Author: Laura Packard

When I first started my column for Lowcountry Weekly three and a half years ago, I was tasked with the assignment of coming up with a title. Trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds.

I am a religious person, but then again, I’€™m not. The best at it, that is. It’€™s always been a major struggle for me to define how I feel, think, worship, believe to my core because . . . everything . . . is constantly evolving.

New York City is starting to feel like a second home. And for this Georgia Peach, it requires a fair share of adjustments. You see, our oldest daughter has wanted to model for forever and a day and a half and a handful of minutes. We made her wait until she turned 16. Little did we know she was dead straight serious about it. It helped out a lot that she ended up measuring in at an inch shy of six feet.

There is the saying down here in the south that we don’€™t hide the crazy people in our family; we set them out on the front porch and give them a cocktail. I think that is why I love it here so much. Normal isn’€™t a state of being; no, along with permanent press and delicate, it’€™s just a setting on the dryer; and eccentricities, the art of conversation, and cocktailing reign supreme.

Down here, having access to a pool during summer is not only a privilege but a deep and needful must for wellness of being, happiness and overall relief for whatever ever ails you. See, Dante in his Inferno describes the 7th circle of hell as teeming with rivers of boiling fire, deserts of burning sand, and burning rain that pours from the sky.

Road trips are not for the faint of heart. They require both a healthy sense of humor and a cast-iron stomach bounded by a bevy of steely sound nerves.

Riddled anxieties, hidden phobias, bottled up desires, long held secrets, the vanity of voyeurism, the dark side of the human condition and an overall sense of creeping doom; this is noir. And along with my husband, a good oaky chard, books with inked pages and old films, well, these are a few of my favorite things.

When it rains, it pours, or so the old adage goes for having a “€œTerrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad”€ day. Then sometimes it dumps buckets, flooding our respective streets, shorting out the power we so desperately exist upon, blocking our every escape.

I can’€™t compute. Nope. I cannot add, subtract, recall, apply, average, multiply, flip, dip or divide numbers higher than 25.

Fill in the blank. There is a _____ for everything. According to Ecclesiastes 3:1, there is a time for everything and a season . . . And if you asked Martha S, anyone employed by The Container Store or Hobby Lobby . . . oh, or my Triple Type A daughter, Margot, there is a place for everything and everything has its place.