The Crab Chronicles

Atlanta, Georgia, Best Place to Live on Planet Earth

There is a Facebook group called Georgia Followers -- Everything Georgia and someone posted this a few days ago:

"Georgia is too hot during the winter and way too hot during the summer."

Of course, a firestorm of debate was ignited.

One wag speculated that perhaps that inflammatory statement was posted by a Yankee. I wouldn't be surprised.

I immediately took issue with the post -- since I have lived in Georgia most of my life -- and I posted this: "I will never live anywhere else. We have mild weather 8-9 months a year. I never have to shovel snow, evacuate due to hurricanes, or flee mudslides or earthquakes. Atlanta Georgia is awesome!"

Much to my surprise, some people took issue with that. I assumed [perhaps incorrectly] that people belonging to that group would be people living in Georgia by choice. Apparently, I am wrong. There are captives here, itching to get back up north where they can pay twice as much for a decent house, shovel snow out of their driveways so they can go to work, and encounter hostility from store clerks.

One person said what about tornadoes and hurricanes?

Hurricanes sweep up the coast and the most weather we've ever gotten here in Atlanta is rain. Sometimes we get heavy rain -- like, once a year, perhaps.

Unlike California, we never have mudslides. We also don't worry about earthquakes [once in a while we get a little earthquake but it does little or no damage]. We don't have to worry about forest fires consuming our houses. We also don't have to pay half a million dollars for a 1,500 square foot house where we then have to commute 2 hours to work. We also don't pay more for gas, or put up with a boatload of state taxes. My best friend lived in California a couple of years [her husband was in the military] and was horrified by the cost of living out there. They moved as soon as they could.

Tornadoes happen here in Georgia, yes. Rarely. Usually they aim for rural areas where it's easy to find mobile homes to toss around. I've lived in Augusta, Athens, and Atlanta, but tornadoes were never an issue in any of those places. Personally, tornadoes have never caused damage to my house or cars. Mostly just high winds and maybe some limbs down in the yard. No big deal.

left, a painting called Snow in Atlanta

About once every 5 years we get some snow here in Atlanta, and we have a logical, wise response. We shut down the entire city -- after raiding all the grocery stores for bread, milk, and toilet paper. We are not equipped for snow because it happens so rarely. So we hunker down at home in our jammies and watch TV and make French Toast.

Some years ago a cousin came to visit me and it was winter and we had a Snow Event. This cousin grew up in Virginia, where snows happen every winter and nobody gets excited. I introduced him to the joys of watching TV and eating French Toast. He was amused at the local Storm Coverage on every local TV channel. He couldn't believe that camera crews immediately jumped into action and sped north, where snow was actually sticking to the ground, to watch rednecks do wheelies. You see, snow in Atlanta rarely ever sticks to the roads. For that excitement you have to head north, to the North Georgia mountains, where the rednecks live to say "Hold mah beer Darlin' I'm fixing to get famous!" as soon as they see a WSB truck.

I had to patiently explain to my cousin that I would not leave the apartment because others drive badly in snow, not me. I have no problem driving in snow, but it's other drivers I fear.

Is it hot here in summer? Yes. Duh. [Of course, we don't think it's "hot" unless it's over 90...] We are accustomed to it, though, and take sensible precautions. If the high will be over 90 I don't leave the house between noon and 7 p.m. if possible. (Working from home helps.) For yard work or dog walking, I get up early and try to be done before 10 a.m.

I would never live in Georgia in a house without air conditioning. That would be like living in an un-heated house in Maine in winter. Simply foolish.

Just FYI, it's December 30 and I walked the dog this morning without even needing a sweater. High today will be around 65. That's not typical, but wearing shorts on Christmas day or New Year's Day is not uncommon.

I've never had to shovel snow so I could go to work. If it's snowing or there's more than a dusting of snow on the ground I stay home, like everyone else.

When people move here from other places they always complain about the heat. They also do things like keep the air conditioner on 80 all summer, wear pantyhose, and go running in the middle of the day. Learn to acclimate, y'all.

I also want to point out that I don't like big cities. I technically live in the Atlanta suburbs but I am next door to Tucker, Georgia, a small town. I shop, work, and dine in Tucker, 95% of the time. If I want to see a Braves game or see a touring Broadway show at the fabulous Fox Theater I can be at those venues within 30 minutes.

Yes, Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world but we also have MARTA. I never drive to the airport. I hop on the train and avoid traffic and parking nightmares quite easily.

If I want to go to the beach, I can be at Hilton Head Island in 4-5 hours.

