I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: Life

  • between the lines, outside the lines – who defines the lines?

    between the lines, outside the lines – who defines the lines?


    Hurricane Debby’s destructive force slowly zigzagged across Georgia and the Carolinas this week following its first landfall on the Florida Gulf Coast; bringing tornadoes, flooding rains, and swollen rivers along its path toward a final destination in the Northeast. At least eight deaths have been recorded from the hurricane according to PBS. While our Midlands area in South Carolina was spared the deadliest blows, the rains started early this week and reminded me of the biblical tales of Noah’s Ark. I felt like it had been raining forty days and forty nights when it was only Tuesday.

    Yesterday the granddaughters’ summer day camp was closed because of the hurricane which meant four-year-old Ella and two-year-old Molly had to stay inside at home while Mama Caroline worked from home. Nana and Naynay joyfully reported for duty to help, bringing french fries from Rush’s.

    both girls happy to see fries

    Naynay encourages sharing while Nana takes pictures

    Molly had show and tell for her antibiotic –

    Ella worked on vision therapy

    As if by magic, Ella learned to color lines and inside the lines this summer so our morning activities included extensive coloring by both girls. I told Ella her Naynay had always colored between the lines which made Pretty LOL while she reassured Molly not everyone colored inside the lines all the time. That Pretty, always the rebel.

    Rivers not far from our home continue to rise from the heavy rains, neighbors and friends struggle to remove downed trees, to have power restored, to clear debris from roads, to begin the long recovery process from Debby’s disastrous forces.

    We give thanks not only for our safety but for all the first responders who continue working to expedite the recovery process. I hope our followers in cyberspace will join us as Pretty and I remember the families of those who lost lives, homes, everything they held dear.

    Meanwhile, our granddaughters returned to their summer camp today. I believe Ella will color between the lines, but trust me. She will question who created the lines.

  • mind your own damn business, says Governor Walz

    mind your own damn business, says Governor Walz


    Yesterday Governor Tim Walz became Vice President Kamala Harris’s personal choice to become her Veep in the 2024 campaign. Of course Pretty had vetted the governor before I even knew who he was. We both sat and watched their first campaign event together in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, the birthplace of America.

    When the topic is women’s reproductive rights, follow the yellow brick road repaired by a Wizard named Walz in his home state of Minnesota six months after the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court in June, 2022, that took away a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Minnesota became the the first state to restore personal freedom of choice for women in January, 2023, an effort championed by its governor Tim Walz who understood from his own experience that personal health decisions must be personal.

    4-year-old granddaughter Ella watches at Aunt Coco’s house

    Daddy holds 2-year-old Molly while Uncle Seth watches with them

    both granddaughters will grow up with a woman President (hopefully!)

    I like Tim, or as I have decided to call him, Happy Tim. I also had a Civics teacher in junior high school who was a football coach, and I credit that course with sparking my interest in understanding the importance of separation of powers in our government. Coach K smiled a lot, too, but our football team wasn’t nearly as good as Coach Walz’s.

    Onward.

    ****************

    P.S. Thanks to Mama Caroline for pictures used here.

  • nothing says summer in the south like crape myrtles and heat

    nothing says summer in the south like crape myrtles and heat


    my favorites in our front yard

    temperature on screen porch at 5:00 p.m. yesterday

    Have mercy – it’s done turned hot over here in South Carolina for the first day of August in 2024.

    I feel a twinge of the vapors coming on…or maybe it’s a case of the Olympic Fever.

  • being present in the past

    being present in the past


    “Naynay, I’ve been busy in the pool today so I need you to make sure you clean my tree house before we come back again. It’s really a mess,” said four-year-old granddaughter Ella to me as she handed me her small toy broom with a serious expression before she made a mad dash to keep up with her mother and two-year-old sister Molly who were already at the gate on the way to their car.

    The girls, their mother and Pretty had been to the zoo one morning with cousin Caleb and his parents earlier this week, but I couldn’t rally for that fun excursion so I was happy they brought the party to our house in the afternoon. Everyone was trying to keep cool in the triple-digit summer heat.

