Dear Reader:

I decided on the coldest day this year, in the “dead” of winter- we needed some warm “live” laughter!

And who better to bring this to us than the late “Miss” Effie Wilder (Fran Townsend’s mother) with her famous taradiddles (defined as pretentious nonsense)… along with Archibald Rutledge sharing one of his workers’ Tall Tales from Hampton Plantation?

I took this picture of (one of ) my bedroom closets for two reasons:

1) The design of this closet… with the higher two shelves containing shoes and the third lower shelf containing blouses… was the smartest move I ever made. I saw it on a long-ago Oprah Show and got Tim to build it for me.

Yep, the best thing I ever did….now I can find every pair of shoes and boots plus (by simply glancing down) on my shirt/blouse rack…it takes half the time to locate which blouse I want to wear than with a standard closet!

2) The extra coat hangers… dangling at the end of the blouse rack… bring back to memory the problem most of us have in collecting more coat hangers than items to hang them on.

Yesterday I stopped by Belk and ended up bringing home four new coat hangers worth of pants and blouses. The clerk even asked me if I wanted to keep the hangers…I could have so easily said “No“…and gotten rid of them.

But old habits die hard…I simply smiled and told the clerk just to leave them on the hangers…it would be easier. “Easier“…Right…until I get home and add them to my already growing crop that I had just gotten rid of back in the fall…now reproducing, thanks to me, in leaps and bounds.

Apparently I am not alone in this ‘closet dilemma’ …Miss Effie, in this first “terse verse” laments the same thing and ponders the problem.

“Multiplication”

I cleaned my closet today, and found

Forty bare coat-hangers hanging around

There were only twenty a week ago

So here is what I want to know

Someone, please, my query heed

Do hangers in dark closets BREED?

………………….

You “true-blue” blog followers, who have been with me for a few years, will recognize the following Miss Effie taradiddle because it is my favorite for the ages. I can just think about it and start laughing out loud! Hope you enjoy it also.

________________

It happened in a small town in Georgia where the Methodist Church had established the practice of asking all congregational families to take turns inviting their elderly preacher to Sunday dinner.

One Sunday the hostess and her husband excused themselves to finish the dinner preparations…leaving the minister in the parlor with their small son, Wilbur.

“I bet you can’t guess what we’re having for dinner.” said Wilbur.

“Let’s see,” said the preacher. “Is it fried chicken?”

“Nope.”

“Is it smothered chicken?”

“Nope.”

“Is it baked chicken?”

“Nope.”

“Is it-could it be-the preacher looked hopeful-“roast beef?”

“Nope. I’ll tell you. It’s buzzard! I heard Mama say I guess it’s time we had the old buzzard for dinner!”

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

This last little “verse” of Miss Effie’s  leads us into one of Archibald Rutledge’s recollections from his Hampton Plantation days….

Genealogy

I surely hate to think that I’m

Descended from primordial slime!

Best, when all is said and done,

To go along with Genesis One.

Adam (with Eve) as first “begetter”

They  weren’t perfect, but it’s better’

Than to think the ocean’s scum

Is where my lineage first came from!

……………………………..

As we can tell from the following Hampton Plantation legend… even before that apple/snake problem in the garden…things weren’t going that well between Adam and Eve…so God stepped into help and a whole new crop of problems were ‘created.’ Have yourself a good chuckle…

“The Legend of the Walk Off People”

It appears that on one occasion Adam, deeply troubled, sought out God in the Garden of Eden.

“God,” he said, “you know how I love to catch fish in the river and to hunt rabbits. But Eve, she’s always complaining. She says that she gets lonesome because I fish and hunt so much. She’s talking of leaving me.”

“That’s easy,” said God, “come down to the creek with me, and we will make a few more people. They will keep Eve company while you are away from her hunting and fishing.”

Arriving at the water’s edge, God shaped some new people out of mud, and then leaned them against a rail fence to dry.

“Adam,” he said, “I will come back before sundown and put some brains in them.”

But God, forgetting that He had some other prior engagements that afternoon, did not return to finish His work until the next morning.

And it was then… to His surprise and dismay, that He discovered the people with no brains had walked off! And (do you know) they have been increasing and multiplying ever since!

You might even have met one!

……………………………………………………………………………………….

So until tomorrow…I hope you liked these examples of humor from the past… which are just as enjoyable today…thank you God for the gift of humor!

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

  Thanks to all the prayers that have gone out for Betsy the past several days…she passed all her cardiac tests (echo and stress) yesterday with flying colors…indicating that overall…physically her heart is not damaged.

However, she does have a disorder with her heart rhythm which will either have to be dealt with through increased medication and/or surgery, perhaps, at some point. But we can all take a moment to breathe deeply again….God is good!