SUNDAY JUNE 22
https://twitter.com/grrreen/status/480709898754207744
My stepdad has a family farm in West Tennessee. Slade and Eli have been helping him build his hunting cabin there since last summer, so we made the trip Sunday morning to see their progress. There are dragonflies, carpenter bees and wasps the size of helicopters. Megan and I sat in a glider on the back porch that Slade had helped screen in and watched the bugs fly around in the heat.
We met Jerry’s parents for lunch at Hagy’s Catfish Hotel, a restaurant right on the Tennessee River in Shiloh.
The shack earned the name “Catfish Hotel” during the early thirties when Norvin Hagy entertained friends at cookouts. He became well known for the delicious catfish, hushpuppies, and hospitality he served up. Guests who had arrived by river were often forced to spend the night after becoming engrossed in yarns spun and darkness made it unsafe to travel the river, thus the nickname Catfish Hotel.
If you’re there for the catfish, and you should be, stick to the all-you-can-eat whole fish — the filets are for people who don’t know what they’re doing, bless their hearts. You’ll get a basket full of hushpuppies no matter what, and really that alone is worth the drive.
We got back and went to see my dad’s mother. She’d invited some aunts and uncles over and we ate Neapolitan ice cream and talked about our lives while the little girls played with some Matchbox cars and old Happy Meal toys in the floor.
My dad had given me a doll named Bubbles for Valentine’s Day one year — she had rosy cheeks, yellow yarn hair and a floppy hat like Strawberry Shortcake. Somehow it ended up at my grandmother’s house, probably played with by at least 25 other grandkids, and she’d made sure to set it aside so I could take it home this time. I gave her the thumb rock and hoped she’d make people try it when they came to visit.
i miss everything already
— laneia (@grrreen) June 23, 2014
