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Showing posts from February, 2020

Hoppin' John

A bowl of dried black-eyed peas artfully arranged for photographic effect My Great Barrington neighborhood, "The Hill", (we live on a hill)  is one of the best aspects of life in the Berkshires.  Although it has been my home for almost 50 years, my roots trace to the deep south.  My 98 yr old Aunt Mil still lives in the Burgaw North Carolina house where I originated and remember from my early school days.  My father was born and reared on a farm at the edge of Georgia's  Okefenokee Swamp .  Generations of my direct forbears share North Carolina, Georgia Texas and Tennessee as places of birth, life and death.  A direct Grandfather who was at Valley Forge, his wife and many descendants are buried in the Ebenezer Baptist cemetery in Hendersonville NC.  I migrated to the Berkshires from Eastern New Mexico, my mother's birthplace, just a spit from the Texas Panhandle, where I had lived since my 10th year. Mrs Cowboy got started in Puerto Rico, (which is way, way so