Robin Traywick Williams
Writing from her 'farm-ette' in Virginia, the author, an award-winning newspaper reporter, comments with affectionate humor on life in a rural county on the brink of suburbanization.
Despite the rural locale of many of the columns, the themes are universal, and the writing is funny and sophisticated. Mrs. Williams muses on why women want to join men's clubs and predicts the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. The author's treatment of eating ice cream, watching tv, gardening and taking piano lessons transcends the specifics of her home in Goochland County and gives the reader a new way to look at these everyday activities. Readers will never turn on a garden hose again without laughing at the memory of Mrs. Williams' losing battle with 100-pound, 200-foot hoses during a drought.
Other routine activities remind Mrs. Williams of her childhood, and she is at her best when she is poking fun at herself and the eccentricities of her family. 'There are two kinds of men in the world and I've been married to both,' she tells us in a hilarious treatise on men who can fix anything and men who can't.
An animal-lover of the first rank, Mrs. Williams writes often about adventures with animals, both wild and domesticated ('I'm not sure where the numerical break point is between 'cows' and 'cattle', but it's certainly in double digits.').
Thought-provoking as well as entertaining, Mrs. Williams often shares her insights into living a happy life. In one column, she explains how to do nothing and why it's important sometimes. In another, she gives a funny update on her grandmother's advice on dating that parents everywhere will want to copy for their adolescent daughters.
These columns were originally published in various newspapers and have since appeared on countless refrigerator doors and office bulletin boards.
Robin Williams has more energy and more fun than anybody you know. When she began sharing her hilarious view of such topics as modern male chivalry and how to get your spouse to stop smoking, her columns became an immediate hit. She has a wonderful sense of both the ridiculousness and the importance of everyday events.
A graduate of the Hollins University masters writing program, Robin attended many of the colleges and universities of Virginia as an undergraduate. In the 1980s, she was an award-winning reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and followed that with an award-winning stint as editor of a rural weekly newspaper.
She ran a close second in her first steeplechase and in her first campaign for the Virginia General Assembly, but she came home a winner when she married Charles 'Cricket' Williams. They have a daughter in middle school and a full complement of cats, dogs, horses, fish, hermit crabs, and, unfortunately, ground hogs.
Robin Williams is currently the chairman of the Virginia (Horse) Racing Commission and legislative liaison for Lt. Governor John H. Hager.
September 2000
People who move to Virginia from monoclimatic places like Florida or Alaska say one of the things they love about Virginia is the change of seasons. We are blessed with four interesting seasons, which is lucky, because it takes most people every day of summer, fall, winter and spring to recover from Virginia's fifth season: drought season.
We had a cold-weather drought in 1984-1985, but the drought season usually falls in early summer, right before hurricane season and right after you plant 450 azaleas on the bank just out of hose reach.
It's easy to tell when drought season arrives. The rain stops and the temperature is 99 degrees every day for 75 or 80 days in a row. Then a cold front comes through, dropping a fine mist on your neighbor's yard and bringing the temperature down to 94 degrees for 15 minutes.
As natural disasters go, droughts are at the bottom of my list. I'll take floods and hurricanes any day. Floods and hurricanes provide an interesting diversion for about a week -- three days of anticipation, one day of actual disaster and three days of cleanup -- and then they're gone. Floods and hurricanes boost morale by giving people the opportunity to be heroic and civic-minded.
But droughts have nothing to recommend them. For one thing, you never get any advance warning. They just latch onto your lawn while you're at the beach and gradually suck all the moisture and life out of everything. And they take too long. It's hard to maintain your enthusiasm for a natural disaster that hangs around for weeks like a smoker's cough.
Plus the spectator factor is virtually absent. You just don't see people driving slowly through the neighborhood taking photographs of parched lawns. Nobody comes out to the country to gasp over fields of alfalfa shedding their desiccated leaves. Financial losses from a drought might be comparable to those from a flood, but 150 acres of roasted soybeans just don't have the visual impact of the James River flowing through a hotel lobby. v No matter how severe they are, droughts are boring. There are no thrilling stories about people climbing trees to escape the drought. Have you ever tried to make small talk about a drought? 'Remember the time the Bermuda High got stuck over Emporia and it bounced all the thunderclouds away for two months? Wow! What a time that was!'
