So when I used to think about Tennessee before I lived here, I'd think that there was more tobacco and smoked hams than there were people. Lots of smoked hams. And those smoked hams were in smoke houses tucked away behind every respectable house with at least 8 hound dogs in the yard. And come smoking time, boy did it smell nice in the ol' holler. Funny that when went house hunting, we couldn't find one decent smoke house.But we found that if you just hold on to your ideas for a while that the ideas come to you. And just 6 months after we moved to Tennessee we had ourselves here the classiest smokehouse in Leiper's Fork. Heck, we were so dang proud of it that we invited the Leiper's Fork Volunteer Fire Department out to come take a look at it. And did you know that they got so excited over our new smoke house that they called in the Fairview Volunteer Fire Department to come take a look-see at it, too? You should have seen it. It was just breathtaking....there was a whole parade of lights and sirens running up and down our road. People nearby where already standing in line out front of the place just to see when we would start selling our cured hams and bacon and jerky and venison. You just can't buy that kind of advertising anymore. As a matter of fact the sheriff came out and was directing traffic just to keep things moving. And the neighbors were so nice! They were so excited for me and so worried that the new business venture would go to my head that they would just run up to me and give me a hug and tell me that everything was going to be OK and to just trust God to help us through this until things were back to normal. You just can't find that type of people anymore. Things were going quite well and the excitement was building by the minute. As a matter of fact one of the school buses came by and parked in front of the house for about 20 minutes before the Sheriff was able to convince him to turn around. Then that bus driver went out to the school and told everyone there about the new smoke house in town. When something is this good, word just travels so fast. But you know what? I think the Volunteer Fire Department got a little bit jealous of our new found calling and began to think that maybe a smoke house the size of ours would just be too much for this little town to handle, you know with all the traffic and things, because they ran up into our house with their fire hoses full of water and put our whole dang operation out of business!!! Pretty soon all the smoke stopped pouring out from under the roof and you can't have a very successful smoke house business without smoke. The people waiting in line could see that their orders for hams, bacon, jerky and venison were not going to get filled anytime soon and after much low level exchanges amongst eachother they decided to go on home. The neighbors were still so sweet though and held my hands and told me to call them anytime if we needed anything at all, since they knew that most of our money was tied up in the new smoke house thing. Did you know that even the Red Cross came out and tried to cheer us up by giving us some gift certificates to the local hotel, so we could get our thoughts together and not have any hard feelings about things because you know that most businesses fail the first year so we are actually in some pretty good company and if I talked to enough people I bet I can find some that have had to deal with things like this too. I mean where can you find hospitality like that except here in the south?So anyhow, I suppose that Leiper's Fork isn't quite ready for so much success, so we will try something a little different next time.
