HIGH POINTS from El Camino Real
CHRIS DAVIS elcaminoreal@consolidated.net
Yards and pastures along El Camino Real are beginning

to green up with warmer temperatures and few good rains. Lawn mowers were busy all weekend trying to stay ahead of the fresh crop of weeds that are covering many of our yards. It cost me $16 to fill up a five-gallon gas can, so I am hoping that I can use the high price of gas as an excuse to mow less. Your four bits is well spent here because you can find out what is going on without having to drive to town.

Patti K. Low is working to raise money for her Relay for Life team. She is a member of Team Lucille- Rocking and Rolling for Cancer. They are having a chicken spaghetti luncheon April 13 at the First Baptist Church after the morning worship. The cost is a donation to help fight cancer. A big thanks ahead of time to Patti and all the other team members throughout the county who are volunteering their time for this worthy cause.

Sybleen and Monty Collins had a house fire Saturday morning and sustained significant smoke damage in their kitchen. They think the fire started in some plugs behind the televison. Fortunately no one was injured. The Alto Volunteer Fire Department was on the scene quickly and made short work of the fire. I don't even want to think about the mess that they have to clean up this week.

Some good news for Sybleen Collins also popped up this week so things aren't all bad. Her seven-year-old great-grand daughter Summer White had a poem published in "The Anthology of Poetry." Summer wrote a poem entitled "Love is a Desire" at her school. Summer is the daughter of Johnny and Jill White. I'm hoping that her interest in writing will be increased by this publication and she can start writing poems and stories about her great grandma. Congratulations to Summer White on her first published poem.

Somebody has set up a big blue and white tent next to where Harold Parker sells his stuff on El Camino Real, just past the old railroad tracks on the left. They are having a tent revival every night. If you like tent revivals and if they are still there this week, you might give this one a try.

My brother-in-law, Gerald West is celebrating his birthday April 10. I don't know what kind of big plans he has for his birthday, but I imagine that his wife Dianne will be making some. She is a great planner. I usually run and hide when she comes a planning, but the mother-in-law minds her pretty good. I hope she plans something really special and doesn't try to spend all of Gerald's first Social Security check. Happy birthday, Gerald!

Ronnie Hendrick is having hog troubles at his place. The hogs are rooting his yard up at night and he can't catch them. He waits up for them until late and then when he goes to bed they strike and root up the yard. We've been lucky in town and we've only had an armadillo or two rooting around here. I talked to Pete James the other day and he told me that the hogs were really creating havoc with their farming. He said that he spilled a little corn that he was planting and they rooted that up and started down the rows. You can shoot and trap every hog you see, but you can't make a dent in their population. Ronnie is just going to have to fix his yard when the hogs move on and Pete will just have to plant enough corn to feed the hogs too.

I was finally able to get serious about gardening this past weekend. I've had the ground broken for several weeks, but I couldn't find time to get any tomato plants out. I dropped by Dover's Plant House on Friday and loaded up on tomato plants. J. C. Dover is always a big help when it comes to new varieties. My late neighbor, Virgil Schochler, bought some yellow squash plants from a fellow one time and the man told him that they were straight neck squash and then they turned out to be crook-necked squash. Virgil threw a fit and told me not to ever buy plants there because the man lied to him. It sounded like an honest mistake to me, but Virgil had shelled out about four bits for those plants and he wasn't happy. I sure do miss him when it comes time to garden. We gardened side by side for about 20 years and never said a kind word to each other, but we sure had a lot of fun. If I make a row that is a little crooked, I still look over my shoulder to see if he is watching even though he has been gone three years. Anyway, I put out 120 tomato plants on Saturday and the rows look pretty straight to me. I'm hoping to have some more stuff planted by this weekend. I'm thinking that the cold weather is over but we had some thunder late in February and that is a bad sign of more cold weather to come in April. I just hope we don't get any of that hail like they got in Rusk. I've seen some pretty beat up cars up that way. If that stuff will bend metal, just think what it will do to a tomato plant.

Prices keep getting higher, so I'm going to do everything I can to get my deep freeze filled up this summer. Somebody told me that a loaf of bread would be $5 by this time next year. So much for eating sandwiches. All the corn is being used to make ethanol and I guess they are growing corn instead of wheat. Eggs have gone up a bunch too, so I think I'm going to get some laying hens and start raising my own eggs. We finally got to eat one of the chickens that Creager raised for the county show and it was so big it would hardly fit in the pot. It sure did make a nice pot of dumplings. I better move on, I've made myself hungry writing about high prices.

I've gone on a little long for this week and I didn't even cover everything that needed covering. I'll catch you up on everything else in the next issue. I'll see ya next week! And remember, Spend less time worrying who's right, and more time deciding what's right.