Our 41st Anniversary Trip—Part Three

During the 1890s Charlie Edwin Turlington built a log cabin in Lafayette County, Florida, near where Ginny and I vacationed..

We visited the pioneer cabin one day during our anniversary vacation; and as we toured the structure, I reminisced about my grandfather’s cracker home place near Graham, Florida. The footprint of the Turlington cabin and my grandfather’s place displays typical Florida cracker architecture.

Turlington built his log cabin with two equal rooms separated by an open porch. A kitchen/eating building lay behind, away from sleeping quarters in case of fire. Another open porch, called a dog trot, connected the kitchen building with the front rooms.

I have no idea why it was called a dog trot.

I imagine that originally the present corrugated tin roof was made of split cypress shingles. My grandfather had a tool called a froe which he used to make such shingles.

Here’s a photo of Ginny which shows how Turlington notched the logs together:

Notice how Turlington caulked outside gaps by splitting saplings and wedging them bark-side-in between the logs. Inside, he sealed the rooms with clay plaster.

In 1919, Senator Fred Parker bought this log cabin from Turlington for $50. The Parker family kept the cabin till 1926 and eventually the cabin came to the town of Mayo, Florida, where it now sits on a lovely town park shaded by majestic oak trees.

As I pointed out log cabin features to Ginny, we imagined how blissful life might be in simpler times—HA!

I remember some of the human relations that went on around my grandfathers place. Think Desperate Housewives by kerosene lamp—the sister who stole away the other sister’s husband. The brother who rescued a baby from off the railroad track, a hero till suspicions arose that he was the one who put the kid on the tracks in the fist place.

Anything that goes on in a highrise condo today, might have gone on in a log cabin way back when.

Well, most anything.

Once, back during the Depression, this lady came trudging down the dirt road to Granddaddy’s house. She pushed a wheelbarrow with a cripple boy in it. In the front yard she tipped the barrow dumping the kid out into the dirt—Like all cracker farmers, Granddaddy hoed out every blade of grass around the house to make snakes visible when they came into the yard. At the turn of the previous century, even in metropolitan Jacksonville people kept grass down using the dirt-yard as a barrier against snakes. Green lawns are a modern innovation in Florida.

Anyhow, this woman said, “Mr. Moody, I caint raise no cripple youngun. Just caint take it no mo. I’m leaving him here. I hears you’s good Christian people. You can take him in or leave him to starve in the dirt. Makes me no nevermind”.

With that, she hefted her barrow and walked away.

Granddaddy and Grandma added that crippled boy to their own 16 or 18 kids and raised him up to adulthood as one of their own. That’s all the adoption there was in those days.

I don’t see that happening often around a highrise condo.

Maybe there’s something to be said for log cabin days.

But, of course there was the time a panther got into the house, attracted by a crying baby, and my great-grandmother Effie swacked it with her broom and chased it out of her cabin.

Our rented vacation cabin in Lafayette Blue Springs State Park hardly resembled the pioneer cabin of my Cracker ancestors.

Yes, in true pioneer spirit Ginny and I know how to camp in the rough. For instance, heavy rain from Hurricane Ida confined us to our cabin for two days—two days in which we spent in wonderful conversations and in reading.

Ginny read a biography of mathematician and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, and she enjoyed reading an armload of murder mysteries. For fun, I read four books on archaeology; and for work I read….

I hesitate to talk about this. But one of the things I took a vacation from was the book I’ve been writing for years about finding and doing the will of God. Yet, to keep my mind focused while in the woods, I read a book by an imminent preacher and internationally acclaimed author and speaker. His 1971 book is about divine guidance.

Reading it was like getting swacked on the head by great-grandma’s broomstick.

Right off, the author starts telling me about the nine symptoms which prove I am out of God’s will. By his criteria, I have never been in God’s will and I hardly even qualify as being a Christian.

I contrast the harsh way the author addresses my confused life with the words of Jesus Christ:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest .
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me;
for I am meek and lowly in heart:
and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

I hope the books I write make life and godliness easier and lighter for readers. I hope my work reflects the attractiveness of Jesus Christ.

Yes, the Cross is hard and heavy. No doubting that. But I feel the preacher whose book I read on vacation seems to make life harder and heavier than it needs to be.

I’m thinking about this.

Oh, that reminds me—Today, I promised to tell a great preacher joke from our vacation:

Way out in the deep piney woods of panhandle Florida was this little town with a Bible college where young preachers learned their trade. To give the boys experience, sometimes the local undertaker would let a student preacher conduct a funeral.

One inexperienced young man faced giving his first funeral.

The undertaker explained that the deceased was an old farmer being buried far out of town on his own farm land; because the farmer had no family and because he was so elderly all his kin had already died, no one would be at the burial.

Only two gravediggers would be there.

The undertaker gave complicated directions to the young man.

The young preacher drove down the state road to the county road and turned off on the shell road, then turned onto the dirt road and finally drove along two ruts through the forest.

He got lost and had to backtrack again and again.

He was over an hour late when he saw a weathered farm house where two workmen leaned on shovels over a hole in the ground and a pile of dirt.

The preacher braked to a stop, grabbed his Bible and ran to the hole. Looking down he saw the cement lid of a vault already in place. Hating to keep those gruff workmen waiting any longer, he began to pray and read Scripture as quickly as he could.

Finally finished, he moped hid forehead with a red bandanna, breathed a sigh of relief, and drove off in his car.

As he pulled out of sight one workman said, “That preacher boy sure gives a good funeral, don’t he”?

“That he does. That he does. But I think we might ought to have told him that we’re here putting in a new septic tank”.

After 41 years of marriage Ginny still laughs at my jokes.

I love her so!

She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tomorrow, God willing, I plan to write about sex.

Readers with tender sensibilities about explicit sex may want to skip that posting.