southern culture

…and THIS little piggy went…

No Telling


Not long ago I told the harrowing story of The 90 Escaped Pigs on the Interstate. Thankfully, there’s an update and a semi-happy ending.

The following is a KATV report which has gone fairly viral.

Little Rock – An 800-pound hog that survived on its own for a week after a truck flipped while on its way to a slaughterhouse has surfaced in a swimming pool at a home near the crash site.

LeAnn Baldy, whose house is only yards from Interstate 430, said Monday she noticed her pool was suddenly overflowing and then saw the immersed pig, which was having a drink in the pool.

About 90 hogs were in the trailer when it overturned where I-430 meets I-40, and about 60 survived. Officials said they thought the last of them had been caught.


Baldy says she found a farmer to take in the pig. A spokesman for Odom’s Tennessee Pride says it can’t use the hog in its sausage products because no one knows what the hog had been eating in its week on the lam.

Reading between the lines makes the math easy. Ninety hogs in the accident, minus thirty DOA, equals 60 hogs caught by local troopers “and others” that certainly made their way to the Odom’s Tennessee Pride processing plant. I’m sure they’re in the freezer by now. Or on your breakfast plate.

Wait. Let’s make that 59 because at least one bought himself more time by laying low, drinking a little chlorine, rummaging around eating God only knows what, and in general making himself un-processable. Way to go, pool pig. I hope someone named you.

I’m no pig-hugger, but I do enjoy small justices and reprieves. This big boy appears to have both for now.

As for Ms. Baldy, she’s probably got a few new snapshots for the family album. I’d love to see one of them. Especially the picture of how they removed the 800-pound escapee from her swimming pool.

The Scribbling Women of Harmony Grove

No Telling

I’m just now cooling off from a whirl-wind workshop week at the South Central Service Cooperative where I’ve had the pleasure to work with some of the finest teaching women the South knows how to produce. We wrote, shared student stories and lesson plans, fanned the 100-degree heat, and ate like dainty field-hands.

And the writing…the picture above is the cover of the hastily put-together anthology of the week’s mad scribbling. I’ve always said that teachers writing together is a modern-day version of the old quilting bee. We circle the cloth, rock the needles, offer recipes and advice, and join the stories of our lives with perfect corners and skillful stitching. It’s true, and this anthology is the quilt we made together in the Harmony Grove Auditorium. Never mind that our nimble fingers were on laptop computers instead of muslin, at the end of the day we carried the words home. It’s the Sisterhood of the Traveling Stories.

And those pictures on the cover? Stephanie gave a fabulous workshop on writing our school-child pasts. The teachers brought pictures of themselves as children and wrote rich memories from childhoods spent in the South Arkansas pines. In the Fall, they’ll share these stories with their students. More importantly, they’ll share themselves as writers with the young writers in their classrooms.

Meet the ladies…

Special thanks to Sonya Russell, Debbie Fleming, and everyone at the South Central Service Cooperative in Camden, AR for their expertise, attention to the smallest detail, and gracious hospitality.

Better Than Fiction

No Telling


I love our local newspaper. Not that I would consult The Log Cabin Democrat for any national or global news, but that was never this newspaper’s purpose. This journalistic wonder was the heartbeat of our community for over a hundred years before Kris Allen, and I hope it weathers another hundred. Maybe only the conglomerated, big-city newspapers will die out. Maybe the small-town rags will outlive us all.

Why? The Police Beat. There’s nothing like it. I’ll give you a taste from today’s shock and awe. These are numbered in the paper. I have no idea why.

4. Theft of property at 3900 block of [deleted by me]. A woman called police to say she’d accidentally left her purse at Walmart and someone had stolen it before she could get back to claim it. In the purse were keys, credit cards and a Kel-Tec .380 handgun.

What? Are other women in the checkout line pushing buggies and packing heat? Apparently so. I’m a complete gun nerd, so I had to look up this particular weapon. The fine people at Kel-Tek advertise this as “…mainly intended for plainclothes police officers as a secondary weapon, or for concealed carry by licensed citizens. The small grip size and light trigger pull make the P-3AT ideal for female shooters.” At Wal-Mart. They left that part out.

