Where are you from, Honey?
She manages to deliver her question without any particular tone and without emphasizing any of the words. It might have come out so differently.
Where are you from, Honey?
Where are you from, Honey?
Where are you from, Honey?
But the courtesy that seems to come naturally to South Carolinians sees her through her natural surprise that someone doesn’t know why they sell corn in bins outside a gas station, or why they have a box of crickets back by the restrooms, with an admonishment taped on the wall above it.
For feeding squirrels (NO!!!) and for baiting deer.
The admonishment.
Fish bait in the aforementioned cricket box.
I guess I’m just a not-from-around-here Honey.
Now I wonder if the Indian and Chinese cricket boxes in brass, porcelain, carved ebony, and other precious substances were for the same purpose? They have been repurposed for incense, trinkets, jewelry, and so on, but surely were too elaborate for fishers?
Laurna – Good things come to she who waits. In this case, I waited and my oldest friend has an answer for you, turns out!
I’m on a roll! Crickets were kept in small boxes almost like a “pet”, or more likely, as a good luck talisman http://www.chinatravel.com/facts/chinese-cricket-culture.htm
A piece of trivia I picked up from reading novels based in China, I think?
Alison – That’s funny. You never know what’s going to stick.