Marion Wilson would not let a troop train pass through her town without being on hand to greet the soldiers, and on a cold Christmas Eve she brought most of the town with her.
Category: Edward Southerland
Things I Learned at the Movies
– The odds of a successful, long-term romantic relationship increase by the square of the level of initial hostility between the two parties involved.- Once you think you have killed a monster, you would best be advised to do it again; otherwise it will come back to life.
Stormy Weather
Every region of the country seems to take a perverse pride in its own brand of nasty weather. “If you don’t like the weather in (Texas, Georgia, Maine, Wyoming—you fill in the blank) just come back tomorrow.” People love to boast of their triumph over adversity. “Why, it was so cold, the firemen just turned on the hose and then shinnied down the icicle that was formed.” It also is axiomatic that however bad it is now, it was worse back when. “Hot? Why back in the summer of (insert preferred year here), it was so hot that folks were baking cakes on the screened-in porch.”
The Simple Life
Toddling off to bed was an important part of the simple life, as one usually got up before dawn to start a fire and haul water from the crick for the morning latte. Bed is also important for filling the otherwise endless space between dusk and dawn when nothing much is going on anyway, and you couldn’t see it if it was, what with burning brands not giving off all that much illumination.
Let Them Eat Cake
While Marie Antoinette gets credit for the “Let them eat cake” line, it is doubtful that she ever said it. And if she did say it, it is doubtful that she was referring to what we call cake. (That “she didn’t, but if she did” construction is called pleading in the alternative for you fans of arcane legal practices.) But I digress.
If Men Gave Baby Showers
If you have ever shared an office workspace with women of childbearing age, you will no doubt be familiar with the office baby shower. This is not a suddenly put together affair, but one that occupies hours of planning and coordination on the part of the shower givers.
The Prairie
There’s something ’bout the prairie as it stretches to the sky
With the tall grass swaying easy in the wind
With the clouds a-headed somewhere out beyond the great divide
On their way to distant places you’ve not been.
Waxing Poetic
Literary Lions
Eustis McGurk was a meek little clerk who worked in a local bookstore. When the circus came round to Eustis’s town he decided his life was a bore.
Lions and Tigers and Bears
I bought a book off the discount rack at a local bookstore not long ago entitled Quintessence: The Quality of Having IT. On the jacket fly, the author explained the book’s purpose. “This a book about the objects of this world that transcend their form and function, that offer more to us than we ask of them—that rise above themselves to assume iconic stature.”
Pru
As you can plainly see
I’m from off the lone prairie,
Got a ranch out there; I call it “Mornin’ Dew.”
But the cowboy life was lonely
Til I found my one and only,
A red-haired widder gal, the name a’ Pru.