[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/greener-grasses-audio-version.mp3[/podcast]greener grasses — audio version
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Someone asked me recently if I was one of those xenophobic yahoos who hate seeing newcomers roll in to the South End with their yachts and their 40 foot travel trailers and their McMansion bluff homes. I said I think you got me confused for someone else, my evil twin maybe. If my curmudgeonly attitude has confused me with my doppleganger sibling, I apologize to all my new immigrant neighbors, the tired, the not so poor, those dot.com masses, yearning to breathe free the salty seabreeze we share. Because, you see, I’m an immigrant too.
Oh I know there are plenty of Old Timers proud of the fact they were born here, raised here and will no doubt fall of their milking stool with a heart attack someday. Their parents and their grandparents stayed put. Their names are now our road signs and their legacy is that they were immobile. My interrogator, once we established my correct identity, asked how long I’d lived on these shores. Well, sir, about half my life, I said, which, he judged by the grey in my beard and the senility in my thinking, to be a very long spell indeed.
I don’t have a gate to close behind me now that I’m an Old Timer myself. Wouldn’t if I did. I believe in cultural cross pollination —- makes life a lot more interesting to have neighbors from all over, from all walks of life and all points of view. Those folks who came early and stayed late, who raised crops and families, who never dreamed of greener grass ….. well, good on em. They’re the same folks who made Stanwood what it is today and we’ll honor them down at the Historical Society all right. But we all hitched up the Toyota conestoga and then stayed for our own reasons. Just like all our ancestors did when they left Europe and Scandinavia and Asia and Africa and Mexico. We’re all immigrants and when we start getting uppity about our pioneer kin, go sit with a member of the Tulalips or the Stilly or the Swinomish. As for us, the Southendomish, we got the gate open, the door unlocked and we’ll leave the light on for the next wayfaring stranger.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-the-funnies.mp3[/podcast]audio version — the funnies
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