A REMEMBERAMBLE, April 06, 2026

YEAH, I WISH I STILL LOOKED THAT YOUNG!

It is a new week, fresh from the solar/lunar laundry. Some say the week begins on Sunday, even the calendar people say so. But in 1971, ISO declared Monday as the first day of the week. In my mind it always was. I know no one who considers Sunday as the first day of the week. Of course there will be a contrarian or two who will say in the comments that they have always counted Sunday as the very first day of the week. But we know better. We got not a drop of rain last week, nor over the weekend. It is very dry, and at a bad time for farmers. Last night, I went through some old images from past posts, that were mothballed for a while, and moved them up top in a file. I decided I will post some here this morning and say a bit about each one, hopefully you will find it interesting. If so, let me know so I can do more Remeberambles like this.

Biscuit bread/flour hoecake, they were so good

Yep, mama made hoecakes sometimes, and they were so good, she put enough buttermilk in them to give them that flavorful tang only buttermilk can impart. Let us not argue about pones, hoecakes, biscuit bread, flour bread, etc., your family might have called them by other monikers, and hoecake might mean cornbread to you, it does not matter, there is no right or wrong in any of it. Word uses varied wildly when referring to southern foods. We want no food feuds please.

The great baseball player turned evangelist, Billy Sunday. His style of preaching was an energetic one. He jumped, kicked, leapt, pointed, in an animated style really like no other. He was a strict prohibitionist.

News bees, aka hoverflies are often mistaken for sweat bees, which are green metallic in color. Folklore held that it was good luck to have a news bee hover in front of you or land on your finger. I asked Ma Bertie Walden why they were called news bees, and she said it was because they will hover near your ear and, "tell you the news."

Do you recall my post about these folks? They are "knocker uppers!" They are engaged in "knocking up" their clients/customers. In the days before alarm clocks, most workers subscribed to a knocking up service to awake them in the mornings at a set time. They knocked on doors or windows, and upper floors required them to toss pebbles or use a pea shooter as you see here. A subscriber paid a small amount but it added up for the knocker upper. Yes, that is where the sang term for "that" came from.

"Come on y'all, it's the skeeter truck!" Shoot, the skeeter truck should have played music like the ice cream truck, you know, to let the kiddies know it was passing by. Actually folks saw DDT as harmless. I hate to tell this, but grandpa Morris put it in the family well to kill wiggletails...nuff said about DDT...

I will try to avoid being indelicate, but this is a tough topic to write about, and a tough one for men in particular to read about. let's see.......uhm, okay, here goes, it was once all too common for men to suffer black widow spider bites, uhmm, before they had indoor plumbing. Those she-devils loved living under the two-holer's bench, and, well, you know some things from their point of view were targets of opportunity.

A few years ago I asked our members to say in the comments of my post on the subject, of what years their parents were born. Many like me had parents born in the 1920s, of course a multitude after that time period, and of course many right back into the late nineteenth century. But the hands-down winner were brothers whose mother was born in 1875 and there father was born in 1873. That boggled my mind.

I will close with that one, and hope you enjoyed our foray into then dark, distant, and almost forgotten files from Georgia Folk and Farm Life!

Numbers 6: 24-26, KJV

we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me