the new kid

Epworth Elementary 1964

Ms. Brackett was the teacher's name. She was young and blonde and soft spoken. She was my new 5th grade teacher. She was very gracious on that November day, the Monday after Thanksgiving, when I made my entrance, coming in late and interrupting her class. You see after moving from Alabama to Georgia over the holiday weekend, come Monday morning we had to find the school. The best way to do this was to follow the big yellow school bus which flew by our mailbox. After watching the red flashing lights at umpteen stops, and one scary turn-around on a steep hillside, it did eventually take us there. So I arrived at my new school late, and was nervous to say the least.

But that turned out to be one of the best days of my life to date. Ms. Brackett was so friendly and welcoming. She stood at the door for a long time talking to my mom while all the 5th graders gathered around me. They were genuinely excited to see me. I discovered later that a new kid in school was rare, and I was the new kid for several years. And wow were these kids friendly! Where did you come from? What, all the way from Alabama? The world traveler Army brat that I was, thought, it is only the next state over, practically neighbors.

I made great friends that day. Recess was a hoot, girls with long ropes were doing Double Dutch - a first for me to see and not try. But lunch was the best. Having eaten school cafeteria foods for several years I was very pleasantly surprised. No more mystery meat or right out-of-the-can veggies, no more white loaf bread plopped down on top. This was real home cooking, actual food that your mom might make, and giant fluffy yeast rolls, hand-made that morning...or maybe it was homemade biscuits, or cornbread, I can't think straight for drooling. Oh my I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I can still taste it all...

Yes, this move was a good thing, the teacher is angelic, the kids are so friendly, and the food, oh my…  

summer of '64

It was the summer of '64 and there was nothing on TV but the Republican National Convention. Some old white-haired man with big black glasses wanted to be president. I just wanted to watch anything but that. We would get up and change the channel, click, click, it's either hiss and snow or this.

I was 10 years old and this was not the first political experience that I remember, that came 8 months earlier when JFK was shot and we (as a nation) mourned together as we watched the events of that week on our collective black and white sets. But the young fresh-faced president was gone, we will miss him. The office of president was an old man's game once again.

It was the summer of '64, normally we wouldn't care what was on TV, but there was nothing else to do as we were stuck in a small room in the Lake View Motel near Blue Ridge, Georgia. It was the first time we had ever been in a motel as a family (that I remember), usually if we traveled at all it was because we were moving, or to visit relatives. It was our first trip to the north Georgia area and the first mountain we saw out the windshield was Fort Mountain. Our big blue Chevy station wagon that took us to Panama City Beach so often was now climbing mountains. We went up and over the top of that mountain, it was like a roller coaster! My mom, the navigator, had chosen the route on a map, from the south up highway 411 to Chatsworth, then right on highway 52 to Ellijay, then north to Blue Ridge. But maps are deceptively flat as a rule.

This trip was not a vacation or even for pleasure, but really any trip is fun. We were in pursuit of LAND, that God-given right, the American Dream to own a piece of land, and a house would be nice, too.

It was the summer of '64 and my dad had decided that it was a good time to retire from his vocation in the US Army after 24 years and 2 wars, with a third one calling him, it was definitely time.

After moving over 20 times in as many years, the decision to settle down was a big one. The decision as to where was easy also, both parents being from Georgia with extended family still there, most down south of Atlanta. The other part was the mountains. The mountains were not a weekend destination like they are now but a place to live and work and raise a family, and a place that doctors had sent my mom to for years whenever she had a bad asthma attack.

It was the summer of '64 and we had driven all the way from south Alabama to north Georgia, looking for mountain land. We met up with the realtor, an hour late for our appointment because of the Fort Mountain adventure.

We saw several places that day, I remember long rides on dusty dirt roads, curves and hills and creeks, blackberry bushes hanging on the roadside banks, and lots of trees. My mother's dream (and instructions to the realtor) was to have 50 acres with a house in the middle so she could look out her window in any direction and not see another soul or house. And that is pretty much what we got. The 50 acres were beautiful - a creek running through it with bottomland, garden spot, pasture land, a couple of mountains to climb, wild huckleberries, blackberries, plum trees. An old building hung on one hillside that my dad promptly claimed as his workshop.

And there was a house. The folks living there were selling out, excited to be moving to town. The house was small. There was running water into the kitchen, running gravity from a spring up the hill. It was nice cold water and tasted good as only mountain spring water can. We would later learn that water had to be heated on the stove to pour into the clawfoot tub sitting next to the kitchen sink for bath night, and that going to the bathroom would be an adventure involving a hike up the hill.

It was the summer of '64 and the only thing on TV was the RNC and we were in search of land. Why would our parents want to live in a place where there was only one TV channel and on it was politics. We bought that land and house, and moved north from south Alabama that fall.

It was the summer of '64 when I got promoted from Army brat to mountain girl, the year I came home. It was a good year, 1964.

These distant memories that were plucked from my addled brain were triggered by the RNC on TV this week, where an old man wants to be president. The young fresh-faced president is on his way out, we will miss him. The office of president is an old man's game once again. Thankfully we get more than one channel here in the mountains now, where is the remote… click, click

Southern storytellers

The joys of this Southern life, we polish like old silver. We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out like dinner on the ground. ~Rick Bragg in My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South.

