My Hometown USA

My Zach... My eldest son lives many hours away in Dallas, Texas and I have not looked upon his flesh and blood face in over a year.  I have a case of the Momma’s separation anxiety disorder. Living far away from family is not a new thing, but in this vast world it seems more and more families are spread apart. Employment, life opportunities, hurricanes, all sends our kids, or parents away. I want to be back on Walton’s Mountain. Can’t we get back to the Walton’s model of family? Where you live and die in the same house, grandma and grandpa just move over and all the kids grow up and bring in their Walton s Under One roof offspring? No one leaves the roost. It is one roof, one family with many branches of the tree all underneath. One mortgage and lots of babysitters! Just think, only one electric bill, but oh, what a bill! Better yet, one cable bill! For many of my growing up years, I envisioned a happily ever after that included a on...

Fifteen years is a long life for an above ground pool. It had served its purpose. Mom's pool was a way to cool off in the steamy south Mississippi summers, it was a social place for family to bring their little ones, but oh, it was so much more. In 1998, the death of husband, my two sons’s father was of course a hard pill to swallow. Zach was ten years old and Luke was six. They were very young and a death of this magnitude changes the course of young ones lives. I often wonder what paths they would have had if not for this devastating injury to their innocence.  Still fresh in our memories was the summer of 97 when Norman and I had brilliantly thought it was an easy thing to buy a hundred dollar do-it-yourself pool for the boys. It came from Wal-mart. It was cheap. It was promised fun. It was torture for parents in a box! We spent, long arduous hours, from morning til dusk setting it up. Filling it up. In the end, it was worth every back-bending swipe of the...