Tuesday, November 17, 2009

High Waters


Above is a picture from Sunday afternoon on the way down to the county beaches. I didn't see any standing water on this road until I approached Haven, and as I said yesterday there's standing water there even after a regular storm.

Below is the road leading to Aaron's Beach, which did have some standing water. If I had a truck I would have plowed right through because it wasn't terribly deep, but since I need my Saturn to carry me to and from work 100 miles a day, I decided to err on the side of sissies chickens caution.

Although most of you are tired of hearing about the storm, there are two others reading who are looking for information about damage from Ida. Many are wondering about Gwynn's Island in particular.

I drove to the island Sunday but only as far as the market. There didn't seem to be anything terribly out of place or unusual other than some roadside debris. BUT. On the local radio station this morning they were talking about a house on the island that was a total and complete loss. Evidently a couple of homes sustained major damage.

Some readers have asked me to check on specific areas. On my next day off, Thursday, I will stop by your property and send pictures if you wish. E-mail me at ChesapeakeBayWoman@gmail.com or Ann Marie at amhaywood@wildblue.net if you're interested.

If anyone reading knows how things look on Gwynnville Road, please leave a comment. One reader asked about that area, and I don't want to leave her hanging until Thursday.

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(That dotted line means we're shifting gears to another topic completely. Please stay seated with your seat belts fastened until this ride has come to a complete stop. Don't worry, it won't be too much longer but we may experience some hairpin turns.)

Now, what I really wanted to talk about here was the phrase "high water" which reminds me of "highwaters." (There is a difference.) Back in school, sometimes Chesapeake Bay Woman kids would wear pants that no longer fit properly--they were too short, for instance. Somebody would point at the poor victim and say, "Hey, you got your highwaters on?" or "You wearin' your clam diggers today?"

It's been a long time since I've been asked if I was wearing my high waters thought about those expressions and how much we'd laugh saying them.

(Warning: Hairpin turn ahead.)

All this talk of pants and school reminds me of the time I wore pants with a broken zipper to school. (The zipper didn't work at all. No zipper.) The thing is, I knew the zipper was broken but didn't care because they were my favorite pants. Then the boy I had a crush on noticed, and it all went sour from there. This is a story for another time and has nothing to do with Ida, clam diggers or storm damage.

It does perhaps have to do with emotional damage explain my abnormal/obsessive fear that my zipper is down whenever I stand up.

What are some of your memories from ill-fitting school clothes including pants that were too short?

(You may take off your seat belts and exit now. Try not to stampede on your way out.)

24 comments:

abb said...

White socks. That's all I'm sayin'...

WV: consu. That just confirms the white socks. And that really IS all I'm sayin'.

Noe Noe Girl...A Queen of all Trades. said...

Penny loafers...GAH! I still hate those things!
I just saw a picture of Newprt Campground on the news...OMG! What a mess.
<><

Ann Marie said...

fashion nightmare of all time... a hand made SMOCK!!! omg why did that woman put her cute little blond headed princess in a red paisly hand sewn smock with a big round wooden button??? I will tell you why.. she hated me even when I was 5.
If I find the picture of it I will post it today.. it is horrid!

and high waters... I swear to you my mother BUYS them that way.. and if they aren't she is going to hem them so they are! Drake is 12 and for some reason he has short legs or something I don't know but his pants are always about 3 inches too long. He now walks the bottoms of them off.. you know where the kid walks on the cuff and it gets a scraggly and has strings hanging off. Yes I allow him to do this because after requesting a hem job and having $50 jeans come home 3 inches too short I said never again. Would you believe she did it again without permission just last year to a pair of camo pants. He woudn't even think of putting them on again. I don't blame him.

wv voldo.... where the hell is voldo??

Maggie S said...

MathewsMark said he will drive over to Gwynnville Road this morning and report back on any damage. I will email you his report

AHR

Daryl said...

Umm .. should you worry that the zipper is UP? Normally you are not directionally challenged.. it must be those hairpin turns got you jumbled

I worked with a guy with Connecticut lock jaw who always wore his high water pants .. one day there was almost an inch between his cuff and socks .. I admit only to telling all the other admins ... I did not send an email or post on Facebook or Twitter as none of those had been invented yet as Al Gore was still working on the plans.

WV: nakim

This is the area between the high water pants bottom and the top of one's shoe (or socks if you have 'em on)

Daryl said...

AM .. jeans with frayed bottoms are EXPENSIVE in NYC .. you could start a business selling distressed jeans!

