12 September 2020
Tropical storm Sally apparently decided to dawdle before it made it to South Florida. I kept getting notifications on my iPhone about how we were in for torrential rains and winds around midnight. It was a very calm night with very little rain.
I started my walk this morning but ran into rain squalls so I beat a hasty retreat. Ever since then, one squall after another has come through with small but consistent amounts of rain.
When it rains, I have some heliconia plants outside my bedroom window and I can hear the rain drops dripping on the leaves. It’s very soothing. It reminds me of staying at my paternal grandmother’s house in Pulaski. I’ve written before it is an old dog trot type of house with one side with a front room, a small middle room and a huge kitchen. The other side of the dog trot was a bedroom where Uncle Ray and Aunt Minrose used to live, then a store room/library.
It had a tin roof on the house. Grandmother kept a double bed in the front room for company – especially grandkids. If it rained at night, you would hear the rain drops on the tin roof. In a downpour, you really couldn’t hear yourself think – it was so loud.
If you went to stay overnight in the winter, she would put old metal irons that she used to iron clothes with in front of the fire place to get them hot then wrap them in towels and put down into the bed to warm it up for you. On cold winter nights, after the fire had died down, you really needed that warmth. After the bed was warm enough, you would fly across the room and get tucked in as she removed the irons. It was a feather bed and you generally ended up in the middle, usually with a brother or cousin on either side of you pressing down on you because the mattress sagged.
My brother liked the sound of rain also. At his home in Brandon, he and Tanis placed a piece of tin roofing next to their bedroom window to get the effect of a tin roof.
Years ago, Dad moved back to the old place and decided to try to get the old place back in shape. Archie and I went over and climbed up on the roof and re-nailed the tin roof down where we could. Over the years, it had come up from the slats on the rafters (what is now called decking because it’s plywood sheets). Interestingly, the roofing nails had a lead piece similar to a washer. As you pounded the roofing nail into the wood below the tin, the lead would flattened out to provide waterproofing for the nail hole.
By the way, the tin roof was not aluminum. It was put on the house around 1898 and was the actual element tin. I suspect that house has a small fortune of tin still on that roof. The panels were quite thick, approximately 1/8 to 1/4 inch in thickness and each panel was around 6 feet long and 4 feet wide. That’s a lot of the element tin.
I loved going to visit my grandparents in Pulaski. I played in the barn loft as a kid and discovered wonderful tasting hay. Actually, it was what I thought was hay because I knew granddaddy did store hay up there but what I thought was hay was actually his peanut crop drying out so he could parch the peanuts in the winter. I would climb up there and eat my fill.
Next to the house was a blacksmith shed and a wood shed. I played in the blacksmith shed many, many hours and probably made a mess of it but granddaddy never said a word.
There was a smoke house just a little east of the last picture. It was no longer in use when Dad returned to live on the place. However, he tells the story of his mother going to cut off a slab of bacon from the smoke house and frying it up while she roasted the coffee in a wood burning stove.
As far as the pandemic goes, Florida keeps opening up. The governor decided the entire state must go to phase 2 for reopening. The newspapers seem to keep suggesting our new cases are going down, but the Covid-19 dashboard for the state suggests otherwise.
Stay tuned and stay safe!
