Here I sit....creeped out

I just finished watching a movie "We Don't Live Here Anymore". Very sad. Here is a link to the site: We Don't Live Here Anymore Pretty good, but I had never heard of it until tonight. I was walking around the video store looking for something different and picked it up on a whim. It is an independent sort of film, but with great stars. Laura Dern was in it, and I thought she looked terrible, but that's just me. Made me think a lot about life and how things can get sometimes. *sigh*

Anyways, about the creepy thing. For some weird unknown reason, I decided to bring in a picture that my grandmother painted when she was alive. She died when I was 9 (in 1972). She lived in the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. I spent many a summer with her in her "cabin" which was really a house, but we always referred to it as a cabin. It was one story with only 2 bedrooms, but it had a huge living area with a largish kitchen and family room with a huge stone fireplace. Over this fireplace was always a picture that she had painted herself. Since she lived in the mountains and had no car (she couldn't drive, but neighbors would drive her places and family would bring her groceries) it sort of explains the condition of this painting. She did not use canvas, instead she used something like plywood. She painted a scene on both sides. One side is a view from her "cabin" in the Spring, the other side is a view in the fall. I am not sure how she got paint (looks like oil) and not canvas. Maybe she ran out of canvas, I don't know, but somehow this painting landed into my father's hands. After he passed away, my stepmother gave me the painting which had been stored in a shed in their back yard. We brought it home, and by this time it was looking pretty rustic. It has been hanging in our garage for years. Something told me to bring it in my house tonight and put it on my mantle. I am not sure why I have not done this before now. I guess I always thought it might be too rustic for my decor, but for some reason tonight, I said to hell with it. I brought it in and took down my huge clock that I had hanging up there originally, and leaned it against the wall. It's pretty large. I called my son down to give me his opinion, but I had already decided it was staying. I heard my son coming down the stairs and looked at it lovingly to see a huge spider peek out from behind it. Neither of us was brave enough to pull it down and get rid of the spider, so I sat and waited for it to come out. It did. It's now under my shoe.

He liked it up there and asked why I am just doing this now.

The picture is staying. I really do not care about the decor.

It reminds me of the many summers I spent with my grandmother at the cabin in the Ozarks. Her parents had traveled there from North Carolina in the mid to late 1800's where they owned and ran the ferry boat business that would ferry horses, wagons and people accross the White River. My father raised me pretty much alone and when he would travel on business he would drive me the 6 hour trip to Arkansas and leave me with my grandmother. She would take me fishing down at the White River and show me how she spit snuff on her crickets for good luck. She use to fry me bologna for sandwiches. I remember how she use to come in the room I slept in at nap time and get on to me for playing "possum" (fake sleeping). I remember how she thought Elvis was the devil until one time she heard him singing gospel music, then changed her tune. I remember getting ticks picked off of me at night from playing in the woods all day. I remember her putting food out and we would sit on her screened in porch and watch the deer come to eat. At night she would sit in front of that huge fireplace with logs crackling and read her bible. She read it over and over again. Every time she finshed it, she would mark it on the last page. That page is covered with marks.

I miss her.