Tag: planet jeanne (Page 3 of 7)

i’ve never liked numbers all that much, but this one seems rather important

January 8, 2013 / jeanne / 10 Comments

GrandTurks

i’m hardly ever sick, so i have no established relationship with any physician. this morning i find myself in need of antibiotics, so i go to the doc-in-a-box at a nearby drugstore. the soft tissue of my ear is inflamed, you see, infected. it happens every three or four years, i tell her. i just need some antibiotics and i’ll be fine.

i do not tell her how i fretted as i dressed this morning, washing my hands an extra two times, downing a glass of a supposed immune system booster, packing my purse with tissues, one of which i use to protect my hand from the pen i must use when signing in because i do not know who held it before me, what germs linger looking for a warm host with a vacancy sign. i worry more these days. what if i get sick and don’t bounce back as quickly? what if i don’t bounce back at all? what if i come in to be treated for one thing and leave with something entirely unrelated that does me in?

she listens to me, believes me, says she likes a woman who knows her body. unused to eye contact from a physician let alone such a notion as listening to the patient, i am instantly smitten with her. the computer doesn’t allow for this particular diagnosis. it’s unusual. not standard. she calls to obtain an override, and when she tells the physician on the other end of the phone my age, she says the numbers in the same tone she answers every other question asked of her. there’s no drama when she says my age, no shriek, no hushed embarrassed tone.

my daughter calls while i’m luxuriating in an infrequent middle-of-the-afternoon-i’m-sick-so-i-can-if-i-want-to nap. will she call her brother to warn him? will she and her brother be worried? surely they must wish for it on occasion, but do they ever wonder what it will be like to live without having me around? do they think of me as old and fear “losing me”? i am not so noble a person or good a mother as to not hope that these scenarios play out occasionally. i want to be missed.

i make a point to keep my hands away from my face. after reading the various flu posts on facebook, i wash my hands.

i have a milestone birthday this year, you see. on the one hand i look forward to it as a crown i may now wear, an outward symbol of what – power? freedom? space? behavioral entitlement? on the other hand, i am embarrassed by it.

[ ::: ]

my word for 2013 is “homage”. i didn’t invite it – i never do – it just appeared, hopping up on my shoulder where it remains to this day. it’s an unusual word that initially causes me more worry; it’s a word i now bump into rather frequently. the stanford university band spelled it out at some halftime show, for example, and i heard it in first episode of season three of downtown abbey the other night. just the other day i overheard someone of some import use “homage” in the course of a conversation, and she pronounced the “h” (“HOM-ij”) settling that score for me. i wish i could remember who that was. am i already losing my memory? it’s a milestone birthday, but isn’t it a little premature to lose my memory? why can’t i remember? this will keep me awake tonight.

age has never mattered to me. a dear woman i cherish and knew because she was my great aunt on my daddy’s side of my tree taught me to never, ever, ever, ever, ever state my age. there’s no need, she said, it will just bring you pain because once they know your age, people will treat you accordingly. if they don’t know your age, they’ll treat you the way you behave in their presence.

am i treating my age like i’ve treated my weight? i look at wedding photos and cry for the young woman who bought an empire waist wedding dress to hide the body she thought grossly overweight at 98 pounds.

[ ::: ]

my color of the year is “deep ground”. i like that. find it comforting for reasons i’m unable to explain. that’s another thing: i don’t seem to be able to explain things, not that i ever have – not to certain levels of more literally-minded satisfaction – and now i’m wondering how important it really is that i should explain myself succinctly and articulately (or would that be articulately) anyway.

being a lifelong caregiver of many and various interests, i’ve long been able to tell you what other people will think about something, to see something and thing oh, so-and-so would love this – that sort of thing. but me, focus? historically, it’s been an impossible task. lately, though, i’m able to pare down, and it’s surprisingly (and alarmingly, at times) easy. mostly i funnel down by recognizing what i do not like, and if i say it aloud, i often forget to tack on the apologetic qualifier that implies “but it’s okay if you do.”

