She-gator

I’ve successfully reached a milestone in my life, or so I consider it. You all should be proud! I started teaching myself to play the guitar my 2nd year of college (2000) and could only manage to strum chords, for some reason. Never put any of them together into a song. That lasted for only a couple of weeks, though secretly, I’ve always wished I could just pick up a guitar when around a campfire, at church, or anywhere else and just start picking away with the boys. Yeah… I’m a tomboy. Always been around a bunch of guys. Which is alright by me!

Anyways, I’ve decided with a baby on the way, that I want to be able to sing it lullabies one day, so I’m attempting the guitar again. Today I successfully made it through a WHOLE song. Now I didn’t say it was awesome and flawless, but it’s a start. One of my favs— Skynyrd’s All I Can Do is Write About It. Please listen to that song here if you never have before. It also has beautiful piano accompaniment. I promise, if you have any ties to the country your mind will just drift away. Gotta love those she-gators. This takes me to Glennville, GA, home of the World Famous Vidalia Sweet Onion.

Glennville… ah, southeast GA… nothing but Loblolly and Slash Pines. And I know this because I spent the summer of 2002 working four, 10 hour days “cruising” through them for a timber company called Rayonier, Inc out of Ludowici, GA. Cruising is a forestry term for inventory. So as you can imagine, on the weekends we enjoyed steering clear of the pines! Well maybe you can’t imagine, so let me help. Here we go; taking you there… “SOUTH GA. Working for a production-minded company. 100 degrees or more in the shade. Working in the woods. No understory management (ie. LOTS and LOTS of thick Titi , pronounced Tie Tie, aka Buckwheat Tree, to wade your way through… sometimes on your hands and knees) Long pants; long sleeves (BRIARS galore!!); snake boots and then even… snake chaps (Eastern Diamondbacks); and a hat” WHAT was I thinking? Really?

So yes, on the weekends we made our way to the swamps. It was nice and open underneath. It was awesome… you could see 3 ft in front of you; no problemo. I’m not kidding about that either. We really couldn’t see 3 ft in front of us sometimes in the pines; not even a speck of the hunter orange cruising vests! DANG. The Rayonier hunt club swamp is where the statement about the she-gator takes me. I’m just glad the she-gator wasn’t around during this particular situation. There was a baby gator stranded in a mud puddle, or maybe it just wanted to be there. Aw, poor thing; it had lost it’s mommy. Naturally, I wanted to help it get back to the main water of the Altamaha River which wasn’t far away. So… I convinced Jason to try and catch it in a bucket; but, it kept disappearing. I have no clue how it disappeared in that mud puddle, but it did.

This area of GA is also where we first encountered our dog Satilla. (The song also talks about a youngin‘ with his dog!) We were working on the Satilla forest at the time, and there is also a Satilla River. So when she walked up to me at our office, I fell in love with this stray, wormy ole pup. She sure went from the out-house to the penthouse, let me tell ya. Right now, she is asleep on the couch, snoring, sometimes groaning of discomfort (poor thang) with the Christmas lights twinkling in the background. Jason had three options for a name: Satilla, Ludowici, or Altamaha. HAHA. Not much of a decision was it?