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It's just a perfect Texas afternoon... It's seventy-something, and the sun is peeking in and out behind wispy clouds here in my corner of Texas. The weather is just right, no humidity, just cool enough to keep mosquitoes huggin’ the undersides of leaves and not makin’ pests of themselves.  Tiny titmouse chicks hatched yesterday in the nest mama titmouse built atop the anchor bolt in the satellite dish. They’re not feathered up yet and their necks are wobbly. Neighbors on two sides of me have their outdoor grills fired up and the good cooking smells are wafting in the air. I can tell by the aroma of spices comin’ across my back yard that one is grilling fajitas, the other is barbecuing chicken.
No salt while the beans are boiling to soft because salt toughens every dang thing it touches, except laundry water. I use plain old table salt to soften the hot water for whites. Works as fine as Calgon, if you add the salt to the washer before you add soap and bleach. Oops, got off topic. I was talking about butterbeans. If you have a hamhock or bacon drippin’s handy, add it to the bean water. If not, add one packet of Goya Ham flavored concentrate. Works just as fine. I put a lid on the bean pot for the first twenty minutes. By that time the beans have got up a good rolling boil. Then I take the lid off, and turn the fire down because I want that water to simmer on a soft burble until the butter beans are tender as all get out. Once done, move that pot off the fire, sprinkle salt over the top--not, too much--then put the lid on and let them rest while you bake the cornbread.
Foods up! You’re ready to eat. Now, in the South, we season our beans in the bowl with Tabasco sauce. My Uncle Frank, bless is departed soul, loved his butterbeans topped with ketchup and Tabasco. I forgot to mention sweet iced tea. I have fallen in favor of peach flavored iced tea. I make a pitcher of that separate. Everybody else in the family likes plain old Lipton. You can use any fake sweetening for tea that you like. I use pure cane sugar. When I tell you a pinch of real sugar, I mean it. Because sugar breaks down fibers. Fake sweetening won’t do the job. Bet you didn’t know that. FACT, you can take the toughest cut of beef, score it, dampen it with water, and rub granulated sugar on it, put it in a paper bag in the fridge overnight. Before you cook it, bring it to room temperature, next, rinse the sugar off, season to taste, cook it any old way you prefer…it will be fork tender. Movin’ on to dessert... It is not shameful to use store-bought mixin’s, especially if it cooks up better than you can do it from scratch. We’re having hot peach cobbler and Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. The very best cobbler mix is Louisiana brand Cobbler mix and any brand of canned pie fruit, with the syrup. Soon as you take the cornbread out of the oven, pop in the cobbler. Long about the time you’ve cleared the table and got coffee perking, cobbler’s ready. Enjoy. Now that you know what's for dinner... May I suggest a way to read three of my favorite books for one low price? And hundreds of thousands of more books, too! For a limited time, the Almost Perfect Series is available to read free with a Kindle Unlimited subscription! Don't have Kindle Unlimited? Learn more and/or sign up for a Free Trial Here! Three men, seductive as sin and living single, meet three strong women passionate about life, loving, and family, who will change their lives forever…   Follow Jackie to stay up-to-date on New Releases, Specials, and just plain ol' chattin'!
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I am superstitious. I can’t help it. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t sit on a bed after it is made to perfection, and I have heart failure if any visitor to my home does. Pull the covers down first if you need to nap. That’s fine. Okay. So now I’m a writer. I need good luck along with craft and a few good author pals. I have cats for the first time in my life. Cats are no respecters of superstition. I don’t make the bed up any more. There is good luck, bad luck, and no luck. Not making up my bed guarantees NO LUCK. I’m good with it. The cats are good with it–or maybe not; I didn’t ask their opinion.
I don’t walk under ladders. I NEVER pass up a penny on the ground. No, I don’t. Here’s why: There is an old Southern adage if you save all of your pennies in your kitchen from one Leap Year to the next, you will have great good fortune. No fail! Leap Year is the year in which a woman can ask a man to marry her. Your good fortune will include some other woman snagging the fool you were gonna pop the question to because you were enamored of a certain muscle, but by the time Leap Year rolls around again–there he is with his pickup on blocks and not a single useful muscle between his ears (or anywhere else) and a bad back.
Plus, you are bound to have at least a hundred dollars in change. Nice Valentine’s gift to yourself. My first year in Houston, I found seventy-three dollars in change on the ground. In the scheme of things that doesn’t sound like much, but when I lived on off-islands and tiny jungle villages seventy-three dollars was enough to feed a family six for three months. I hoard my luck like Bookbub subscribers hoard books. I was in Panama City, Florida, not long ago and went to Walmart. Of course I walk with my eyes on the ground (don’t come at me with traveling body parts–you know what I mean). There was a hundred dollar bill floating across the macadam. Honey, I stomped it. Next, I saw a twenty-dollar bill. Snagged ’em both.
