Where I Make No Apologies for Who I AM.

It is not blood that runs through my veins, but the splash of a quick summer rain on a too hot day when it pelts down quenching the thirst of my parched back yard leaving it's sweet smell along the way.

The very cells in my skin.  They tell me I should only enjoy the salty air of a nearby ocean, a mere day's drive away.  But in fact, they are packed with the Indiana clay that will never go away.  Not from my skin, not from under my fingernails.  They are permanently part of who I am, what I believe and ultimately what I would not want to spend one single moment forgetting.

I cannot deny I love fresh caught seafood, but that cannot compare to the smell of my hands after man-handling a tomato plant in early July to taste the uncomparable goodness of a red ripe fresh picked Indiana tomato while it's still warm from the summer sun.  Or the dry smell when driving past a field of corn growing in a farmer's field. 

To walk out your backdoor and slice your arms just a bit on the corn stalks that some people only recognize from Field of Dreams and grab a half dozen ears of the Ambrosia sweet corn before a refrigerator has began to spoil the best of your supper for the night.

To bask in the glory of a morel mushroom in those first fine days of May, where we listen to the roar of the race cars at 200 mph while frying those smells throughout the wide open house.

Knowing all this goodness will be quashed under some gloomy dark sky that pervades this middle part of America during those thousands of days in that short month of February.

The place I despise in the winter is the very place that I love all of the days of the year.    I wouldn't trade this boring, flat piece of nowhere for all of the cement and plastic and nothingness that I see on my TV from the glorious elitest who attempt to explain to me that I am not like them.

You're damned right.  I am not.  

So, I'll leave you with the best of the best.  A bit of Pete Fountain, who knows in which state his greatest fan lives.   This courtesy of one of my best friends, whose father gave Pete his entire unparallelled collection when Pete's was drowned under Katrina. 



And I long for my Indiana home.