A City Kid went to visit his uncle living in a cabin in the mountains.
On the first supper they had together, the kid remarked on how greasy the dinnerware (plates) was. The Uncle’s reply was simple, “That’s as good as Cold Water can get them”.
They ate, and the uncle then told the kid he’d show him some of the local trails on the mountain, as they were leaving the cabin the uncle’s old Blue-Tick Hound was laying across the doorway. The uncle stabbed at him with his cane to get him to move, and hollered “Out of the way Cold Water’.
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The story above was told to me by a friend who grew up in a cabin in Kentucky. He lives very remote in a treehouse/groundhouse built into a series of trees in California, far from the power lines of civilization.
Again the dichotomy of civilization comes to mind, how different we all can be while concurrently ‘the same’.
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My father grew up on a small farm in the Ozarks in Missouri, he went to Europe after W.W.II with the military where he met my mother. The first time she invited him to her home for a home cooked meal, she cooked chicken soup. He stepped into the door smelling that delicious familiar smell of home cooked chicken soup (a welcome reprieve from the Mess Hall), but when she went to the pot and pulled the chicken out with it’s feet and head still on, he thought that was kinda odd. But in Europe in the old days, people ate the entire animal, head and feet too.
Then years later Dad took Mom to visit his uncle living on a lake in the Ozarks. She’d imagined a large house, rich Americans, maybe a speedboat and bridge. But instead my Dad drove his car up a long rutted dirt road, they pulled up to a small dock, honked the horn a few times, and flashed the lights in a certain sequence. A few minutes later they could hear the ‘swish-swish’ of oars slipping into the water, and out of the misty darkness came the apparition of an older man bending his back to the oars. Stepping into the small boat, she had difficulty on the rounded boat bottom walking with her heels which she had worn to impress the Americans (she was conscious of her post-war peasant upbringing, and still imagined all Americans lived lives of luxury and high fashion). Dad’s uncle and aunt lived in a cabin all alone on this little island with no power, it sounds very primitive. But they had the delicious smell of cooking wafting from the dirt-poor cabin. Dad’s aunt was eager to show off her cooking, but when she opened the wood-burner stove to show my mom the meal, my mom screamed, she thought it was a rat, but it turned out to be a Possum.
We are all very different, but we are all the same in some ways. The trick I guess is to find your own niche where you can move along in comfort and ease with your surroundings. I suppose some people have different tolerances for change or different circumstances. To be able to change with the times and situations is a very advantageous trait. If any animal remains static, it will die out, either on an individual or a species basis. This is true whether it be a species, a people, or a business. ‘Change and adapt or die’ is the watchword of evolution. It has been said many times, ‘The only thing that stays the same is change’. Be resilient, be aware, observe what happens; compare it to history to determine what the future might bring. Don’t be rigid and unchanging, it is the rigid tree that breaks in the storm.
Chapter 76