
The first jar is also very potent. The alcohol in the jar pictured above is probably around 130 proof. Subsequent jars have lower proofs. When all the jars are mixed together, the final product will hover somewhere around 90 proof. I was told the leftover apple wine still has an alcohol content roughly equal to beer but I didn't think to ask if they drink it or dump it.
I even got to take home a souvenir Mason jar full of moonshine - for display purposes only, of course.