If I want to go to the mountains I head north on I-85 and I'm there in less than an hour.

above, a street in my neighborhood, early morning

Here are a few fun facts that you may not know about Atlanta:

• We have great diversity here. Large immigrant communities and places where you can live and work for years and speak only Spanish or Chinese.
• Most people are friendly and have good manners.
• Atlanta is the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the U.S., with almost 5.8 million residents and no signs of slowing down according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
• We rank 10th in the nation economically with a GDP of $276 billion.
• Lots of movies are filmed in Atlanta because we offer great tax incentives.
• Atlanta magazine wrote a lengthy article about where all the celebrities lives when they are in town filming.

If you prefer a cooler place, feel free to avoid Atlanta. We don't need more traffic. Don't let the screen door hit you on the way out...

Connected

When I was 8 years old we left Augusta, Georgia, the only home I'd ever known, and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville is a lovely city, in the foothills of East Tennessee, very close to the mountains. Many nice people live in Knoxville. It has a fine university, and many thriving businesses.

However, I never felt like it was really my home. I always wondered why. I lived in East Tennessee from 1971-1982, and 1985-1993.

Left, me sledding that first winter. I had never seen snow before.

I was flipping channels not long ago and I watched a few minutes of a program on the local public broadcasting station here. I cannot recall the name of it. It was almost over. What sticks in my head is a middle-aged woman standing in front of a river somewhere in rural Georgia and saying words to this effect: for the people who lived here and used this river as a water source, the river became part of their bodies.

I was profoundly moved by that. I sat in silence and thought about that for a while.

Suddenly it made perfect sense to me, why Tennessee never felt like my home.

My ancestors have lived in Georgia, most of them, for many generations. They came from Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and other places, but they settled here in Georgia and farmed. For generations my people have lived in Georgia -- eating food grown in this soil, drinking water from the creeks and rivers, and effectively building their bodies out of this place. Literally.

Georgia became part of them.

When they died, their bodies went back into the soil and became part of the process.

This is so profound to me. My parents loved East Tennessee but they were also happy to get back to Georgia in 1991, after 20 years. An old man at Dad's Kiwanis meeting said when he saw Dad for the first time in 20 years "Where have you been, Tony?!" He always thought that was touching and hilarious.

I am so glad at the end of his life Dad returned to the area where he had begun his life.

The hold that North Georgia has on me is powerful.

left, one of my gardens in early summer

When my mother is gone, I will still have this place. I will still be nurtured by this place and it will feel as though I'm supposed to stay here.

When my father died, he was cremated. My brother and I took his ashes to scatter on a beautiful November day, months after he died. We went to the countryside outside of Augusta, where Dad's friend Roy owned land that Dad loved to visit and hunt on. Dad was a city man, a banker, but he also loved the outdoors. He loved hunting and fishing. When I was a kid I never really understood why he would come home from work, change clothes, make a drink, and spend at least 30 minutes just walking around outside, looking at the yard, the garden, the trees, just whatever was outside. He calmed down. He un-stressed.

Now I totally understand that.

We put Dad's ashes in a swiftly moving creek and he became, once again, part of that land, just like his forbears. It felt right.

Now I go outside to unwind, too.

Sometimes I take Lola outside on the leash and just stand there, contemplating nothing except the sky, the birds, the trees. My backyard is filled with a lot of trees and needs a lot of landscaping but however unkempt it is, it soothes me.

 

My ancestors lived and died here in North Georgia. The land was part of their bodies and it soothed their souls.

I hope and pray in this era of technology that we do not lose the connection we have to the land of our ancestors. We are not only what we eat but WHERE we eat. Our DNA contains this place, and also contains the DNA of all those who came before and had to live off this land, and if we listen to our instincts hopefully we will not lose that connection to the land and the old ways.

I love this double rainbow in this shot looking down my street. I always view rainbows as signs of encouragement from God..

 

“We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.” –William Hazlett

 

“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach of us more than we can ever learn from books.” –John Lubbock

The Hermit and the Team Lunch

I have been working as a freelance writer for a long time but last April I took a part-time job as a paralegal, using my other skill set. I had not held a regular paralegal position in 6 years. If you had told me when I moved to Atlanta in 1993 that one day I would be able to work from home as a paralegal I would have laughed. 

I spent a lot of money on pantyhose and hair care products during those paralegal years [1985-2009]. I'm not bitter. Much.

