What Is It About January?
A song popped into my head yesterday and I asked my husband - “Do you remember Huddleberg Picnic? We used to do it years ago.”
“Sure,” he said and attempted but failed to remember the chords on his banjo. I remembered the first verse and the chorus and went blank after that. Goes something like this…
I went down to the Huddleberg picnic
Dinner all over the ground.
Skitters in the meat was nine foot deep
With green flies dancing all around.
Biscuits and grits was a-bakin’
Beef steak fryin’ in the pan.
Pretty girl sittin’ in the parlour, lord,
Got mighty hot where I stand!
Whoa mule I tell ya, whoa mule I say.
I ain’t got time to kiss you now that mule is runnin’ away.
Well, we tried to remember it for awhile then we tried the vast library of Google. Found no song using Huddleberg Picnic as the key word and a few songs called Whoa Mule with the same chorus but the verses were all wrong. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see if I can find it in one of our song books upstairs.”
My husband and I have been picking and singing old tyme music for over 50 years. We have binders and folders full of songs taking up a lot of space on our bookshelf. Some we know, some we used to know, some we thought about learning, some are alphabetized, some are just piled in stacks. I dragged a bunch downstairs but had no luck finding Huddleberg Picnic. So I decided to go through all the song books, throw away duplicates, alphabetize the rest, get organized. And I did eventually find the song, filed under K for Kicking Mule. Kicking Mule! And, of course, with the right key word I found a Kicking Mule on Google too, with some but not all of the same verses. (Animal folk songs for children, Mike Seeger.)
Ah, project started, may as well continue on. What is it about January? A new year, a new start? All the Christmas stuff that moves in and must find a place to rest? January seems to draw me into sorting through stuff, getting rid of stuff, asking myself if I really need this or that? I reorganized my entire closet, sent clothes and shoes to the thrift shop, bought a closet organizer. My husband, on the other hand, could not bring himself to get rid of anything. Thirty or more years of storage doesn’t mean he might not use it someday. Hmmm, speaking of mules.
Sometimes I think about my son and the daunting task he’ll have digging through the contents of this farm when we pass on. I don’t think he has the patience, would probably heave everything into the landfill. Auctions take a lot of organizational time. But there’s good stuff here, good no longer used stuff. Why, for example, do we have a set of heavy horse harness when it’s been many many years since we worked with horses? Why camping gear when we don’t camp? Oh well there’s always another January until there isn’t, and then, sorry son, I won’t care.
https://www.facebook.com/Northof543/,
January 3, 2024
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