June 26, 2016

June Time

Yesterday was a typical summer Saturday for Rob and me. We played with our cats, mowed and edged the yard, and cooked up some marinara sauce from our homegrown tomatoes.

On Saturdays I like to do things slowly and daydream a lot instead of working efficiently. (I watch birds while hanging out the laundry, for example.) I don’t like to talk about anything serious. As soon as Rob woke up yesterday morning, I announced, “If Carl had been a girl I would have named him Daisy Dumpling.” Carl is our little brown tabby, my precious baby boy, and I love to spout a bunch of adoring nonsense about him.

We started the day playing with Buntin, our high-maintenance tortie, in the front bedroom, a room normally closed to cats because it contains our best furniture. Buntin loves to sneak in there and get special attention from us away from the other cats, and we don’t really discourage her. Yesterday we sat on the floor and petted her and complimented her, as we usually do, and we even cajoled her into taking her asthma medicine, which was dissolved in a little blue bowl of kitten milk.

We held our breath while Buntin licked daintily and agonizingly slowly at her bowl of milk and asthma medicine. (It’s a real struggle to get her to take her medicine because she’s such a diva.) When she finally finished, we congratulated her and complimented her even more, and she started running around the room, showing off, opening all the cabinets and rolling on the rug.

“She can tell how happy we are that she finished her medicine,” Rob said. “Look how proud she is. She’s full of beans.”

Then it was time to mow and edge and do all our other yard maintenance. The day was burning hot and brilliantly sunny, and we kept stopping each other to say, “Hey, look how sweaty I am.” It really was amazing.

In the evening, we made our marinara sauce. I was in charge of picking the herbs. I filled a basket with oregano and Greek Columnar basil, and when I brought it inside it filled the whole kitchen with fragrance. I thought the basil smelled especially delightful and unusual—cinnamon-y and perfumey, almost like incense.

We used 10 pounds of heirloom tomatoes and seven chubby cloves of homegrown garlic in our sauce. It simmered through two episodes of Grimm and several old Law and Order reruns. Rob kept the oven timer next to his bowl of snack mix in the living room and got up every 15 minutes to stir the pot.

Mountainmint and prairie coneflower by the Vine House

A clay teapot in the jelly cupboard on the breezeway. I got this long ago in Taiwan when I taught English there for a year.

More clay teapots

A fairy table (in the house rather than outside). The dishes are old Barbie dishes.

My new “Pebbledash” birdbath from Tallahassee Nurseries. I’ll get some better pictures when I finish gardening around it. I want to plant some ferns around the base.