[ ::: ]

i’ve not worn a watch for decades, and yet i feel each tick and at least every-other tock. is that why it’s so easy to make decisions about – to sort how to spend my time, who to carry-on with, who and what to surround myself by?

having been a student then a teacher then a mother of students then a student again, my calendar has long started in september and ended in august. now i’ve decided that beginning in 2013, my birthday will be my new year’s day. decisions like that come easily to me, and they feel Good and Right. i continue to make my list of things i want to do in this new year, in this milestone year, feeling like a kid in the candy store. i should think of places to go, i tell myself, but when i consider travel, i shove it aside because it takes me away from the things i want to create. i have SO much i want to create.

[ ::: ]

i think i should probably dread this birthday, skirt around it, shoo it under the proverbial rug given that it’s an undeniable fact that i have more life behind me than in front of me. i am, you might say, quite in touch with my own mortality. death is frequently with me these days, mostly by way of a deep desire – a commitment, really, a resolve – to die well by living well.

I Don’t Know if This Is Going To Make Any Sense at All

December 23, 2012 / jeanne / 5 Comments

Cicles2

It’s been years – eons, it seems – since I felt anything resembling Christmas spirit. Every year I make half-hearted attempts to try to figure out why, but I mostly just keet putting one foot in front of the other to get through, pasting on that smile and doing what I think will make everybody else happy. This year, though, I feel an ole’ familiar flutter, a stirring, a quickening that I vaguely recognize from many years ago. I pass a mirror and am surprised to see myself smiling. I play and dance and I even sing Christmas carols.

Yes, really.

I feel peace and I feel contentment, and I’ll take those two things over happiness any day of the week. On the way home from a glorious day spent in Asheville with my husband and our children and their friends, I think about that, pondering what’s the difference. Wondering what magic ingredient is here this year that’s been absent the past umpteen years. What’s different? Maybe it’s an age thing – there’s no doubt my clock is ticking – but I think it’s mostly something else.

This past year, you see, I kicked the shutters off my heart, opening up to the sorrow I’ve long been trying to outrun or shove aside or leave on the side of the road. I sat with the sorrow. I went to bed with it and I woke up with it; I spoke to it and I listened to it. I stitched it and wrote it and invited it to tea. I grieved, and I grieved long. And hard. And deeply. It was a generalized grief and a broad grief, a mourning for those lost, for time wasted, for loss of my space, both physical and personal. I missed my daddy, my Aunt Rene, and my children, Alison and Kipp. There was a deep well of unspent grief for me to draw from, and though I did keep functioning (on most days, anyway), I didn’t rush my way through it, and you know . . . I think it’s that opening to sorrow that has made all the difference.

Oh don’t get me wrong, sorrow is still with me, quietly accompanying me, popping up when I hear Silent Night (the song we sang as we exited Daddy’s funeral) and when I realize that I’ve lived over half the Christmases I will ever know. Tears are precariously near the surface as I hear my children poking and kidding each other and laughing with their friends; when they stop what they’re doing and walk over to give me an unsolicited hug; when they ask to do something the way we’ve always done it. I think about how they are young adults living their own independent lives now, and I’m touched by their willingness to leave some of the burdens of adulthood at the door and come into the world of being a child again. I see them looking at me through different eyes, and I imagine them being impressed even if just a wee little bit to now see their mother as an independent woman who devoted a big chunk of her life to them and did so willingly and lovingly. Their dad comes over in the midst of the delightful hubbub to kiss me, and we linger in the embrace, knowing that we brought these two amazing people into the world. Satisfaction. It wasn’t always easy, and it still isn’t, but we did good. There’s a sorrow there, and there’s a gladness there. Both.

I can’t explain it, and maybe I don’t need to. Maybe it’s enough just to enjoy and appreciate the peace and contentment that swaddles me. Maybe there doesn’t need to be a reason, and maybe I couldn’t articulate it even if I knew perfectly well what it is that caused the shift. But my bones say it has something to do with opening the shutters to sorrow, that somehow in opening to grief, I also opened to peace. That in giving space to the sorrow, I laid down the notion that I’m somehow defective or broken or less than because I feel sorrow.

However it happened, I feel Whole and Genuine and more Right than I’ve felt in an awfully long time.

Grief Doesn’t Wear a Watch

December 2, 2012 / jeanne / 20 Comments

JeanneDad 1

We walked into the hotel lobby last night to find it all decked out in its Christmas finery. As we walked past the brightly-lit tree on our way to the elevator, I felt something I’ve not felt in I don’t know how long – Christmas spirit. It’s been twelve years since my daddy died – his side of the family is bad to die during the holidays, and that’s why what little decorating I do now, I do it outside so I can see it, but only from afar.

