This afternoon, my aunt and uncle treated my sister and me (and David Hobart) to an all-you-can-eat buffet for lunch. It was wonderfully good southern food – fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, yeast rolls, slabs of pork – basically, like a good Southern Baptist church potluck. I had slept late and skipped breakfast (the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet the night before helped satiate my normally-ravenous early-morning appetite), so I was ready to dig in and make the most of the opportunity.

It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Uncle Wallace and Aunt Martha – they’re so friendly and encouraging and interesting. After Uncle Wallace retired from teaching philosophy, he built a cabin on a ridge on his portion of the land. It’s a bit of a drive to get there – you can’t see their cabin easily from Aunt Sarah’s, and have to drive a roundabout way to reach their entrance, almost on the other side of the land. They’ve settled down to a quiet life here in the backwoods. They haven’t severed their ties with the outside world, though – they’re reading this blog! (Hello!) Although my uncle caught a split infinitive in one of my entries. He might find other errors, if he looks hard. A sentence fragment. For instance. ;-)

I didn’t want to leave today, but I had to. It was raining, and starting to get cold, and I just sat on the hearth in front of a nice, warm fire, with the dog on the floor nearby, and the cat next to me on the hearth. It was so comfortable, and I was so full from lunch, I just wanted to stretch out and take a nap, then wake up and read a book and drink some hot chocolate, nibble some cookies or something. I don’t know – anything except pack my car up in the rain and drive for a couple of hours.

The weather reports were talking about ice, though, so I figured I better go before things got any worse. The drive back was cold and rainy, and my windshield kept fogging up and I had to reroute my heat to defog it, which kept me from warming up. I was glad that I left when I did, though, because by the time I got back to Atlanta, it was nearly dark, which would have made driving in the rain with a foggy windshield much more hazardous, and also because it was significantly colder when I arrived than when I left Alabama.

It was good to be back, though. I have a number of things I’m in the middle of reading, and, as relaxing as Alabama is, I have been wanting to get caught up. It’s funny – even after just a few weeks here, I’ve begun thinking of it as my home, and it really felt good when I saw the driveway at the end of a long, cold, rainy drive. And even though, technically, the cot my sister put up for me was much more comfortable than my own sleeping pallet, I was happy to sleep on it again.