Where We Live

Today's world of cell phones, email, text messages and twitter accounts, handwritten letters can seem hopelessly old fashioned.

These modern technologies make the process of writing a letter and sending it through the air waves so much faster and easier.

Text messaging refers to messages being sent from one mobile phone to another.

Email describes a system for sending and receiving messages over a computer network.

By KAREN CIMMS

kcimms@tnonline.com

About 10-12 years ago, my husband asked me what I wanted for Mother's Day. It didn't take long for me to answer.

I looked at the area behind our screened-in porch spotty patches of grass and dirt, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

I wanted a garden. We have a lot of trees and rocks, and the area doesn't get a lot of sun, so I knew a vegetable garden was out of the question. But flowers I figured we could grow some shade-loving varieties and get a little color back there.

It's 93 degrees and natatorium-humid, so I'm sitting in our library, one of the two air-conditioned rooms in our old farmhouse, taking a break from Saturday house cleaning.

I'm irritable and uncomfortable I don't handle heat well. Flipping on the television, I page through channels, pausing as a show about an international group of doctors volunteering to treat cases of leprosy in a remote village in the Congo catches my interest.

Growing up on a farm in South Dakota, "Shut the gate" was one of the Golden Rules we lived by.

It was right up there next to, "Never miss Mass on Sunday," "Always love your neighbor as yourself" and "Don't forget to Shut the Gate."

Gates are made to keep animals in or out of certain areas and leaving them open to have the animals roam was just a big No No for any farmer or rancher.

If you have gone through a gate that was shut, you are to automatically close it right behind yourself.