This past year, I’ve allowed myself to grieve for Daddy and others, to grieve things that I cannot attach a noun to. Instead of trying to outrun the grief, instead of brushing it aside or turning away from it, I sat with it. I went to bed with it. To paraphrase Naomi Shihab Nye, I spoke to it till my voice caught the threads and I could see how big the cloth is. I’m not done yet, and I miss him now just as much today as I have every day of every year since.

HoldingBabyJeanne1

That’s me there in Daddy’s arms – I’m the one wriggling my way out of his lap.
Oh what I wouldn’t give for a do-over right about now.

I talk to him, you know. Write him letters, cry on his shoulder, try my best to remember the way it felt to have his arms wrapped around me. Sometimes he would hug me so hard, he’d bite his lower lip from the effort. With Daddy’s arms around me, I could be both vulnerable and invincible, knowing I was loved and protected and supported. I like to think he still does that – still loves me, protects me, supports me, though I try not to pester him with requests for assistance too much because it’s clear from the dreams I’ve had that he is quite content in his new life.

I know you pretty much read only train magazines, Daddy, but if you happen to look over my shoulder and catch my blog, know this: you still own real estate on my heart. And that hole in my heart? It’s packed with stories and smiles and love like you wouldn’t believe.

What’s On My Platter Today

November 22, 2012 / jeanne / 14 Comments

Waves2

I don’t mean to sound prissy or anything, but when you make gratitude an inherent part of your life, it’s almost hard to make a list of what you’re grateful for on this day that comes around once a year bearing the word “thanks.” I started writing, saying, living expressed gratitude several years ago – maybe initially from a tinge of conditioned guilt (“Think about those poor starving children in China” and “Who do you think you are, Missy?” – that kind of thing), then after a while the conditioning fell away and goodness took its place, and next thing I knew, I’m just sending thank you notes and not even remembering that I did. Oh, I remember the people and the acts and attributes I’m grateful for, I just don’t always remember sending the actual note. And I’m not sure how to take that, but I don’t fret so much about it any more, trusting that it’s enough knowing I send the notes from a sincere place of deep thanking and let it go without any strings.

[ :: ]

I miss my son today. Which is not to say that I’m not absolutely delighted to be with my husband, daughter, and mother – it’s not as simple as the glass being half-full or half-empty – it’s only to say that I miss my son. We’ve come to that point in our lives when I see him about once a year on every-other big holiday. Me, the Penultimate Queen of Preparedness, the only fourth grader in town to have built a full-equipped bomb shelter for her family . . . I never prepared for this. It’s not the turkey we eat, you understand, it’s the turkey in the stories we share that Kipp and I love about Thanksgiving. I miss him, and my brain can hiss all sorts of words at me about being unattached and letting go and how he’s not really my son, and in response I say simply I’ve never aspired to be Enlightened.

I miss my daddy, too. The last Thanksgiving we “had him” as we say around here, he was a bit removed from the hilarity, and I sensed on that day that he might be leaving us.

I miss my nephew, TJ, too, and his artful eye and surprising insightfulness. He usually travels with us, but he’s a college freshman now, and exams loom large so he can’t take the time away from study hall.

And I miss my dog Phoebe. She’s still alive, thank goodness, but I am not with her, and I miss those soulful eyes that peer deep into my soul and end every one one of those conversations-without-words with an unspoken “I love you anyway.”

[ :: ]

We’ve been hearing a lot of Christmas carols the past couple of days, and a few of them can pep me up, but most of them tap into my deep sorrow, and I don’t really know why, but this whole season is rather sad to me. (Sometimes I sense it has to do with what amounts to Great Big Lies we’re told before our critical thinking skills have taken hold.) (And when I say “lies” I’m not just talking about Santa, it’s bigger than that – like how if we’re good, we’ll get what we want and how happy is the only game in town – those kinds of lies.) Oh, if we happen to be together during this time of year, I won’t burden you with my sorrow – that’s what my journal is for – but it’s there, and this year I will not wag a finger at myself, spouting all the scoldings about how it’s the happ-happiest time of the year, the most wonderful season of all, and all that. Just so you know: I do wish I could be the posterchild for happiness and gaiety – I really do – because it makes it so much easier for everybody else, but it’s just time to lay down some of those I-do-this-for-you obligatory burdeny kinds of things.

