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Georgia Green Stamper – Georgia On Her Mind

  • Aunt Bessie's spring flowers live on decades later

    I’m pretty sure I gasped. Maybe I only think I did, embellishing the memory, but a sight that unexpected can make you gasp, and I’m pretty sure I did.

    We almost didn’t stop by the farm that afternoon. I was tired. Early that morning, we’d driven to Cincinnati where I’d given a lecture. We needed to get home to Lexington for an evening obligation. But my family’s vacant home-place is halfway between those two cities, and only a few miles off the Interstate. Ernie and I agreed we needed to check on it after a winter of neglect.

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  • Seeking the groundhog's forecast in modern times

    If I were naming a holiday for an animal, I might go with Giraffe Day. They’re elegant beasts, and I’ve felt a kinship with them since I was in high school. That’s when Tony Denny observed to everyone in earshot that I had a neck as long as a giraffe’s.

    Or Zebra Day – is there a more beautiful creature than a zebra? If it had its own day, might it become a symbol of racial harmony or world peace?

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  • Close the French doors and keep the grown-ups out

    My husband would say that we bought our nothing-out-of-the-ordinary suburban home because it had a walkout basement. That’s an uncommon feature, we were surprised to learn, in our more flat than not sub-division. The real reason, however, was its tiny front room.

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  • Uncle Murf: The man who defied the odds of survival

    Veterans Day – formerly known as Armistice Day until we realized peace would ever elude us – seems a good time to tell my Great-Uncle Murf’s story.
    This November day of observance first began to honor the veterans of his war, World War I.  And he was the archetypal American soldier. A Kentucky farm boy who’d never been more than a 100 miles from home, drafted but willing and patriotic, he did his duty without glory, without complaint.

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  • Georgia On My Mind: Warm memories of Dad’s charcoal-grilled burgers

    I opened the window of the car and summer slipped in beside me.
    “I know him,” I said when the air conditioner objected to our picking up this hitchhiker. I’d been following him, I could have explained, watching for glimpses of him through the windshield.
    I had almost forgotten the smell of his cologne, one part fresh-cut bluegrass, one part humidity, one part – oh, I can’t name it. Maybe heat, the kind you see rising up in a haze on the horizon? But now I remembered: The scent of summer before time ran away.

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  • Georgia On My Mind: 'Swag Money' fires incompetent cyber-assistant

    I fired my personal assistant. I got worried she was a spy for the CIA using my ho-hum life as a front. Bumbling around working for me, a Kentucky grandmother on Medicare, she was respectably dull and invisible, ready to take on any ISIS terrorists who may have penetrated the frozen foods section of my local Kroger.
    If not an undercover agent, however, she certainly was the most incompetent assistant in history. Or maybe the most impertinent.

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  • Georgia: On my mind - Detective works pays off for class of 1963 reunion

    Ernie and I have hit upon a new plan to supplement our retirement income.
    We’re starting up the Georgia & Ernie Detective Agency.
    I’m kidding around, of course, but with the help of our classmates, friends, the News-Herald and the Internet, we’ve done the near impossible - to announce our 51st Class Reunion (yes we forgot to plan a 50th) on Aug. 2, we’ve located a mailing address for the 58 living members of the Owen County High School Class of 1963.  

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  • Georgia: On my mind - Trust me Honey, it’s not easy getting older

    “You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once, –
    All at once, and nothing first, –
    Just as bubbles do when they burst.”
    Oliver Wendell Holmes
    “The Deacon’s Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”

    I was striding through middle age without a stumble when I bumped smack into Honey.

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  • Georgia - On Her Mind: Say goodbye to Livingood

    Did you hear about Zee Livingood? She passed away last week from complications of good health, the coroner says!
    I was so upset when we got the news that my husband had to shove a gluten-filled doughnut into my mouth and put me to bed with a Diet Pepsi.

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  • Georgia - On my mind: Every generation finds its own way

    My daughter and I were five hours into a road trip with two grandchildren bored in the backseat. They’d exhausted the usual diversions and had sunk to the level of bug-your-sibling-until-it-squeals. That’s when I pulled out an old compact disc of Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits I keep in my car.
    The 13-year-old began to gag. Inspired by her humor, the 9-year-old joined in with noises only a boy can make. I restrained myself from giving them my opinion of current pop music. Every new generation celebrates its own, I understand.

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