    Ella’s definition of “tree house” puzzling

    hope my cleaning passes Ella’s inspection this week

    (she was right about one thing: it was messy)

    And yet, as I try to live every day in the present, I am a wanderer in the wilderness of my past during the quiet times when the dogs haven’t spied dangers from the mail delivery, Pretty is at work in her antique empire, the granddaughters are busy making new friends at summer camp – just me with the memories of another time and place.

    George Patton Morris holding his granddaughter (me) in 1946

    Barber Morris, as he was known for more than sixty years, wore a starched white shirt with a carefully selected tie every day of his life until he closed his barber shop in Richards, Texas in the mid 1980s. I thought of him especially this week on his birthday, July 29th., and rummaged through my first baby pictures book to find images of this man I adored until he died in 1987.

    George was born in 1898 in Walker County, Texas, the ninth of eleven children born to William James and Margaret Antonio Moore Morris. Maggie Morris (1864-1963) was from Winn Parish, Louisiana and had her first child in 1882 when she was eighteen years old, her last child in 1906 when she was forty-two. Imagine what their family life was like raising eleven children on a small farm in rural southeast Texas at the turn of the twentieth century. Surviving the Great Depression of the 1930s as a widow with the death of her husband in 1927; living through two world wars. I knew my great-grandmother because my grandfather took me to visit her when she came to see her daughters, his sisters Erma, Berniece and Hattie Jane, in Huntsville which was only a half hour from where we lived in Richards. She was a tiny woman, frail, and like my grandfather, not very chatty.

    George and his wife Betha holding their granddaughter in 1946

    If only I could see my family again…I would ask countless questions I didn’t have sense enough to ask when I was a teenager absorbed with keeping my secret homosexual self safe. Today I’d want to spend the time thanking them for the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the foundation they laid that gave me the opportunities I’ve had to live the good life. I am grateful for my precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul.

    Back to the present, though. It’s time to pick up Ella and Molly from summer school camp.

    Naynay, can we have ice cream today? You betcha, and your tree house is spotless.

  • before the brand came The Red Man

    before the brand came The Red Man


    Teresa and I had purchased the house in Montgomery, Texas, in 2010 so I could be closer to my aging mother who was struggling with dementia in a memory care unit in Houston. Her condition had deteriorated significantly during the past four years of her stay there while the long-term care policy critical to our financial stability neared the end of its benefit period in that blazing hot Texas summer of 2011. My mom needed to move to a less expensive place… I had equal parts of fear and dread at the thought of moving her, but I was in a search and rescue mode for a place closer to our Worsham Street home in Montgomery while my wife Teresa kept a busy schedule in her job managing the mercantile department of the Mast General Store a thousand miles away from me in Columbia, South Carolina.

    I was in the middle of writing my third nonfiction book, desperately seeking a publisher and/or a literary agent who could locate a publisher for me. You have to build a brand, I was told with every rejection. Red’s Rants and Raves (my first blog on WordPress) wasn’t setting the right tone for my “serious” writing. Seriously? Nobody was more critical of human frailty than The Red Man, our rescued Welsh terrier, but I got the hint.

    The premier for my second blog, I‘ll Call It Like I See It, was on August 02, 2011. Nine hundred ninety-nine posts thirteen years later was a number I couldn’t have imagined when I started this amazing ride that began as a solo journey with zero followers. In November of 2011 Shirley Baranowski Cook from my hometown of Richards, Texas became the first email subscriber joined by my cousin Melissa Bech, Worsham Street neighbor Lisa Martin and college roommate Robyn Whyte – all in December of that year. I was no longer alone on the journey.

    The cyberspace universe has been magical for me – my readers who are now loyal subscribers and social media followers have become friends whose comments make me laugh when I need a laugh, inspire me to keep going when I wonder if anyone finds me that horrible word for old women with white hair: irrelevant. I developed an Honor Roll of Friends, but I had so many names I was overwhelmed by the numbers and didn’t dare risk overlooking anyone.

    Just know that I treasure each of you who has made part or all of this journey with me – I hope you know you made the Honor Roll. If you are in doubt, just ask.

    ******************

    P.S. In 2012 I’ll Call It Like I See It: A Lesbian Speaks Out was published. The Red Man was delighted and quick to claim credit for giving me my start.