I don’t know about what I just wrote. Seems I need a wee little bit of clarity here . . . I am not morose, not moping my way through the day with a sad face that begs folks to tell me to turn upside down. I simply choose to not muster the energy it takes to cover the sadness. I am sad AND I am not sad. All at once, all in the space of a day. On any given moment of any given day, I am polarities. Now I’ve muddied it more than ever, I suppose.

Well, Pfffft. I think I’ll go laugh and love that incredibly patient and loving husband of mine, who travels with three generations of Hewell women, never uttering the first complaint (I guess he carries that around in the same pocket I carry my sorrow in); with my Mother, who I’m enjoying like never before (perhaps because we’re both being honest like never before?); and my daughter, who is so much fun (we pretty much wrote a play on the way down last Tuesday, and laughed – oh my goodness, how we have laughed). I will go sit and let the unending sound, the unimaginable enormity, and the undemanding horizon of the ocean wrap itself around me. I’ll ask the waves to help me roll this into something presentable, then we’ll go fetch Nancy and take her for an early Thanksgiving dinner, and all along the way, I’ll honor and love and be grateful for those I love from afar as well as those I love from a chair away.

wondering

November 13, 2012 / jeanne / 11 Comments

Story

i continue to remember and explore and plan and imagine and sometimes I stomp my feet or swat the air with a loud “Pfffft.” Other times I weep and wail, my body wracking from the release and recognition and realization. Angela and I talk about what we want engraved on our tombstones and simultaneously decide we do not want our legacy to be “She helped a lot of people.”

That shocks both of us. We’re Good Girls From The South. We know better than to say such a thing. We know we were bred to help others. We know there’s no higher calling, no better way to spend a life. We know we ought to be ashamed. We know we just told The Truth.

I wonder who I might have been and how might life might have been different had I thumbed my cute little nose to all the things I’m not supposed to do:

Be attached
Care who gets the credit
Talk about my self
Talk about others
Wear glasses
Get too big for my britches
Draw attention to myself
Be sad
Start an argument
Continue an argument
Carry a grudge
Wrestle with pigs
Talk back
Regret
Cry over spilt milk
Fly over the cuckoo’s nest
Speak up
Speed
Dawdle
Take up too much space
Take more than my fair share
Make too much of it
Be any trouble

I wonder if it’s too late for nose-thumbing.
It feels so good, I wonder why I haven’t done it before.

I wonder if I’m done enough nose-thumbing for now.

This is one time it probably doesn’t matter if I told the truth or not. I start to explain what I mean, even though I’m not really sure. Maybe some explanation – any explanation – will lessen the impact of my words.

I wonder who or what will smite me for saying I don’t want to help people.

There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology,the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making.

Help us walk through this. Help us come through.

Help.
It is the first great prayer.

Anne Lamott

Maybe it’s not that I no longer want to help people, maybe it’s that I don’t want to devote my life to helping other people and when I do set aside some of my life to give to others, I will help them in a different way because maybe – just maybe – the way I’ve been helping hasn’t really been helping at all.

Maybe I need to help myself first. Maybe that is the best – perhaps the only – way to help anybody anyway.

that woman is me

November 5, 2012 / jeanne / 20 Comments

You know, years ago I drove down a two-lane country road and as I looked at the clapboard look-alike houses all lined up one beside the other in what looked for all the world like a cow pasture, with short, straight driveways connecting each house to the road leading out of town, I said “I want to go knock on the front door of each of those houses and ask the woman who answers, ‘Did your life turn out the way you wanted it to? If not, what are you going to do about it?'” Today I stand before you as that woman. And as that woman, too. I am the woman knocking, and I am the woman answering. I am the woman on both sides of the door.

It’s not my biological clock I hear ticking – at least not THAT biological clock, but the biological clock that leads tick by tock to my demise. To the end of this life as I know it. Has my life turned out the way I’d hoped it would? Well, let me answer this way: there are things I’d like to be different about my life, and if I’ve learned anything in all these decades, it’s that if I want things to be different, I am the go-to girl to make it happen.