That’s not the day’s favorite from the police blotter, though. This one is.

6. Assault at 500 block [deleted by me]. A woman answered a knock on her door Friday morning to encounter a heavyset white female wearing a brown hat and scarf and “big dark glasses” spraying her in the face with what seemed to be hairspray and beating her with what is described in the report as “a plastic dump truck.” After the attack the assailant fled in “a black, foreign-type passenger car,” according to the report.

This is why the South produces so many good writers. It’s not that we’re all literarily gifted, it’s because the local newspapers sweetly dump these prizes right into our laps like birthday presents. We don’t have to make it up. The stuff of fiction happens all around us. There’s no such thing as writer’s block when there’s a good hairspray-and-plastic-dump truck incident to get us over the hump.

Was it Aquanet? Tonka? Did that unfortunate woman at Wal-Mart lose irreplaceable pictures of her grandbabies along with that Kel-Tek .380? These are questions a writer must answer.

So keep on plugging away, Log Cabin Democrat. Just to make sure you do, I’m re-upping my subscription. Sure, you’re free on the internet, but my loyalty to the Police Beat requires hard cash and a fresh year-long commitment.

Dirt Farming

No Telling

It’s that time of year again. I crave puttering and seedlings and faded pink canvas gloves and big straw hats. There’s nothing like the hot, green smell of tomato leaves after a storm, or the random geometry of climbing yard-long beans. I’m a Southern Grandmother and it’s my right to tend the garden.

But I don’t have one and it’s my own fault. I tried to simplify yard work by moving into a gardenless garden home where mysterious bands of young rogues sweep across the subdivision on riding mowers, slinging edgers and leaf blowers. Twice a week, the battalion tidies our postage-stamp yards. A plague of well-paid locusts. They do a good job, mind you, but a yard that can be manicured in half an hour is too small for a garden.

When I was a young mother with a strapping husband and big yard, I planted thick raised-bed gardens every summer. He fought the grass and bamboo, I nurtured seedlings, weeded, and staked. Later as a single mother, I turned to flowers and herbs. It was all I could manage in those busy years. Weekends when Em went to her father’s, I’d hit the plant stores. Putting rose bushes in the ground somehow helped the shock of childless weekends. It filled the empty places.

It occurs to me now I’ve unconsciously given myself less fertile ground to tend and maybe it’s a sign. The need to parent vegetables and blooms is still strong. But gardening is maternity and I suspect my own waning fertility has made choices without consulting me.

I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not ready.

So look out, Home Depot and Lowes. It’s Sunday and I plan to worship a little dirt. Grammy needs to plant even if it’s only a few tubs on a concrete patio.

Home Town Boy Wins Big. Twice!

No Telling

Bless his heart, he won! I can hear the screaming and see the fireworks from my front porch, and I suspect it’ll go on for hours. Things are hopping here in Conway for damn sure.

Here’s the thing – 38 million votes last night from Arkansas alone. Have any of you ever been through Arkansas? We might have almost that many ticks here after a warm winter, but nothing close to that many people. We don’t vote for the ERA around here or much in a presidential election, but put one fairly cute, aww shucks Baptist boy on American Idol and stand back, brothers and sisters. Stand back.

I won’t pretend I followed any of this before tonight. I was too busy trying to find parking during finals week to make his on-campus concert and, well, American Idol comes on during Deadliest Catch. Sorry Kris.

It’s possible I’m the only person in Conway who doesn’t own a t-shirt with his name across it. Wait – the second person. My daughter still harbors a grudge over his free Stoby’s cheese dip for life, so there are two of us. She’s fairly put out over this and I’m sure she’ll have plenty to say about fame and fortune and belonging to the right congregation.

Soon, all the profs at UCA will start pouring over old gradebooks to see if he was once in their classes. I couldn’t tell you on a bet right now if he was in one of mine. Nothing against Kris at all, it’s just that you could walk into any class on any day at any hour and see about three or four just like him – good boys who smile and say “yes ma’am.” I love those students, and their numbers are legion around here.

