leaving Charleston

M returned with a rental car - the last one they had - having found a good place to do the work on Dapple.  We took the rental and headed out to explore Charleston, running through the old downtown again and then off into the poorer residential areas.  I noted that the looks we were getting were less than friendly (unusual down here) and M dryly pointed out that we were driving a police car (a black Mercury Grand Marquis.)  I suppose we'd have gotten more friendly response in a big old blue camper.

I should have noted that we headed off in a major thunderstorm, pouring rain and incredible lightning and thunder, but still 85 degrees or so.  You walk outside here and your glasses fog immediately, as though you have just leaned inside the dishwasher.  The rain let up, but the lightning sort of kept on - we walked down the pier at Folly Beach tonight and watched the sky light up every one to two seconds. Incredible weather.

I got to walk through the downtown outside market and look at the sea grass baskets, beautiful work (not affordable) and watch the women weaving them. There was also plenty of kitsch, Pakistani goods, t-shirts, and stuff of the sort you'd buy at Fisherman's Wharf, but I enjoyed my flea market fix anyway.

The Gullah community is still strong here, with a particular Gullah patois and culture. There are Gullah restaurants, but we haven't gotten a chance to sample the cuisine.

I did eat fried green tomatoes, though, because they were on the menu, so how could I not order them?  It's thing I can say I tried. My take on it is that someone had useless tomatoes that would not ripen, wondered what to do with them, and had the Southern brainstorm that anything's better fried.  Well, green tomatoes have very little taste, so you're eating pretty much fried (fried stuff.)  I'm all for frying the hell outta deep fried fried stuff, having been raised by a Southern woman. Fried chicken, fried socks, fried air, fried green tomatoes. Yes ma'am.  But I won't be practicing recipes for fried green tomatoes, sorry.

Here's what I do know: we were talking yesterday, and if we had to choose one place to come back to so far, one place to spend a few weeks exploring, M would pick the desert - the soothing long vistas and muted delicate colors, the geographic formations of time and huge power, the pueblos and peoples who lived peacefully in harmony with the land for so long before "settlers" arrived; but I would choose this land, with its heavy perfume and hanging moss, the weight of heat and water and rolling thunder in the air, the smell of brine and sea, the brutal beautiful history.  I'd come back here.

lots of this

Starskovitch & O'Hutch-mobile

that history again - the slave market