The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide berth too.

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Now that Covid is squarely in the rear view mirror for most of us (maybe for half it’s always been there) we can turn our sequestered attentions to more important matters than mask mandates and booster vaccinations, only a million of us died these past couple of years, time to move on. And no, I’m not talking about commie teachers propagandizing that racism still exists or gays should have equal rights anymore or if Roe v Wade is going to be relegated to a Supreme Court waste basket. I’m talking about Ukraine, that country most of us couldn’t find on a map that Vlad Putin has been attempting to redraw for a decade now.

Oh, I know a sizeable percentage of us couldn’t identify the United States on a world map, but let’s not go all tangential on our educational system, we’ll have plenty of time for that in the midterm elections. Ukraine, stick with me here. You remember Chernobyl, maybe saw the Netflix series, well, it’s in Ukraine. Or maybe you vaguely remember the last impeachment trial, all about quid pro quos, military aid in exchange for finding dirt on Biden’s kid? No? Well, once again, that was Ukraine, the place where Vlad had already annexed Crimea, said Khruschev had gifted them that country when he maybe was drunk on vodka but now he wanted it back. Khruschev, remember? Okay, never mind, it was a long time ago. Back when Russia was part of the Soviet Union. Yeah, they’re different.

We had a Cold War, see, Iron Curtain. Ring any bells? When the Soviet Union collapsed, all those countries Russia had snapped up after World War Two — and I know you’ve heard of World War Two, the Good War? — well, Russian let them go. Too much work maybe, too many languages, too much trouble. But Putin thinks this was the biggest mistake in history and apparently he would like to return Russia to its glory days, you know, before the country became a kleptocracy and a poster child for corruption. They were communists back then, like the Fox News folks think teachers are now here in Amerika, but once again, let’s leave that for later. And we hated communists. We hated Russia. Bad, very bad. Us, good, very good. Those were simpler days, my friends.

Now things are complicated. Our President-in-Exile thinks Putin is good. A genius, in fact. And the right wing media echoes that sentiment. I don’t know, maybe they think we should annex Canada, smart move, genius move in fact. Mexico? Well, we got all the drugs we need without the cartels in our downtowns. But … I was talking about Ukraine, wasn’t I? I can see this is possibly too byzantine. And anyway, what’s it got to do with us?

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