Fire ants are in the news this week. Apparently they are really mean and will turn on each other. Hmmm. Does that sound like politicians, too?
This got me on a trail to hunt down a column I thought I wrote on fire ants and how to do them in. But, it did lead me to this one from 2013.
One of my favorite humorists is David Sedaris who commented once that his family prefaced everything by warning it wasn’t for publication. My family does that sometimes and I now find I must sometimes rely on things I find as inspiration for the next 500 words I have to round up for this space.
I find all sorts of things. Sometimes they are stories cast aside by unsuspecting storytellers. Sometimes they are things. More often than not, none of them ever match up like a quilt top that makes a flower garden or a log cabin.
A couple months ago, when I was looking for snakes in the sewer pipe, I found a sandwich. It was a perfectly good ham sandwich on white bread neatly wrapped in a paper napkin. A few ants were crawling on the napkin, but the sandwich was pretty much intact.
I saw the ants as a clue. If the ants wouldn’t eat the sandwich, did that mean the sandwich wasn’t very good and that was why it was neatly deposited in the sewer pipe? Do ants just not like ham sandwiches and could that be a clue to getting rid of fire ants?
Since I didn’t find a snake in the pipe, I wondered if the sandwich was a deterrent and, if so, could tossing a ham sandwich at a snake scare it away?
I might mention that I have only found one snake in the sewer pipe and he was accidentally chased in there and that’s about all of that story I care to tell.
Flipping through a found cookbook last weekend, I saw a recipe for okra bread. I love okra and I love cornbread and this seemed like the best of both worlds. The planets aligned perfectly when someone showed up at work with a bag of fresh okra.
So, as I hummed “Mama’s little baby loves shortening bread” because I couldn’t remember all the words, I whipped up a batch of okra bread. The finished product was almost good and probably would have been very good had I followed the recipe road exactly instead of veering off down a side street.
I made a couple of substitutions that were perhaps, on second thought, not wise.
As for the song, my grandmother used to sing that to us. She also sang the song about boll weevils looking for a home. I liked that song, too.
Last week, someone came in the workplace and mentioned needing just a tad of blue paint to tint white paint to make blue paint. Well, I just happened to have a bit of blue paint handy. I am just like “Let’s Make a Deal” only all of my stuff isn’t in a big old handbag. It’s spread out among different locations, which complicates locating what I need.
Anyway, the blue paint I found was just right to doctor up the white paint to make it blue paint and the painter said the wall matched perfectly. I wouldn’t be that lucky, but I’m glad I know someone who is.
Have a good week.
October 21, 2020 at 07:16AM
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