If I had a freeway billboard, it would say If you haven’t had pizza for dinner at Frank’s Filling Station on the backside of nowhere in the rural Georgia Countryside off Highway 362 in Hollonville, you haven’t fully lived, ‘specially if you didn’t split a Little Debbie Double Oatmeal Cream Pie with your sweetie for dessert.
dinner wasn’t planned
we just ended up hungry
looking for some food
I was delivering a Facebook Marketplace sale of the last of my Longaberger collection from the 1990s ~ a lidded piece of Christmas pottery. I sold all but one of my baskets a couple of years ago in the sweeping house cleanout, but the pottery popped up needing a better home, and some man in a small silver sportscar pulled up next to us as we waited at Frank’s Filling Station, the designated meeting spot to do the business. I handed him the dish, and he handed me the cash.
The next obvious question at that time of the day was what was for dinner – a common conversation for two tired full-time working folks. We went down the list of possibilities, but nothing was appealing much to either of our appetites.
Wouldn’t it be fun to see if we can each eat dinner on five bucks? I asked my husband, eyeing the filling station and wondering whether they might have a little cafe inside. The place had just been redone a year ago, and neither of us had been inside since. I’d just picked up an easy ten dollars, and I sure didn’t mind splitting it with the love of my life to feed us both. It would be a fun challenge to see if we could stay within budget.
He took me up on it.
I eyed the boiled peanuts. They have regular and Cajun in there, and I do love the spicy ones. Probably not the best choice that close to bedtime, though. I scanned the cooler of local beef from Caldwell Farms and made a mental note to come back for some another time when I planned to cook at home. We spied the barrel tables next to the window and took a look at the food options – cheeseburgers, fries, pizza, chicken wings, hot dogs, and even a fried bologna sandwich. That’s how you know you’re in the country is when you see a fried bologna sandwich.
We settled on the pizza and two bottled drinks, and sat at a table to eat and watch the people coming and going – and that is a lot of excitement on a weeknight for the place where we live. My back was to the door, but when the last two pizzas walked out in the arms of a young man, my husband whispered that he was glad we got ours when we did. It wasn’t fabulous pizza, but it was decent, and that was good enough for a Tuesday night.
Did we stay under budget? Nope. We went over by $1.80 before adding the Oatmeal Cream Pie. We’d already blown the bank, so we splurged on a $2.00 deluxe dessert we could split, and we were grateful for the sustenance.
So if you’ve never had dinner at Frank’s Filling Station in Hollonville, Georgia, add it to your list of things to do if you’re ever an hour south of the Atlanta airport. They also have Hollonville, Georgia t-shirts in there, and those are as rare as hen’s teeth and would make great conversation starters for traveling. Keep a lookout for us ~ we might just be at a barrel table by the window.
Many thanks to Two Writing Teachers for giving writers space to bud and bloom!
The earth laughs in flowers. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today’s poem is a triolet, inspired by Barb Edler’s post yesterday. Before Barb’s mother died, she planted daffodils, and these are Barb’s favorite flowers. I, too, lost my mother (December 2015) and miss her very much – my mother’ s favorites were wild petunias and yellow roses. When I need to count blessings and decompress, I take my keys off the hook by the door and start up my little blue Caribbean RAV4 and go riding the country roads. I look for the blooms, the rolling hills, the hawks on wires, the cows in the meadows. It puts the world back in perspective for me – – I am here but for a blink of an eye, and whatever is worrying me, too, shall pass.
Today, let’s remember our mothers who have gone before us but who still wave to us in flowers! We still see you, Moms! #flowerhugs
Several years ago, my father sent me a stack of books from his collection by Gladys Taber.
“Read these,” he urged. “You’ll see yourself in these pages.”
So I did. And he was right.
Gladys Taber lived on a farm named Stillmeadow in the Connecticut hills, where she wrote for Family Circle, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and other popular magazines. She published over 50 books.
I live on the Johnson Funny Farm in middle Georgia, where I make a feeble attempt to add to my blog every day.
Gladys was a lover of animals. She raised her precious, spoiled rotten Cocker Spaniels and treated them like her children. She even made friends with 2 skunks.