Here is a way to have bad luck follow you for the rest of your natural life: Toss out old blouses and shirts without first cutting off the buttons. I have a button jar. Back in the day, we used to make all of our own clothes. We needed those buttons. Buttons are lucky, even if they are just sitting in a button jar. My best friends from up north looked at me like I was crazy when I tried to stop them from tossing old clothes with buttons. All are D-E-A-D now. Every single one. If that ain’t bad luck or no luck, I don’t know what you’d call it.
The Chinese have Kitchen gods. I have a Kitchen witch. She’s a cute little thing on a tiny broom, with a pink felt skirt. I bought her from an old woman at a Fiddle Festival in the hills of West Virginia, Appalachia. I haven’t burned a pot of beans since she came to live with me twenty-five or so years ago. No Lie. I used to have to keep a gallon of vinegar on hand for burned pots. In case you don’t know, here’s what you do: Pour a cup or two of vinegar in the pot and bring it to a boil. Keep that full boil going until that black crud just works loose, and the pan comes out shiny as new.
I feel like I’m on a lucky streak right now–in my resurrected writing career and life in general–and Bingo. I won three $500 jackpots this month. Two back-to back on the same night! Did I stand up and dance a jig and make a fool of myself? Dang right. In reality, including superstitions, we make our own luck–good, bad or indifferent.
And today IS your lucky day. Well, if you like to read a romantic suspense book with; according to this Vine Voice Reader: "Characters you will want to slap, shake, possibly kill, along with those you will love! You will want to hold them, give them support and just cheer them on to a better life. This is a book you will not want to put down."
Why is it your lucky day, you ask? Because my publisher is offering No Perfect Secret and the rest of the Almost Perfect Collection in Kindle Unlimited for a Limited Time! Oh, and if you've already read the series, I've added a few other deals from my publisher! And...there's a Giveaway for a Kindle Fire! See... Good luck is possible!
Also on Sale!
It’s funny that for most of my life I had no idea that I was poor or lived in poverty. True, I was raised poor, married poor, had a slew a kids and so stayed poor. I budgeted every nickel. Now here’s the thing. My parents came from good families. Working stock. My grandfathers owned their own businesses. All had been through the Depression. Money was tight. Next along came World War II and my uncles and dad went into the military. We had coupons for every shortage–shoes, fabric, sugar, butter, gas. I had my first stick of gum after the War. Juicy Fruit. One pair of buckled sandals got us through summers, otherwise we went barefoot. A six-ounce Coca Cola was 6 cents and a treat.
When I was raising my kids there was no such thing as Food Stamps or Aid to Dependent Children or Disability. Never heard of it. My first job paid fifty cents an hour. My husband earned a dollar an hour. There was no such thing as credit cards. Or ATMs. We didn’t have checking accounts. We got our salary in cash in little brown envelopes. We fed, sheltered, and clothed our families on what we earned. We ate our meals at home, rode buses to church. We sometimes went to a matinee movie. 10 cents. For family entertainment we went on picnics, crabbing, and fishing.
Every single woman in my family, including me, darned socks, turned collars, replaced missing buttons on shirts and blouses, and often hand-stitched our own clothes. We put Christmas for our children on layaway at department stores. We went out into the country to pick black berries and wild plums to cook up jellies. During the War we couldn’t get out to the country. Farmers hooked up mules to wagons filled with garden produce and made the rounds in our communities well into the late Fifties. Until bylaws and restrictions were passed against it, we kept chickens and hung our wash on clotheslines.
A day trip to the movies with my granddaughter ended at an upmarket bakery. I bought 6 cupcakes…almost fainted at the price: $37. Won’t be doing that again–ever.
How things have changed in the fifty-some years since I raised my kids.
Rachel Cameron from The Sheriff's Woman knows a thing or two about being poor and raising children. She also prefers to lick her wounds and protect her children from gossip and shame in isolation on a small homestead in the Ozark Mountains. But life-long bachelor and ex-Marine Sheriff Garrett Stark has other ideas.
A little taste of living off the land and making do...
Download The Sheriff's Woman from your favorite retailer! 
I'm still kicking! In fact, I'm chasing a litter of ferocious pooping kittens around my house. I also got to spend time with my daughter and great-grandson yesterday. He's as cute as a button with with creamy peach skin and silky brown hair! Happy child, too! Always a plus.
This happened... A bunch of stuff fell off my car (all plastic anymore), so I taped it up with pink duct tape. Now it's easy to find in a parking lot anyway. Yeah, I'm still drivin'! Enjoying life, and still writing, too! Sharing an updated new release with you today! Keep Reading, folks! It keeps us young...or at least knowing what the younger generation is thinking. Another plus! XoXo Jackie
"Sweet Second Chances, Romantic, and Witty!"
Falling for the wrong man landed Stormy Maxwell in jail for eleven months for a bank robbery she says she didn’t commit. Now, while she's trying to restart her life with her seven-year-old daughter, another man wants something from her. Something she doesn't have to give! READ MORE
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