Ann Marie said...

I could make so much money if I had my own little street front shop to do all the crazy things I do...

bechli... what happens when i don't get my way..

Anonymous said...

Are you kidding me?

I am almost 6' 3" tall, and the internet (and easily available custom-hemmed pants) hadn't been invented yet. ALL my pants were high waters. I grew an inch in one month in 3rd grade -- pity my mother, there is no way she could keep up!

Luckily, by high school it was the 80's and cropped pants were the style.

AMN

Pueblo girl said...

Mmmm. My worst is that my mother was totally wowed by nylon and polyester and anything else that supposedly didn't need ironing. So all my clothes were made in vile synthetic fabrics usually with cheap, loud prints, sent off sparks whenever I walked and stuck like cling film to my legs. Right now I'm remembering some brown polyester slacks with elasticated waist which traumatised me as a teen.

Ann Marie said...

picture of bad horrible smock was posted.. readers beware the rest of the post is .. well maybe you should just skip to the bottom.

Mental P Mama said...

I was wondering about the island...and I had to wear a uniform. The worst thing we could do was have dirty hair when the boys from our brother school decided to streak. 'Memba that????

Meg McCormick said...

There was that one time in like 4th grade where my mom, who sewed ALL of our clothes, was experimenting with a new procedure called Stretch 'n' Sew. As you might guess, the fabric was knit... cotton-blend. It worked well for my chubby butt. (Seriously.) BUT, one time the elastic in the waistband of my new homemade stretch 'n' sew pants came undone and I couldn't keep them up! Nothing too horrible happened, but I did have to hold them up the whole day.

This may or may not have been the same day that I got bonked on the head by one of those giant wooden jumprope handles, or maybe it was the day day that Karen (or was it Dawn or Donna, one of the twins?) chased me up to the top of the turtle shell jungle gym and I fell down on the asphalt below (because that's how we liked our playgrounds in the 1970s - asphalt-covered!) and bonked my head and saw stars and everything was tinted turquoise.

Point being, it was a pretty traumatic year and it kind of all runs together now as ONE REALLY REALLY BAD DAY.

Aren't you glad you asked??

Been wondering about the Island too...

Joe Friday said...

Thx for updating us on the storm damage.

What radio station mentioned the home damage on GI CBW?

Thx

big hair envy said...

I'm laughing so hard at Pueblo Girl's comment that I can't even focus on highwaters, bangs that my sister "cut" for me, OR crocheted ponchos!!!!!!

Mrs F with 4 said...

Highwaters? *snort* I LOVE it! We used to call them jam butties (butty=sandwich), the solution being to put jam on your shoes to attract your trousers to them.

Too short? I went to a school with a very strict uniform code. It haunts me to this day. Regulation skirts, blouses, blazers (cotton dresses in the summer, which started on March 1st, hell-or-high-water), felt hats in winter, straw in summer, woolly over-the knee socks that wouldn't stay up, regulation itchy blue knickers. As slightly rebellious teenagers we would naturally roll up the waistband of the (hideous) calf length a-line navy blue wool/poly blend (designed for maximum itchiness and general grotesque-osity) to a remote semblance of (we thought) style.

And every single morning on the way in to school assembly, the hag of a head teacher made every single one of kneel down on the way past her to check that our skirts were 'modest' enough to touch the floor. And if it didn't she was likely to check you were in fact wearing the gigantic granny-pants the school specified. In public.

Scarred for life..... honestly.

foolery said...

My entire childhood was one big Fashion Don't, so nothing really sticks out. Except for the mullet I gave myself (with The Good Scissors, probably -- shhhh! Don't tell my mom) in the 7th grade. Sad to say, it looked pretty good, comparatively.

Hoping the Gwynn Island residents we met this summer came through the storm safe and sound. : )

Anonymous said...

Hmmmmm, everything was a highwater until I graduated from college and found longer length pants. Now I only wear pants that drag the ground and fray.....and I'm proud.

I remember a pair of striped, bell-bottom terry-cloth pants that CBW used to have and I couldn't wait until I grew into them because they were so cool. They felt and looked just like a beach towel.

Almost as cool as the green/navy blue plaid polyester pants with the tie waist that had a million little blocks with a tennis racquet in each one.

Remember Big Sis? Clothes just don't fit like that anymore.

-Middle Sis

Chesapeake Bay Woman said...

TSA-How about white TUBE socks? With blue and gold stripes around the top because those were the school colors and had to wear them to every basketball game?