I’m smitten with our three Schnoodles. We call them our four-legged sons and share our meals with them at every sitting. I watch birds and serve them specialty seed.
Gladys and her friend Barbara Webster exchanged letters for years, even publishing one full year of correspondence between their farms in Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge, sharing details of farm life in the 1950s.
I’m fond of mailing postcards to family and friends.
Gladys’s love of the countryside is evident in every carefully crafted sentence, rich in her descriptions of the simple pleasures of farm life.
We, too, are so fond of our corner of this planet that we audibly say, “Ah, back in God’s Country,” when we come back home from anywhere else. We’re “those folks” who take Sunday evening drives just to admire the landscape and praise the Creator for the rolling hills and the cows in the meadows. We catch our breath with every rustic charm – split-rail fences, old barns, rocking chairs on porches, sweet tea in mason jars, sheets blowing in the wind on a clothesline, clumps of wildflowers at the base of a mailbox.
I turn to the July pages of Stillmeadow Calendar and begin.
“July comes to Stillmeadow clad in silk-blue dawns, blazing gold noons, and violet dusks. Heat glazes the air, leaves droop, and the pond level begins to drop. But night is lovely as a dream, and we can go outdoors without a sweater. Sitting in the garden is inadvisable because the mosquitoes and gnats are busy, but a brief walk is possible.”
I connect with Gladys. These could be my own words now, 80 years later.
I glance out at the drooping leaves, heavy with the heat of the day here in middle Georgia and look to the western horizon, the copper tangerine sun hanging low in the branches and think, “What did I ever do to deserve this slice of heaven on earth?”
And for a moment, I feel the knowing spirit of Gladys here with me, nodding enthusiastically, urging me to love it while I can. She’s smiling from a better place, assuring me that for now, this’ll do.
Jennifer Jowett of Michigan hosts today’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com and offers us a compelling prompt about the future of our world today. Her prompt is one we dance along the periphery of in so many of our countryside drive discussions, wondering about the future of our county, heartsick over each new development, each new killing of droves of trees that were once home to birds, deer, foxes, squirrels, bees, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums…..it breaks my heart for the wildlife and for the future of our grandchildren.
Pop-Up Rainstorm, May 16, 2023, 6:45 p.m., Johnson Funny Farm Eastside
In reflecting on Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood after rereading the chapter on Bachman’s Sparrow this week on the heels of hearing one of these rare birds on Global Big Day, I find that I’m perpetually drawn to her words, her style, her sentiments. In Wild Card Quilt, Ray writes
A farm's is a meditative kind of existence. One could live many places happily, but some situate you closer to nature and the intricacies of survival; closer to the seasons and the cycles of moon and sun and stars; closer to the ground, which chambers water and is host to essential ingredients of life.
To pay attention to the world, where forests bend according to the wind's direction, rivers bring baskets of granite down from the mountains, and cranes perform their long, evolutionary dances, is a kind of religious practice. To acknowledge the workings of the world is to fasten ourselves in it. To attend to creation - our wild and dear universe - is to gain admission into life. One can live at the bone. This I wished to do.
Details define the farm: the arrival and departure of birds, wildflower blooms, habits of animals, ripening of fruit, passing of cold fronts. The more attention we pay to a certain place, the more details we see, and the more attached we become to it. ("A Natural Almanac," Wild Card Quilt)
I’ve often thought we might retire on the island where I grew up. Until I was 40 years old, I lived life at the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. When I married my husband, I moved to middle Georgia and fell in love with the rural setting so charming it’ll give you the tickle-shivers. He considers going to the beach a vacation. I consider the beach home. We’ve had to focus our lens and have some deep discussions about what constitutes a vacation, and all the differences between vacations and traveling and trips.
Beaches these days are too people-y. When you have to plan your grocery shopping at 10 p.m. to get a parking place and be able to move through the aisles and not wait in line six carts deep, it gets old fast. When you work all the time and are too tired to go to the beach and have your first basal cell removed from your nose and are warned to stay slathered with sunscreen just to go check the mailbox, being outdoors below the gnat line means you alternate between insect repellent and sunscreen. And when you have to wait in line to eat in a restaurant for over an hour because there is no “resident pass” to the front of the line, the charm fades because unlike everyone waiting, you’ve worked all day and have to get out of bed early and go do it all again the next day.
