I Never Saw That Before!

I went to the North Georgia mountains for Thanksgiving. Like the turkey, I was stuffed when it was over—full of food and unwanted advice, as usual.

I go up there twice a month, so the drive is a familiar one. I am frequently bored by the scenery, since I have been driving the same road since I was student teaching in 1977. Hubby doesn’t usually go with me, since my mother doesn’t like him much, but my daughters are often in the car, either asleep or with their ears full of music. If I do happen to see something unusual, they are incommunicado, so it is a good thing I have this blog now. I can share the rare and unusual sights I might see. A while back I noticed a huge metal sculpture of (a)a huge insect (b)a triceratops (C)a dragon. It stands before an antiques and folk art place on the right as we go out of Gainesville, and it is one such sight. What inspired a person to make this thing?

Once, a humongous praying mantis hit my windshield, and green guts reminiscent of guacamole covered the windshield. Naturally, if something so wonderfully gross occurred, both girls were asleep. I had to turn on the windshield wipers to clear the glass, and they missed it. That was before I got a phone with a camera, unfortunately.

Anyway, this time I noticed a house about halfway up the road to Dawsonville with seven or eight dead crows hanging on branches all around a big tree in the front yard. How weird is that? There’s a certain amount of deliberate and macabre action involved here. First, a person would have to kill the crows. Then, he or she would have to tie strings on their little black corpses, and then contrive a way to tie them at regular intervals on the branches of the big tree. Why?

On the way back home today, I watched for the dead crow house, and made my daughters look at this unusual yard art. I did this so I would have confirmation, since there are people who would believe I made up the whole thing. A little too admiringly, Older Daughter said, “It’s like a cult thing or something!” It was weird enough so that even I, usually an intrepid photographer, was unwilling to stop and take a picture. What if they looked out the window?

Thank goodness for Google! I found some info on the internet about this hanging up of crow cadavers. Apparently, in “the southern Appalachians,” some people hang up a dead crow to warn off other crows, literally a “scarecrow.” Whoever lives in the dead crow house needs to realize that seven or eight hanging symmetrically around the tree is surely OVERKILL.

Never mind that I grew up in “the southern Appalachians”… I never saw THAT before!

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving and that sometime this week, you see something that you never saw before!

"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it." - --John Steinbeck