With my childhood spent during WW2 and my adolescence during the Cold War of the 1950s, living with The Bomb when people took it seriously, I was programmed to expect that the end was, in fact, coming.

Front porch of house looking from NE, with side of store to the right.

Good question! My father died in December 1987 and my mother in January 1988, leaving to my sister and me a 4-bedroom house in good condition, an acre of yard, and 3 acres of wooded pasture with the 4 goats, Daisy, Buttercup, Ageratum, and Ivy. My sister lived and worked in Tuscaloosa, I in New York. What to do?

(At the end of this post, the goats get a slideshow!)

I just noticed that my first spider lily has poked up out of the ground. Seems to me they are late this year. Sometimes they are called hurricane lilies because they tend to pop up after the first fall hurricane. But maybe it's not the rains by themselves but the dry spell before, and we really didn't have much of a dry spell until the last couple of weeks before our light, slow showers of the last few days.

Yesterday my sister Betty from Tuscaloosa, my Cousin Melinda from Montgomery, and I met at the May Farm west of Sawyerville with our Cousin Billy, and after greetings and gossip we drove into Greensboro for lunch at the Pie Lab (if you haven't  read about it, check it out!), joined there by Billy's wife Terri and Melinda's nephew Warren. The menu is small but changes daily. Yesterday on offer were their usual salad plate (you chose 3 out of 5 or 6 items), a selection of sandwiches (gyro and BLT were available, with fruit salad on the side), and cheeseburger casserole with side salad. Terri and I had that, and it was just what you might expect and delicious. Even had slices of dill pickle baked it it! And yes, I broke down and had a slice of pie, having great difficulty choosing between grasshopper and caramel and ultimately could not resist the latter. (I could have had lemon or peanut butter, but I'd had  those two lately.) The chef/managers, Seaborn and Kelley Whatley (Seaborn is the son of one of my best friends in Alabama), are both great cooks, and one of these days I may share with you the (well, just the description of) wonderful southern Italian meal they prepared at the Pie Lab earlier in the summer for a special party of 35.
     After lunch Billy drove us out to the serious boondocks (that is when even the dirt roads have petered out and you are driving on old logging roads and there are no more power lines in sight) so that he could eyeball some hunting lands recently acquired by an assortment of other May cousins who want to lease out hunting rights on the land. In our zigzag journey several times we crossed the path of the Hale County Tornado of April 2011 (same day as but not to be confused with the one that devastated much of Tuscaloosa and the rest of the state. Ours did manage to kill 6 people in the county, and had it not been for the greater loss of life elsewhere Hale County would have been in the national news). It is still startling to see that wide path of destruction that started, I believe, down near the Black Warrior River several miles southwest of Sawyerville, passed through Sawyerville a third of a mile west of where I live, and moved northeasterly through the entire county.
     Before ending up back at the May Farm our final major stop was at the old country cemetery (no, not Hollow Square. Another one) where Betty's and my great-grandfather and -mother, one more great for Billy and Melinda, are buried. It was Melinda's first visit there.
     Family and food. Anybody who knows me will not be unduly surprised at these topics for my first blog post. Of course, it could just have easily been books or movies, and I'm sure they will start appearing before long.