Wednesday wandering again

Wednesday was a busy day, starting with breakfast of smoked king salmon from Alaska Seafood Company. I went online about them and found that they ship for free. The product is delicious, and I may place an order with them.

After breakfast, our second covid booster vaccine just as Sam's pharmacy opened. The pharmacist said she was getting lots of phone calls asking about it, we were the first to arrive. Just as with all the others, and this is my fourth covid vaccine shot, I've had no reaction, not even a tender arm.

From Sam's to Publix for the twofers we wanted - - coffee, Blue Bell homemade vanilla, Linda's yogurts, and frankfurters, two brands of all beef - - Ball Park and Oscar Meyer. Hot dogs I'm leery of, as years ago we bought Morrell frankfurters in the Navy commissary in Yokohama, Japan, and, slicing one open, Linda found a mouse foot. So that brand went off our grocery list until Hell freezes over. I've tried most of the hot dog brands and'm no connoisseur, pretty much can't tell the difference. My favorite is pork sausage or deer sausage in a bun with mustard dribbled across the top.

Then home to 7H with the cold stuff for fridge and freezer, then down the street to Hunt's Oyster Bar.

The raw oysters on the half shell were not the "gaggers" a friend told me about that I actually went hoping for, but the oysters they opened for me were good. Hunt's were out of the whole red snapper that we like there, grilled, so we had the whole flounder (sans head), that is offered fried. Flounder is good, but so thin it tends to dry out in cooking. Our all Time best flounder was broiled, floating in lemon butter, and hanging off both ends of the huge platter, at Jimmy Mosconis' restaurant up the Apalachicola River those years; it has never been equalled.

Tuesday it must have been, we went to Ann's, which is what we call Charlie Lahan's Carousel at Laguna Beach. Linda shopped in Ann's gift shop, a favorite place. While she shopped, I took a walker with basket and wandered around aimless. Bought another quart bottle of old time pasteurized whole milk with the cream rising in the neck, comes from Southern Kraft Creamery in Marianna and takes me back to the nineteen-forties. OMG. They also sell Southern Kraft Creamery's ice cream. I bought a quart of the tupelo honey ice cream and we tasted it after supper this evening. OMG.

What else have we been doing to relish life in 7H? Yesterday or the day before, I googled Willard Coley, a relative we knew and visited in Uriah, Alabama back in the forties and fifties, to see if Bill or his brother Frank are still living. No, but googled opened the website "Southern Anthology: Families on the Frontiers of the Old South" and I did some genealogical sleuthing that I once would have simply asked Gina about. There comes a Time when you can't ask loved ones things about family history, it's too late. Gina was our dedicated genealogist. I can't ask my mother or father or grandparents either, questions that I wish I'd thought to ask back when.

Southern Anthology took me to the Crary Cemetery in Bluff Springs, where Mom, my beloved paternal grandmother's, mother Lizzie Lee Crary is buried. Her father John Williamson Crary owned a brick factory, and Lizzie Lee first married Orson Peck Godfrey and had her first child, my grandmother Carolyn Lee Godfrey, in 1877, when she was sixteen. With Orson she had six children, then Orson took off, is the family story, never to be seen again. Was it Orson that shot somebody, or was that a different great-great-grandfather, somebody in the McClammy family, my mother's side? IDK.

In 1894 Lizzie Lee married again, Samuel Willard Coley, and with him had five more children, the last born in 1907, thirty years after she gave birth to my grandmother. A picture of Lizzie Lee Crary (Godfrey) Coley, with her father holding my grandmother as an infant, pictures an extremely beautiful woman. I couldn't make it copy to post here though.

The what and why of Orson Peck Godfrey? He was a brick mason, which suggests that he and Lizzie fell in love as teenagers, him eighteen her fifteen, while Orson was working for her father. Orson later turned up in Live Oak, Texas, married again, and had children and grandchildren, who would be my, what? half-cousins?

In spite of all that, my grandmother Mom named one of her daughters Evalyn Godfrey Weller, my father's sister, my aunt EG.

Thanks to Gina's genealogical research and writings and discussions with me over the years, and my own further work online, including done this week, I have a treasury of family history, some of which is, at least to me, interesting and intriguing enough to share.

A sample is that my grandfather A D Weller and his next older brother C K Weller, who was an Episcopal priest, both married Bluff Springs girls. My grandfather married Carolyn (Carrie) Lee Godfrey, who was a teen at the Time. Uncle Charlie married May Crary, Carrie's mother's sister, (my grandmother's aunt) who was only three years older than Carrie. May died in 1939 and Uncle Charlie then married Grace Coley, who was Carrie's half-sister. Both May Crary Weller and Grace Coley Weller are buried in Crary Cemetery, Bluff Springs, Escambia County, Florida (north of Pensacola). Sometime after Grace died, Uncle Charlie married for a third time, to a woman whose first name was Daisy, a member of Christ Church, Pensacola. My teen-years friend Jack Dennis was acolyte at their wedding. Uncle Charlie died in 1954, while I was a freshman at the University of Florida, and was buried at the Catholic cemetery in Pensacola. My mother said he was afraid of being buried in the same cemetery with two of his wives.

My mother's family the Gentry family and the McClammy family also were from Bluff Springs, Florida.

This is Wednesday evening as I write. We are watching the weather, with extremely dangerous circling thunderstorms and possible tornadoes heading our way from west of us, due through Panama City early Thursday morning. Our porches are almost but not quite as clear as I empty them for an approaching hurricane.

Wednesday wore me out. Now I lay me down to sleep,

RSF&PTL

image from Pensacola cemetery where all my grandparents are buried. pic must have been taken before the hurricane that toppled all the trees