I do wish him well. I know his mama is mighty proud, because I saw her. In that red dress. Weeping. I’m also sure that for the next few weeks we’ll hear about the power of prayer. Jesus will get most of the credit for a while, but that’s fine. Jesus doesn’t have free cheese dip for life.

"What are you DOING?"

No Telling

I read an interesting piece about experiencing vs. spectating our lives. It reminded me of this irritating woman I follow on Twitter who leaves upward from 60 to 100 tweets a day. She’s a high school English teacher who does, I admit, leave a scads of good education links in some of those tweets. Every single time I check Twitter, she’s unloaded another fifteen to twenty more links, comments, insights, and hourly whatevers. Fine.

Yes, I know I don’t have to follow her. There’s this strange combination of connection (she’s a codirector of a group I’d rather not name, just like me) and fear of Bad Manners. Southern twitterers must bump into this dilemma all the time. UNfollowing someone, especially if you have a connection of any kind, feels a lot like walking off in the middle of a conversation at the grocery store. It’s rude and ungracious.

Yesterday, as the cloud of grades and final exams finally blew clear, I opened my Twitter to actually leave one. I don’t do this often enough to be remotely interesting to anyone, so if you follow me, well, it’s going to be a little dull. At any rate, I opened my account and there she was, this high school English teacher twittering away about this and that and filling up my whole page.

And then it occurred to me…this was a school day. She was at a high school somewhere up north with a rotating classroom of students every hour on the hour. I counted, and she sent over forty tweets between 8:00 and 4:00. That’s a little over five tweets an hour.

When did she teach? I’ve been a high school English teacher myself, and I know averting your eyes from the crowd at hand for more than ten seconds can be A Very Bad Idea. I also remember nonstop teaching, planning, conferences, lunch duty, and grading during those hours. I also remember the four or so hours at home each evening dedicated to most of that list. Teaching high school English is an all-consuming vocation.

At what point does she push away from the computer and teach in the moment? or at all? And why on earth do I need a running string of electronic teaching ephemera from someone who only twitters teaching?

Here’s the bottom line. Experience needs the luxury of time and reflection to fully explain its multiple layers and provide real meaning. Twittering bypasses reflection and allows us to forgo internal monologue and true understanding. It happens too instantly and is discarded too quickly. Twittering also eats up the moment; constantly narrating our lives turns us into spectators without actual experience. If we Twitter five times an hour we can’t be doing anything.

I’m going to set my Southern upbringing aside and UNfollow this poor woman. My guess is she’s tied up in a broom closet right now, 25 to 30 teenagers laughing and texting each other as they run to their cars.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

No Telling
There are so many things I love about Arkansas. To the north we have the idyllic geography of the Ozarks, hills rolling and tree-covered, the land covered with fossils from an ancient sea-time. The south is a red-clay pine forest where, if you look very carefully, you can find diamonds. The people here are proud, stubborn, fascinating survivors of the economic turn from rural farming to whatever it is we are now becoming. Sure, there are metropolitan areas. Little Rock is a fine example and just big enough to trip over itself while it morphs into a large city.

I love it here and find it hard to imagine living anywhere else.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have times when I shake my head in bewilderment. Yesterday the Arkansas House of Representative voted to allow concealed weapons in churches. Seriously. They did.

The argument is that smaller congregations can’t afford expensive security forces, so it’s every man for himself in the pews now. Legally.

The kind of change Arkansas is going through now is tough for most to stomach. I understand that. I even expected a little paranoia, which we exhibited full-tilt during the last election. But I think we’ve crossed the line when we begin legislating concealed weapons in houses of God. I can’t imagine sitting there on a Sunday morning and wondering if the deacons are packing.

Not that I actually sit there on a Sunday morning, but, you know, if I did it would be most disconcerting.

So what’s next? I’m almost afraid to find out.