Plus, no one knows how to drive. There’s a perpetual crowdedness like being on a packed out elevator, just waiting for it to stop on your floor so you can squeeze between everyone to get out the door before it closes and breathe.
That’s why I think the beach will remain a place for us to visit, but not to live. I’ve gotten too attached to the wildlife here on the farm – the birds, the cows in nearby pastures, the goats and occasional donkeys, the roosters crowing at all hours, and the hens that give us fresh farm eggs – the kind that many people would find surprising to see and smell and taste for the first time after eating those that come in cartons.
I’m not sure how I would feel about moving to a place where I didn’t get the occasional opportunity to see my husband, tractor running, standing off to the side in his wide-brimmed hat and t-shirt, with his jeans unzipped, peeing on a tree as he has done all his life here, as all little boys in the country grow up doing, never outgrow, and find that even into their later years there is no sheer pleasure like drawing a urine face on Loblolly Pine tree bark. Country boys pee like our ancestors did, au naturel and wholly Biblical, before all of this indoor plumbing.
I would miss driving down the long driveway, my camera always on and ready because I never know what will pop out of the next shrub around the corner before I get to the road. Could be a cute bunny, as it was yesterday with its paper-thin membraned ears up – or a mob of deer with their little ones, or a coyote, or a fox, or a fox squirrel, or a raccoon or possum or our resident hawk. You just never know what you’ll see next out here, because every trip to the road holds a story or two, a real adventure, some actually wrinkled with risk.
And the fig tree, the little clearance turkey fig I bought for $3.00 from the scratch-and-dent rack at Home Depot that now towers above the roof line and yields more fresh figs than I could ever use, so I end up calling my fig friends to bring their containers and use the garage ladder to pick all they can take.
Then there’s the bird and butterfly garden that we planted when we first moved in, where our beloved dachchund Roxie is buried and where the Black Swallowtails hang heavy on the fennel each summer before spinning themselves into chrysalises, emerging, and flying off to lay eggs and keep the cycle going. I don’t want any neighbors messing with my baby birds or my caterpillars; they’ve come to enjoy a quiet life of solitude with plenty of wayward fennel to transform them into creatures of flight.
And right now, it’s raining. I knew it before it started because we aren’t covered up in asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks. The earthy scent rises like coffee steam from the ground right before a good rain, announcing that showers or storms are imminent. You don’t even have to be outside; it’ll barge in right through your car vents if you’re on the road. The thunder is absolutely magnificent, too – – it sounds like the end of the world, it’s so loud sometimes. And just as suddenly as it pops up, the trees will stop dancing in the wind and it’ll go away and the sun’ll come out, making you wonder if you actually dreamed up a storm.
I could close my eyes in the summertime and tell you exactly where I am on the driveway – from the wild roses at the entrance to the wild honeysuckle along the edge along the middle, to the jasmine at the garage, and the gardenia at the porch. There are certain smells in the country that naturally take to the breeze and GPS-footprint us exactly where we are standing.
And the Saturday Market. I don’t know where I would get my fresh vegetables if not for the farms here and Gregg’s Peach Orchard, where we not only buy our peaches and watermelons, but where we also go to sit under the silo in the rocking chairs and eat their fresh peach and strawberry swirl ice cream. Sometimes we pick blueberries while we’re there, and we rarely come home without a loaf of peach bread to butter and toast for weekend breakfast in the summertime.
I’m not sure where we’ll retire, but the beach and all the people packed onto islands like sardines in a little peelback-lidded tin can can’t hold a candle to the space and solitude of a farm. Indeed, this is a meditative kind of existence. Once it begins to grow on you, it takes off like Kudzu vines, hugging you tight in a forever kind of way, never turning you loose to think life could be better anywhere else.
Because it doesn’t get any better than farm life in the country.
7:33 p.m, after the storm May 16, 2023, Johnson Funny Farm Westside – I came home from camping this past weekend to find this glorious flower blooming on my back porch. I have no idea how in the world it grew there – I didn’t plant it, so the only guess: a sunflower seed from the bird feeder fell into a planter pot and received Heaven’s touch from my mother.
Common Threads 