Let’s start with the things I like about my life, the things that just need regular expressed appreciation . . .

My husband, my daughter, my son, my dog. They stay. Period. (Though I am taking my maiden name back.) (I kinda’ wanted to keep it all along cause it’s always wrinkled me being treated like I’m some object, some knapsack to be flung from one family to another.) (But you’re right: that’s another post entirely.)

And I love living here on the waterfall, so I’m not moving. Well, not like that anyway. See one thing in the Dissatisfaction Column is my size, my weight. And I could go on a gluten-free diet, I could purge my plate of everything I love to eat, but the thing is: I’m a picky, picky, picky eater, and I adore Southern food. And if the clock is ticking, I see no reason to make myself miserable. Maybe when I start moving more I’ll feel so much better that I’ll want to do something drastic and so thoroughly unlike me, but to start, I’ll just take more walks and count the days till January when the new community fitness center opens in town.

Besides that, I want . . .

to unshackle my tongue so I never have to feel validated (or annoyed) by seeing other people say what I wanted to say but was too afraid to.
to retire the parade of qualifiers and disclaimers I usually tack onto every sentence and to be bold enough to stop you if you start that nonsense.
to be the kind of person you can feel comfortable and safe with.
to turn the tear ducts loose.
to create with abandon and glee.
to forego the practice of apologizing for myself.
to get reacquainted with the earth, maybe sometimes through my bare feet.
to unlearn worrying about whether you’ll like me or not.
to forget how to justify and explain everything I think, feel, and do.
to regain personal space, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
to get by with less stuff and more space.
to laugh and enkindle laughter.
to live poetically.
to make everybody I come in contact with, including the woman in the mirror, feel like the rare and special and extraordinary person they . . . we . . . are.

Or, as I said to my friend Angela just a few days ago: I want to fling-it from the f##k-it line.

How’s that for starters?

s . . . s . . . s

October 21, 2012 / jeanne / 3 Comments

Mountains

Sunsetca

i’ve been many places
in the past several weeks,

traveling for many reasons,
all reasons involving other people.

Beach1

some folks are quick to divide people
into two groups:
those who like people
and those who don’t like people.
i continue to bump up against
that categorization,
but i no longer spend time and energy
trying to explain that i, too, like people
just in different doses.
defending and explaining is time and energy better devoted
to what my soul must have
as nourishment:
space,
silence,
solitude.

Solitude

Looking Back Over the Day (and Beyond)

October 6, 2012 / jeanne / 0 Comments

Insidetent2

Despite the cold and rain that we didn’t plan on (or pack for), it was another especially fine day at the storytelling festival, a day that kicked off with a car pulling into the parking space next to us and the driver calling out “Hey, didn’t we park next to y’all yesterday?” I wasn’t sure till I saw how long it took the woman in the backseat to get out, and then I knew yes, yes they did park next to us yesterday – how’s that for a needle-in-the-haystack moment?

108collage1

It was also a stellar day for found objects, as you can see here and read about here.

Retrolinoleum

The Buddhists say we’re supposed to stay in the present and the Baptists keep us focusing on the future, but to tell you the truth, my natural leaning is towards times past, and today it wasn’t just the storytellers that carried me back in time . . . Who can forget this linoleum pattern from days gone by? We didn’t have it on our kitchen floor, but every one of my friends did.

Sons1

Not only were these fellas a lot of fun to cut up with, but they offered to help me nudge my son into joining the Sons of the Confederacy. Now seems as fine a time as any to tell you that I belong to the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy), the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), and the Colonial Dames XVII . . . AND . . . I’m working on my papers to join other lineage societies cause while I may not approve of everything that was done in the past, I’m proud to be a Southerner, and I’m proud to be an American. Even though it’s not politically correct. Which is probably why I”m coming clean here ’cause yesterday a woman sat down next to me, and at one point in our brief little chitchat, she said “You are politically correct,” and I was insulted. Insulted, I tell you. I’m just tired of covering up who I am at my deep, essential core to keep other people feeling all comfortable. What I’m saying is: I guess I felt insulted ’cause I realized she was telling the truth. Doesn’t mean I won’t continue to be polite, but political correctness is a whole different thing that leaps right on into dangerous territory, if you ask me.