Windchimes and Widow-Women in Paradise

No Telling

Writing about my sweet neighbor-lady’s political fright yesterday reminded me of a couple of neighborhood issues in our Walled Subdivision Paradise. First, a brief history.
I moved here a few years ago when this little circle of patio homes was still all construction and dirt and sticks in the ground connected by string. I was seduced by the promise of marble counter tops, six-inch ceiling mouldings, and of never again sweating over my own yard work. Living in a 100 year-old Downtown Grand Dame of a place was fabulous, and while I’ll always sigh a bit at leaving the wrap-around porch and Seven Sisters irises, that old house was more upkeep than any one woman could manage, even with an expensive and ever-changing team of electricians, plumbers, tree-men, and mowing neighbor-boys. I love the smell of New Construction in the morning. It smells like . . . victory.
What I didn’t know was my new Walled Subdivision Paradise would become a sort of weigh station for retirees either headed for The Home or The Grave. I don’t say this lightly. By the end of my first year here, I was the youngest resident by an easy twenty-five years and two neighbors had already passed into their Sweet Release. So far this year we’ve lost four.
There’s quite a bit of turnover in this ‘Burb.
Longevity is a woman’s prerogative, so the majority of these homes belong to widow-women with small yappy dogs and an abundance of hanging windchimes. I’m not sure why the windchime thing is so important, but there it is. Walk the circle on a breezy day and and it’s like driving home from a ZZ Top concert – a bit muffled and “huh?” for an hour or so. Everyone here has several chimes and at least one each of the gonging call-to-prayer variety usually reserved for Buddhist Temples.
I suspect I’m the only one bothered by the windchime concert because I’m the only one who can hear them. I’ve been on the porch on stormy nights watching for tornadoes as the wind whipped frantically through the streets. This happens regularly here and I always enjoy a good stormy night, but the collective throng of these hundred angered windchimes can drown out even the train-roar of an F-4. The widow-women sleep peacefully behind darkened windows and never know a thing, bless their hearts.
In our darkest moods, my daughter and I have plotted systematically vandalizing the larger and more mellifluous of the chimes. We have our moments. We won’t do it, though, because as well-brought-up Southern Women, we could never. If one of these widow-women should pass on in the night we committed a heinous windchime-attack, we’d never survive the guilt.
Or the prosecution. These old gals don’t play.

That Genie Won’t Go Back in the Bottle

No Telling

I’ve seen and heard an awful lot of hate lately, and it worries me. It should worry all of us.

John McCain made an attempt yesterday to quell a bit of that, but the attempt is late and doesn’t square with his campaign message. He’s between a rock and a . . . well, rock. One one hand he’s got to make Obama out to be the devil, and on the other – not devil enough to assassinate. Yes, that’s a strong word, but some folks out there are riled up and the Crowd is starting to sound like a Mob. Some people believe anything you tell them, and once they become suitably inflamed they don’t much like being told the devil’s not quite as bad as all that.

You don’t have to use a podium and a large hall to incite folks, either. I live next door to a sweet elderly woman who’s cornered me several times in the yard to discuss “that HUSSEIN Obama” while her nervous little dog pees in my grass. She’s convinced he’s a Muslim/terrorist/A-Rab/communist/Antichrist, and she’s genuinely afraid. Stirring up fear in people is one thing, but frightening old neighbor-ladies is an unforgivable sin. I try to avoid her on Wednesday nights after Bible Study and – of course – on Sunday evenings when her conspiracy fears seem to be most feverish. She’s never attended a political rally and probably never will, but that doesn’t stop her from knowing what she knows. She may watch FOX News, but she gets her real political information from the good people at church.

That, my friends, is a genie that can never go back into its bottle.

The Wednesday Night Bible Study group my neighbor-lady commiserates with will never cause a harm. To anyone. Ever. But there are those out there who who might. There are those out there who have, actually. Arkansas has its fair share of lunatics and I’m sure every other state can say the same.

It all goes back to my teaching mantra. I tell my students that in their essays and in life, the most important thing they will ever get right is to Know Their Audience. Words are powerful and require responsible wielding. I also tell my students that what they don’t say is just as important as what they do say. Just ask those folks up the road who were around when Faubus closed the schools. They’ll tell you all about the incendiary nature of irresponsible words and silences.

Working both sides of the aisle is going to be an even trickier business now, because McCain also has to work both sides of the pew as well. “Country First, “senator. Country. First.