Kudsu rules!

Glen could probably be a little more clear on this since he lives in Tennessee, but one thing Cynthia and I noticed on our trip into the Volunteer state was not only how green every thing seemed to be, but how everything appeared to have some sort of growth all over it. Being the curious newspaper reporter I used to be, I had to inquire about what exactly it was that we kept seeing. It reminded me of ground cover but much, much thicker. Turned out it was something called kudsu or kudzu. A lady at the campground told me about it and didn’t know the correct spelling but said it just takes over and grows up and around everything in sight. Some sort of invasive growth. Cynthia said her mother had told her a little about it, since her mother was from Tennessee. Her dad said cows wouldn’t eat it, because it would make their milk go bad.

Anyway, our stay at the campground allowed us to take several days trips, which I will blog about later and include some photos Cynthia took. Just for grins, I’ll give you a little inside preview, however. We went to Jackson one day and saw the home place of Casey Jones (the famous train engineer) and a museum, toured the site of the battle of Shiloh and stopped to eat some wonderful catfish, plus we went through a little town called Adamsville, where we saw the home place and museum of Buford Pusser, though we didn’t go into the museum. Pusser was a famous sheriff who had a movie – Walking Tall – made about him. He walked around with a big club, rather than a gun.

Another day we went into Memphis and toured Elvis Presley’s home place at Graceland. Neither of us were big Elvis fans, but we liked his music and the tour proved to be very interesting and informative. We went back to Memphis a second straight day and went on a bus tour of the city. Again, very interesting and informative.

The one thing that impressed us was, of course, how green everything seemed to be and how neat and tidy things were. Well-manicured lawns, lots of white fences around all the pastures seemed pretty normal. And, yes, the kudsu, or zu, however it’s spelled, ruled.