So there.

Glad we got that cleared up.

Chopperhopper

My granddaddy used to take his dentures out every night and put them on the sideboard in a saucer of water. Right up there with other important and often-used things. Grossed me out and scared me more than once when I happened upon those teeth. So one year I saved my money to order him a ceramic AND LIDDED chopper hopper that I spied in one of Mother’s catalogues. It was just like this one I saw in an antique store on Main Street today, except I splurged, spent an extra 10-cents, and had “William’s Chopper Hopper” printed on the front of the one I ordered. Nothing but the best for my Granddaddy.

Tractor

Don’t you wish this beauty could talk? Don’t you know she has some stories to tell? Oh my goodness gracious, if tractors could talk . . .

And now I’m going to tuck my cold, damp feet under the cover, (pretend to) watch a football game with my husband, and stitch a bit.

stories, stories, everywhere and not a need for drink

October 5, 2012 / jeanne / 2 Comments

Tentop1

Their father was strict – oh my goodness gracious, he was strict. He worked in a garage, and that’s probably why he wouldn’t let them wear shorts outside the house. Fortunately for the older sister, you could set a clock by her father, so in the summer she could lay out in the sun in her swimsuit and still make it inside, change, and be presentable and ready for supper when her daddy got home. They had an aunt named Mary (but everybody called her Aunt Mert cause they all had nicknames. Their Uncle Howard was called Paps. See, I told you: everybody had nicknames.) Aunt Mert was a mess. I mean that woman was a mischief maker. Once, when she was a teenager, Mert’s mother and grandmother dropped her off at church, and as soon as their car rounded the corner, Aunt Mert hopped in her friend’s car and off they went. But tragedy struck: the car wrecked. Flipped over, I’m telling you, and without even slowing down to check on anybody, Aunt Mert scooted on back up to the house where she was when her Mother and Grandmother got in from church. “Goodness gracious,” the grandmother said, “such a wreck you’ve never seen. Those poor young people flipped their new car. What a mess they left all over the road.” “Well, I hope none of them got hurt too bad,” Aunt Mert said. And I want you to know that the mother and grandmother never found out Mert was a passenger in that car.

Door1

Her first house cost $1600. Didn’t have an indoor bathroom, so they saved their money and took up part of the kitchen to build a bathroom. It was her mother’s idea. Her mother was real stupid until this woman got married, then her mother turned smart again.

Clock1

They came down umpteen years ago – 27 or 28 as they recollect – with a couple who they were friends with at that time. The couple moved from Connecticut to Charlotte, NC. After settling into their new home in Charlotte, the friends called one day. “Y’all want to come down and go to the storytelling festival with us?” The husband thought that was the most ridiculous thing he ever heard, so they declined. The next year, the friends called again: “Y’all want to go with us to the storytelling festival?” and this time the couple couldn’t think of a good excuse, so down they trotted from Connecticut to Charlotte where they loaded into one car and came over to the festival. That was either 27 or 28 years ago. Neither one can really remember. (This year the Charlotte couple is in Croatia and are appalled that the folks from Connecticut came to the storytelling festival without them.)

Corn

“Can you hear from back here?” she asked as she sat down next to me. “If they’ll be quiet,” I said, nodding to the two men sitting behind us. “If they make too much noise, we’ll just slap ’em,” a solution that seemed to tickle her. Turns out she’s the wife and grandmother of the men sitting behind us, so you might say that we hit it off right from the start. Her husband is named Brick, named after his Uncle Brick who grew up in Mississippi, two houses down from Tennessee Williams. By all accounts, Tennessee Williams was rather effeminate, and it doesn’t take a great store of imagination to know that made Tennessee a likely target for a fella named Brick. But then Tennessee grew up and wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With a character named and modeled after, you guessed it: Brick. That very childhood nemesis.

Steeple

Musicians accompany themselves and sing on the sidewalks. Streets are closed. Schools declare today a holiday and rent out their lots and buses. Churches open their doors and sell you soup, sandwich, desserts, beverage, cornbread, and crackers – all you can eat – for $7/person. For three full (and I do mean FULL) days, stories are told under big tents set up all over Jonesborough, Tennessee. The air is filled with stories, and not all of ’em are told on stage . . .

Pumpkin2