Droughts don't inspire bumper sticker philosophers or give anyone anything to brag about ('I Survived the Drought').
Furthermore, droughts haven't the least bit of glamour about them. Floods and hurricanes bring out neighborly concern, volunteer brigades and governmental disaster aid. With a drought, you have to bring out your own hose and operate it yourself. This is perhaps my biggest gripe against droughts.
I've spent every summer since we got married watering bushes. This has led me to conclude that Job couldn't be considered a paragon of patience until he'd dealt with a garden hose. I'm telling you, hoses are the bane of Mankind. They look like such simple devices -- but a more cunning instrument of torture was never invented.
To start with, you never have enough hose. All the hoses in the world laid end to end will not reach from your spigot to the boxwood out front that is getting brown around the gills. And even if they did, the ends would be dented so you couldn't screw them all together.
One year when April stretched into a drought, I bought four new, 100-foot, five-eighths-inch ID, double-ply, triple-option, dual-belted steel radial hoses. They weigh a thousand pounds apiece. Every summer I spend weeks dragging 10 tons of hose around the place.
Of course, before you get a hose where you want it, it hangs up at the other end, and you have to walk back to the beginning to straighten it out. Then you walk back to the end to put it under the bush (which is prostrate and panting by now). Then you walk back to the spigot to turn it on. Then you walk back to the bush to see if it's on fast enough. It's not on at all because there's a kink back at the beginning, so you walk back to the beginning to fix the kink.
Then you walk back to the bush to see if it's on fast enough now. It's not, so you walk back to the spigot and give it a quarter of a turn. Then you walk back to the bush.
After several trips back and forth and several quarter-turns, you get disgusted and give it a half-turn. Whereupon the hose belches and spurts water in a high pressure stream which blasts all the mulch and three inches of topsoil from around the bush.
Hose reels are almost as bad as hoses themselves. They are not made for more than one 25-foot hose. When you unreel them, they turn over and the handle digs into the ground 15 times per hose.
Reeling up the hose is worse. No one is strong enough to turn the crank and reel in 10 tons of hose, so you have to carry the hose back to the reel, where it gets all tangled. Then you have to guide the hose onto the reel with your knees to keep it going back and forth in even rows or it will pile up any old way and then you'll have 25 feet left over that won't fit. Of course, as you guide the hose with your knees, you wipe all the mud and dirt off on your pants leg (or skin, as the case may be).
Next time we have a drought, I'm going to move into the city where they won't let you water anything.
The problem is, it's gotten so that we have a drought every summer, and every summer I have to run the hose around the clock for weeks at a time, trying to save a few bushes. And every hour when I go out to move the hose to the next bush, I curse the bleeding liberals for causing me to spend my summers this way.
If it seems like the summers are getting hotter and longer, it's not your imagination. Four out of the five hottest years on record came in the 1980s, and 1988, if it continues at the same pace, will become the new number one sizzler.
Meteorologists say the earth is heating up because of the 'greenhouse effect,' which is created when people produce large clouds of carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil. All the carbon dioxide from coal- and oil-fired power plants (which is most of the power plants in the world) is forming a sort of greenhouse roof in the upper atmosphere, letting heat from the sun come in but not letting it escape.
This is just the sort of issue you'd expect bleeding liberals to take up with a vengeance. You'd think they'd be out there demanding that fossil-fuel plants be replaced with nuclear power plants, which produce vast amounts of clean energy. But noooo.
They are out there fighting -- successfully -- the construction of nuclear power plants, thereby ensuring that each year will be hotter and drier than the one before.
The bleeding liberals are so anxious to avoid flash-frying in a nuclear holocaust that they are going to turn us all into dried fruit for some celestial trail mix.
Fortunately, I won't have worry about either outcome, because if I have to fool with these hoses much longer, I'm going to commit hara-kiri.
