Cotton, Crepe Myrtles and the Creek House

September in the south is always fun. It's a transition month when summer is winding down and fall is winding up. Crepe Myrtles are showing their colors and it's the first time I have really taken notice of how many different colors there are. Mama told me her favorite Crepe Myrtle color is watermelon. She described the color to me as "the one that looks most like the inside of a watermelon when it is ready to eat". Dad helped by saying "go look at the ones in the Wendy's parking lot". He does love Wendy's. There are two schools of thought about how to prune crepe myrtles. Some prune from the ground high up the branch showing more branch than flowers while others leave a lot more of the flowers and greenery from the ground up. Daddy told me that Phil calls the first way crepe murder.

While the crepe myrtles blaze with color, cotton is starting to show little white dots sprinkled in green fields all over the county. It almost looks like snow out there and kind of reminds me of the Wizard of Oz.

Daddy was talking the other day about how cotton was king in Cleveland County from the turn of the century until the 1950's. It was planted in the spring, hoed by hand and plowed with mules to keep the weeds out. After the weeds are cleared away they wait until fall to pick the cotton. Daddy said this was referred to as laying it by.

For some reason, Cleveland County always had alot of acres in cotton and competed with bigger Eastern NC farm counties for the most acres of cotton in North Carolina. There was a local cotton competition in Cleveland County too. The competition was to be the first farmer to get a bale of cotton to the Cleveland County Courtsquare in the fall. That bale would be auctioned off and then left on the courtsquare as kind of an advertisment for the buyer and bragging rights for the farmer. Cleveland County cotton farms started dying out in the 1950s, but in the last few years there are cotton fields popping up again. Cotton is really a beautiful and unusual plant to see and to touch.

September weekends are full of fun following the Wofford football team. Last weekend, the game was at Charleston Southern University which is a very hot place on a Saturday afternoon. People were literally falling out from the heat and searching for shade to cool off. Wofford won the game which was a cause for celebration. As if the Wofford crowd really needs a cause.

Since we live several hours away from the low country, Dale and Linda invited us to their creekhouse on John's Island. Being from the foothills of North Carolina, my mental image of a creekhouse would be a small house by a rocky stream. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Charleston area over the years, but I haven't spent alot of it staying on a creek. Dale and Linda's creekhouse is beautiful and spacious with an inviting low country style entrance and two porches to catch the southern breeze. There are windows everywhere so you can see spectacular views of the creek all around the house. The marsh is really beautiful and made me think of the movie Prince of Tides. The marsh view is constantly changing with the tides and we all thought the high tides are especially pretty. I was amazed at how fast the water moved in and out of the creek.

As the weekend went on, I kept having the feeling that I was in a foreign country. Part of the reason was the difference in the landscape with tides and marshes, and the difference in the critters. It is strange to walk across the yard ducking under the pretty spanish moss and trying to avoid stepping on tiny crabs. I saw a porpoise swimming in the creek early one morning. Trust me when I say I don't see a porpoise swim by the house in a creek very often.

There were other things that seemed kind of foreign to me. Dale and Linda grew up in this area and Jamey and Teresa live in Beaufort, SC. It's hard to believe we only live a 4 hour drive away and have such different surroundings. Jamey loves boats and fishes competitively with SKA - the Southern Kingfish Association. I knew I was in uncharted waters when I asked if he used the big cooler on the porch to keep the fish in. He explained that they use bigger coolers than that one for the bait. The fish they catch are like 6 feet long. Jamey said that once while deep sea fishing he saw a whale. Actually he said he just saw the whale's tail, but that it was wider than his fishing boat. I can't imagine being in a boat and seeing a fish that big. He also told stories about how smart and playful porpoises are far out in the ocean. Then Teresa started talking about being a little girl and falling into the Pluff Mud. I had no idea what that was until Dale told me. When I got home, I googled pluff mud and learned that rice plantations had sprung up in the low country because the pluff mud is especially fertile and the marshes are perfect for growing rice.

Some things may have seemed exotic in the creek, but there is one thing for certain. We all laugh in the same language. We laugh so much with this group that sometimes my face hurts.

Cotton, crepe myrtles, creek houses. I love September.