Rick Bragg paints a down home picture with a voice as smooth and warm as butter dripping out of a biscuit. That is when reading his written words, but when listening to his audio version, wow it is like y'all are sitting side by side on the porch in a hot summer breeze sipping sweet iced tea.

I recently discovered Mr. Bragg and his stories and have been smiling ever since. He tells about small town Alabama and other parts of the South. He defines piddlin' and loaferin' in case you don't know, and he talks about Alabama football. A lot. Roll Tide.

I also stumbled upon another Southern storyteller in the last few weeks, Sean Dietrich, On his website/blog, Sean of the South, he tells stories that are short and sweet and powerful. You can sign up to get a story in your email box every morning, or buy one of his books overflowing with Southern goodness, just enough for a quick morning e-mail at work or a long setting spell on the porch. And they get you right here (hand over heart). Every time. And they make you smile. Every time.

Sometimes grandpa Buddy will do that, pull a story out of his fading memory and tell it to the kids and grandkids, they sit around and watch him in awe, wondering why they haven't heard that one before. Like the other day when he told the one about the ashcan and the hole in the living room carpet, and the one about building a boat, and the one about building a dune buggy. He even told Madison and her boyfriend the one about jumping out off the second story balcony because, well he was where he shouldn't a been, because of a girl (before my time). So many stories.

Southerners will never run out of stories, unlike the Yankees, because, well like Mr. Bragg says:

I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something. ~Rick Bragg

selling like hotcakes

Growing up we made most of our own clothes. In our small town, the local fabric shop had everything we needed, because if it wasn't there we didn't know about it, therefore didn't need it, and there was nowhere else to go.

There were bolts of fabrics for making clothes, polyester that wouldn't wrinkle, corduroy, denim, wool, double knit in bright colors and patterns, after all it was the late 60s and like they said - anything goes. Oh and those giant pattern books!

There were no quilt shops back then, quilts were something our grandmothers had made, old fashioned frayed things made in hard times when there weren't so many pretty fabrics like now.

The little fabric stores tried to stay in business, but competition with the big box fabric stores and cheap store-bought clothes pushed many of them out.

Then in the 80s quilt shops started popping up here and there, selling pretty cotton fabrics for making quilts. People young and old wanted to revive quilt making, learn the skills of their ancestors that had been all but lost.

Around that time I was out of college and looking for a job, I ended up working for a fabric manufacturer. I was the only girl on the sales team, and got the worst route to travel, a few dying fabric stores and a couple of new quilt stores, traveling winding roads through rural Americana.

The fabric company would mail out swatches of their new line, all different colors and patterns, encouraging the fabric stores to order bolts and bolts to sell. It was my job to follow up the mail-out and stop by the stores to take orders. I would ply them with our free stuff like yardsticks and tape measures. The complaint was always the same, the swatches were too small to tell anything about the fabric.

One day I went back to the factory and out to the floor where the fabric was being made and convinced the foreman to give me the ends they cut off the giant rolls. I made up a sample sales kit of 5" squares of the latest fabric line to take back to the stores. The store owners loved them!  They wanted to keep the sample pack of squares to look over. So I made up more kits and gave one to each of my stores. Orders came flying in for the new fabrics. On my next round of visits I was surprised to see that some of the shop owners had used the 5" squares to make a sample quilt to display, which sold even more fabric. I was at top of the sales board in the break room!

I got to know a lot of nice folks in those little shops. The shop owners would show me what they were working on, told me how they loved the little sample kits because they didn't have to cut the squares, and that they were all coordinating colors and patterns, making it easy to put together in a quilt, and when could I bring more, different colors?

Being on the road that much, you get to know all the good places to eat. Small town diners are the best. After my last stop, I sat at the diner counter eating a piece of pie, thinking about what I had just learned…

So the ladies like these pre-cut fabric pieces, interesting. I thought a lot about this and then convinced the boss to cut up some of the beautiful bolts of fabric and package them into 5" square kits - and they sold like hotcakes!  Yes, just like yummy hotcakes... we should name the fabric square kits something delicious and irresistible like cookies or tarts. Light bulb moment. The ideas then started pouring in like glaze on a hot donut. Why don't we make different sizes of pre-cut fabrics and name them after something yummy, like say cakes and pies and donuts! 

Of course this story is fiction, but the Moda company has gone and done just that, with other fabric companies following suit. You can get Layer Cakes, Jelly Rolls, Honey Buns, and Turnovers at the Moda Bake Shop or your favorite fabric store!

Layer Cake - 40 pieces in 10" x 10" cuts

Jelly Roll - 40 strips 2-1/2" x 44"

Honey Bun - 40 strips 1-1/2" x 44

Turnovers - 80 pieces in 6" triangle cuts

PRECUT fabrics, what marketing genius! There are so many ways to buy fabric now, bundled up into little packages, all matching and cute and with such delicious names. It's no wonder I get so hungry when shopping for fabric online. But they also have the FAT eighths and FAT quarters which is what I will be if I eat all of these yummy treats. Oh wait, these delicious fabric portions are calorie free!


Jelly Roll®, Layer Cake®, Honey Bun® and Turnover® are registered trademarks of Moda Fabrics/United Notions. ©2009-2014 Moda Bake Shop