About a year and half ago I moved from Atlanta to a little town in a historic district located northeast of Atlanta.
The house had recently been restored; complete with a fenced in backyard, security lights, and a large vacant lot between my house and a neighbor’s. The lot has a white picket fence with an arched entrance. At the back edge are blueberry and Muscatine vines growing over the arches. The entire lot is completely filled with azaleas, now in full bloom. The white and pink azaleas are a remarkable sight when I look out my window every morning. They remind me of the Beatrice Potter stories.
After a lengthy drought here in Georgia, the April showers came in full force. Now the weather is warming so I take 3-year-old Prince William (my grandson) outside to play. A couple of days ago, while sitting on the patio, two bumblebees playfully chased each other around our heads. Watching them play, I wondered if any one had ever figured out why they fly.
A tornado just made a 6-mile swipe through the middle of Atlanta for the first time ever.
It seems a little strange to me that one has not hit before because there is area of North Georgia in Hall County that is known as tornado alley. Plus Gainesville, which is only about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, has had more than one tornado during my lifetime.
The big tornado that practically leveled the town of Gainesville was in 1936, killing several hundred people. I remember it quite well. It was around 8 in the morning and I was walking to catch the school bus.
From time to time, I’ll write about a time between the late sixties and mid-seventies, when I lived in the country in a little community just above Atlanta, called Ocee. This was just a small community with a country store, church, school, scattered neighbors, with me and my family in the center. It was actually near the town of Alpharetta, surrounded by two other communities called Lick Skillet and Shake Rag. After being there awhile, some called me the “mayor.”
I had only been there a short time when I flew out to Colorado to take a course in philosophy. When the other students asked me where I was from, and I replied Alpharetta, Georgia, they wanted to know where it was. When I responded that it was between Shake Rag and Lick Skillet, they said they had never heard of it. I replied, “neither had I before moving there.”
I wanted to live some place where I could raise my young son to teach him about things of nature, where he could learn how to be self-sustaining. In this connection, I acquired a few living creatures, namely chickens, pigs, dogs, and a pony for him (when he was just out of the rocking horse phase).
I named all the animals. One rooster I named Marshall Dillon. Two hens were named Bonnie and Clyde. My two dogs, one a collie and the other a German Shepherd, were named Miss Cookie and Taco. The pig was named Arnold, while the parakeet I named Mahatma Ghandai. The pony’s name was Tip-Toe.