NNG-Penny loafers don't do a thing for me either, although my father used to wear them and he could pull it off.

AM-I saw the picture - cute as a bug's ear. The smock was too. My mother and yours must have gone to the same seminar on how to traumatize children. Or maybe it comes from drinking too much Mathews well water, who knows.

betsykk - Thank you for coordinating that info - anyone reading interested in knowing about Gwynnville Road - everything looks fine there, at least what you can see from the road. See you Friday, ms. betsykk/ahr.

Daryl-Oh, what fun we could have had with all this technology back then.

AM-you can have a jeans rack in the corner of your Bavon restaurant. BTW, please make me a reservation for whenever you're frying oysters and hush puppies again.

AMN/anonymous mathews native-I don't know where you could have found clothes that fit. Country Casuals or Fosters Department store sure didn't carry *anything* for tall ladies. My legs were long (thought not as long as yours), and we didn't shop for clothes much/very often, so highwaters were a way of life for me. Sniff.

PG-We need to start a support group: post-traumatic-polyester-pants-wearing syndrome. I can see we already have several potential members, my sister and I included.

MPM-Not only do I remember it, I have some stories to tell...it all started back in 1982 at U.Va...

Meg-Oh, how awful! I just had some terrible flashbacks myself when you mentioned elastic waistbands. Oh the horror. Isn't it something about those blacktop playgrounds? What up with that? Good old dirt and grass makes for a much softer landing. We also played kicball on a blacktop. Crazy. No wonder mercurochrome and merthiolate was so popular. Constantly skinning ourselves up. p.s. You can be a charter member of our support group for children traumatized by parents.

Joe-WXGM/99.1 - those two in the morning briefly referenced it, but not as a part of the official news, just in conversation, at least for the hour that I was listening to it going to work.

BHE-Ponchos! Middle Sister has the best poncho story ever, which has already been posted on this blog so I won't repeat it. I actually loved my poncho - it was all white. Middle Sis got the one that looked like something somebody made in girl scouts. Hideous.


Mrs. F. - YOU WIN! Oh the humanity of having to display the granny pants. How have you managed to stay sane through the years? You can be president of our support group, you clearly have strong survival/coping skills. p.s. Jam butties sounds a condition where somebody really needs to take a bath.

Foolery-Surely you have pictures of this self-inflicted mullet? Inquiring minds are dying to see.

Middle Sis: LOVED THOSE STRIPED, TERRY CLOTH PANTS! They were it. A slight flare at the ankles, and fit just right - elastic waistband, nothing binding. Once I went over to Alda's for the weekend and left them there. I kept asking her for them back. She kept them forever, and one day she wore them to school! By the time she returned them they hardly fit. If I had those pants today I'd frame them. Best pants ever.

Anonymous said...

PS - two things

#1 My word verification is "dingpi", which I believe would be pronounced "ding pee" and I had to comment just to get that out.

#2 My poncho rocked and I can't believe you called it hideous. It had bright blue and orange and white and a great pattern. That's why I was proud as a peacock in it....

Middle Sis

Chesapeake Bay Woman said...

Middle Sis: This is an example of how we see things so differently.

1. "dingpi" is pronounced ding PIE.

2. That poncho looked like one of those pot holders we'd make in vacation bible school.

The End.

big hair envy said...

My poncho looked like a yarn factory threw up. 'nuff said. Although, I DID have a solid yellow one that totally ROCKED!!

Meg McCormick said...

All the COOL KIDS had ponchos and I did NOT. I was too busy tryin' to keep my elastic-waist stretch 'n' sew pants from migrating down my chubby thighs to my ankles. Please, don't make me feel even worse about myself because I DID NOT HAVE A PONCHO.

Just let me know where to send my dues check for the Club.

Mrs F with 4 said...

OH! I always wanted a poncho too! Finally Grandmama knitted (or crocheted?) me one. It was purple with orange edging, and hanging off my tall scrawny and distinctly gawky frame, I looked exactly like a stork in a tablecloth. Or, as Grandpapa so kindly put it, a camel in a curtain.

WV: congions. "Eh, lass, you've some congions, agoin' out dressed like that"

Chesapeake Bay Woman said...

Mrs. F + 4 - If you aren't a stand-up comedian, you need to seriously consider it. That's some funny stuff. Camel in a curtain? Ha!

Meg+BHE-I adored my very own poncho, which had some dignity and was one solid color, but Middle Sister had the one that the yarn factory threw up (good one!).

Off to work, which bites big congions.