The ghosts of Christmas past

Opinion

December 22, 2012

The ghosts of Christmas past

By Rhetta Grimsley Johnson/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Dec 22, 2012, 08:00 AM CST

THOMASVILLE, Ga. — While the rest of the country is shoveling and shivering, South Georgia is at its loveliest. The camellias are blooming, live oaks keep their leaves and trees loaded with bright-orange kumquats and satsumas are exotically common.

I’m not sure if it was provoked by the season, the place or the company, but I dreamed about my grandmother’s house last night. I’ve been told by someone wise never to try to recount your dreams, which are boring to everyone but you. I often ignore wise advice.

Already I was missing my grandmother. That happens a lot during the holidays, especially when I find myself driving through a landscape so familiar that even the dirt smells right. It doesn’t have to be Georgia; anything along the same latitude will do.

I was here to visit a friend. She lives in a secluded, unpainted and marvelous old family mansion on the road flanked by quail plantations between Tallahassee, Fla., and Thomasville, perhaps the loveliest of all Georgia towns.

My grandmother lived in a small town farther west. The paint on her farmhouse was only a distant memory by the time I came along. The rooms were big and the ceilings high, but that’s about all the place had in common with my friend’s grand house.

But I was, after all, sleeping on a South Georgia screen porch in December while a dew so heavy it sounded like rain pelted the pines. I was transported.

To me as a child, everything about my grandmother’s house was magical. I loved every nook and cranny. I especially loved December visits, when I could sleep on homemade flannel sheets beneath so many quilts it was tough to turn in bed.

There was central heat, of sorts. Each morning my grandmother wrapped me in a blanket and rushed me through unheated rooms to the kitchen, where a pot belly stove was central to all activities.

We ate breakfast on a small kitchen table the color of egg yolks. My grandfather broke the fast in a spectacular meal of several courses. He began with a bowl of cereal, and progressed to a big plate of grits, sausage and eggs and, on some days, fish roe. He slathered his biscuits with a jelly made from mayhaws, a swamp berry. This was, of course, before the invention of cholesterol.

I have the yellow table now, and I wonder how all of that food fit on that saltine-size surface.

A cedar branch kept fresh in a saucer of water served as the Christmas tree. It had a string of colored lights and was placed on my grandfather’s desk in the entry hall.

I’ve seen some remarkable Christmas trees in my six decades, including those in the windows of Paris’ finest department stores and in America’s fancy Biltmore House. I saw one placed in the middle of a downtown Natchez, Miss., street, creating an instant roundabout.

None made as much of an impression as a branch in a saucer in South Georgia.

When I awoke from my dream, I tried to tell my friend about her starring role in it. She was remodeling my grandmother’s house, yet not changing its character. The pie safe was full in the pantry, and the mantel clock was still keeping time.

But I could not find adequate words to explain why this was such high honor.

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Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
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