My work situation now is quite interesting. I work for an attorney who decided some years ago to quit the big law firm he was with and work from home, as a sole practitioner. His reasons for doing that were personal, and not for me to reveal here. Suffice to say, he was able to manage the transition and grow a very successful practice and that's pretty remarkable. Lots of plaintiff's lawyers are sole practitioners but few defense lawyers.

Anyway, The Boss keeps everything in a cloud so we can all work remotely. The Boss lives in Sandy Springs. The associate lives in Johns Creek and has 3 small boys. The secretary lives in Snellville and is basically retired from the big law firm life, but still sharp and capable. I live basically in Tucker. In order to get to all our homes, in a circuit, you'd be in the car probably close to three hours, depending on traffic. We all have computers and phones, though, so it works out.

We had our annual team luncheon yesterday, at a very nice restaurant in Buckhead, Bones. I had never been there. Elegant place. (I doubt they get many vegetarians eating there, however.) 

Everyone looked very nice, except me. However, in my defense, I did take a shower and wear a bra and earrings. I don't do any of those things on a daily basis any more, since I am something of a hermit. 

It felt kind of surreal, being in a crowded restaurant among a lot of people wearing business clothes. 

It felt weird being in a place where there were no TVs in the corners. 

A few observations about Bones. You can valet your car and there's no grungy asphalt lot behind the place. There's a multi-story parking garage next door. You walk in, and there are plenty of couches and comfy chairs to sit in while waiting for a table -- not just a hard bench and some pimply-faced kid with an attitude handing you a plastic beeper and telling you to get lost until your table is ready. The plates and bowls are incredibly heavy. You could take a bread plate and kill someone with it. There were two forks, three spoons, and two knives at my place. Took me a minute to remember the rule -- eat from the outside in. (I am more accustomed to restaurants that give you a plastic spork.) The server took a little scraper and scraped crumbs off the tabletop periodically. 

I told everyone a story I've always thought was pretty amusing, about me going to New York City as a college senior and being taken to lunch at a very elegant restaurant by a friend of my father's. I ordered fish and green beans. When they brought the plate of green beans they were hard and barely warm. I called the waiter and said "Hey, these didn't get cooked. Please take them back to the kitchen and tell the cook to really boil them hard for a few minutes and I'll try to get them down." The woman sitting opposite me had a look of absolute horror on her face. I'm sure she was wondering if I was actually Tony Thompson's child.

I had never seen someone eat hard crunchy green beans. In my experience, green beans were always cooked all day with fatback until they were so soft a totally toothless person could easily eat them.

Telling that little anecdote produced a few smiles among my team members but no guffaws. Within a short time I had ordered trout stuffed with crabmeat and haricort vert.

FYI -- haricort vert is French for hard crunchy green beans. I had forgotten that. No matter. I was so full of lobster bisque I could only eat my fish and had no room for sides.

I badly wanted a dessert and they had a very elegant dessert menu. However, I was so full I could hardly move, much less consume an entire dessert. So The Boss ordered a piece of key lime pie and a piece of pecan pie and we all had some. I had a tiny bite of each piece of pie. Not to be rude, but I make better pecan pie, and the key lime pie was not as good as the pie at my fave local place, Fork in the Road.

The Boss ordered a steak, and when it arrived it looked very delicious, if one likes steaks. I don't. Unfortunately he wrestled with it for quite a while before finally giving up. It was gristly and super yucko, he said. The waiter took it off the bill, which was fortunate. The associate and the secretary also got steaks but theirs were excellent. 

My steak aversion is because we had steaks about once a week when I was a kid in Knoxville. Dad was good friends with a guy who owned a meat company that supplied steaks to restaurants and we always had steaks, like once or twice a week. Dad got really angry one day when he said "We're having steak tonight, kids!" and my brother and I immediately started whining "Really? Steak AGAIN?! Can we have hamburgers instead?!"

Dad, raised during the Depression, was livid.

My brother and I still never order steaks in restaurants.

Here's a really interesting one. My colleague wanted a half sweet half unsweet tea concoction. Instead, the waiter brought three unsweet teas and a small jar of Simple Syrup so everyone could sweeten their own tea to their liking. (I drank water.)

I was surprised there was only a tiny one-potty bathroom just off the lobby, but I used it several times. It had elegant cloth napkins for drying hands, and a huge jar of mouthwash with little plastic cups. (Right before we left I learned there was another ladies room.)

After the bill was paid everyone at the table got a complimentary chocolate in a little paper envelope. Allrighty then.

I truly had a fun lunch and I enjoyed getting out of the house and spending time with my colleagues immensely.

