9-09-09 Part 3 (aka:9-11-09)

*Author's note: I have decided to return to my normal tone for this post. You may have noticed I employed a different dialect on 9-09-09 Parts 1&2. This was in honor of the old people around here I have heard tell tale of storms such as this one, and also in honor of Shorty, in whose old house I took refuge from the water and ice that night.




On The 11th of September, a day and a half after the storm, I went back over into the holler to begin clean up. I decided that creek clean up would be a good starting point. For one thing, I hate the idea of my trash and belongings junking up the creek banks. And also, I happened to know that many of my empty lotion and salve bottles (new and unused) that I was storing in the barn had washed down. I knew this because 2 of my neighbors were making an activity of collecting my stuff that had washed down to their property and dumping it into the bed of my truck. And there were quite a few lotion bottles.

So I got my "Tevas" on and brought some trash bags and walked down through the creek, collecting trash and other items. Susie and Todd joined me and together we walked all the way down Gentry Branch to the Shelton Laurel River. I do not know how far that is, but it is kind of a long distance. It actually was a beautiful walk and made all of us feel better about everything. We picked up garbage bags full of stuff. Here is a list of some of the stuff we found:

* Mecho's heavy ass tile saw- (caught in a culvert)
* a large glass door that wasn't even cracked lodged in a creek bank
* about 30 or more feet of chicken wire
* lots and lots of plastic and glass bottles (mine) all over the place
* 2 dead snakes (drowned)
* 1 dead salamander
* some pieces of old leather shoes (Susie went hog wild over these)
* a piece of precious little tea china that was mine
* a brown paper bag that said "Deez Nutz Who's your Daddy?" that Michael gave me a
gift in a couple of months ago- perfectly intact
* bits of hymns from one of Shorty's hymnals all down the creek banks, including the
Doxology, which says "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" (appropriate for a
flood and just beautifully poetic that they were Shorty's)
And finally the most amazing to me: on the shore of the Shelton Laurel, Todd found a perfectly intact and gorgeous habanero pepper that had been washed all the way down from my container garden. I sent it home with him for dinner...