Things sure have changed since I got my first paralegal job. 

At my very first job, the firm had a luncheon. All the ladies made side dishes and desserts. The firm bought a pre-cooked turkey. The ladies set out and served the food, and cleaned everything up afterwards, then went back to work. Lots of work for us staffers. The attorneys all sat at one end of the big conference table and nobody said much. There was exactly one hour allotted for the consumption of food. Everyone was tense. Normally, on weekday lunches the attorneys went out to lunch at local restaurants and staffers stayed in and ate sandwiches or leftovers brought from home, in the tiny break room. I quit that job when I decided to go back to school and get my master's degree in English.

At my second job, same deal, except after lunch [and after the staffers cleaned everything up, of course] we got to all go home. Huge improvement. I usually had to go home and nap, after hitting the spiked eggnog. I was at that firm for 5 years. 

Third law firm job, first one here in Atlanta, same deal. Staff served a Christmas lunch for everyone. However, we did get to go home afterwards, and there were names drawn for Christmas presents so everyone got a Secret Santa present. Plus the attorneys paid for the office manager to buy a nice present for each staffer, in addition to a Christmas bonus. I got some very nice luggage that way. My boss also gave me presents at Christmas. I stayed there 6 years. 

Fourth law firm job, at a very elegant firm in midtown, the Christmas lunch was catered and there was also a big firm holiday party at a hotel. I never went to the fancy parties. I was so stressed out at that job that I cried most days in the car. I only stayed there 2 years.

There followed 8 years at two different corporations in their legal departments. Catered Christmas luncheons, but nobody had much fun. 

My legal career never turned out the way Dad envisioned it when he paid for me to go to paralegal school. I didn't ever express a desire to go to law school, nor have I ever married a lawyer.  My paralegal skills have, however, enabled me to support myself nicely for the majority of my adult life, and I've gotten to do some really interesting work. 

I have a lot of "war stories" about interesting lawsuits I've worked on over the years and wacky lawyers I've worked for, but I can't tell those stories publicly without winding up at the bottom of the Chattahoochee River. 

No worries. The tell-all manuscript will be published after my death. 

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah!

the photo is me holding my cousin's baby -- I was in college and the baby is now grown and married and a successful doctor with three children! Wow, I am old...

Two Great Books About the South

It has been a while since I posted but I've been super busy. My mom fell the day after thanksgiving but didn't go to the hospital. We've been nursing her here at home. She went to the doctor a few days after the fall and was diagnosed with a UTI and has been treated for that. In elderly patients UTIs can cause loss of mobility, weakness, and dementia symptoms. They can be quite deadly, even fatal if undiagnosed. You can read more about it here.

She is much better. Still not 100% but better.

Having said that, I want to remind everyone that my books Ghosts in the Garden City and Leaf Season are available and make excellent Christmas gifts! They are both available on Amazon, in paper and on Kindle.

 

Ghosts in the Garden City:

Leigh Harrington is haunted by a past she cannot remember. One day, walking through a department store, she smells a scent that catapults her back to her childhood, to a trauma she has blocked out. She senses there is far more to the memory than anyone in her family wants her to know. A short time later, Leigh inherits an old suitcase from her long-dead grandmother, and she discovers a family secret that has long been kept hidden. Eager to learn more, Leigh sets out on an scary but transformative journey.

It's not only Leigh's journey it's the journey of her mother and grandmother -- all strong southern ladies with secrets to keep.

Ghosts is the first novel I ever wrote that I am proud of. A number of folks have told me it caused them to neglect chores and miss sleep so they could finish it in a day or two. That's high praise, music to my ears!

The cover image is a home in Acworth, Georgia, and I found out that my aunt's family used to live there, so I have ties to that house!

 

Leaf Season:

This story is set mainly in the beautiful North Georgia mountains and it's a love story, a ghost story, and a story of redemption. Wyatt is an attorney looking to retire early and he inherits the family homeplace in the tiny town of Crossroads, Georgia. The next door neighbor is a lady he met years earlier when both were kids. There are a lot of questions to answer about the house, like what was Wyatt's uncle looking for that caused him to wall off the back yard? Is the house haunted? What's in the old trunk in the basement?

It's a very different book but several people have told me they enjoyed it just as much as Ghosts, some even more.

Leaf Season's main characters are not kids any more, but they still have a lot of life left in them, including the capacity to heal and to love.

Check it out!

 

Below, the Christmas tree -- despite Mom's mishap we are doing Christmas, y'all! Merry Merry!