February was another busy month for home-improvement projects around here. Rob and I were hard at work every weekend. We started fixing up the bathroom in the main house, planted lots of plants, and even did a little Easter decorating. We spent the beginning of …
I wanted to tell you about a favorite place of mine, Tallahassee’s most famous tourist attraction, Wakulla Springs State Park. The park is home to one of the world’s biggest freshwater springs, thousands of acres of woods, and an elegant Spanish-style lodge built in 1937 …
Last weekend Rob and I painted the trim in the back bedroom. The trim in there had always bothered me because half of it was painted and the other half was bare wood. Plus, the bare wood part wasn’t even stained or varnished and wasn’t even completely bare; bits of old white paint were stuck around all the nails. Obviously somebody, years before, had tried to strip the wood, but they hadn’t quite succeeded. I wanted all the trim to match, so Rob and I gave everything a few good coats of a nice neutral color called Mannequin Cream.
We had fun painting, and the cats got into the spirit too. The house was in complete disarray, and Buntin, June, and Frankie were making the most of it. All the bedroom furniture and decorations were piled up in the hallway, and the cats were climbing precarious towers of books and leaping from one wobbly end table to another. As we painted we kept hearing crashing sounds.
We took a break for lunch on Saturday at the Laredo Grill, one of Quincy’s few restaurants. It’s a cheerful place near the Piggly Wiggly and a great asset to our little town. The waiter at the Laredo Grill likes to tease me about my vegan-ness. I always order the Double A Combination Platter with “no cheese and no sour cream,” and whenever he presents me with my plate, he says, “For you, señorita. Extra cheese!” He says it in the most deadpan manner; he never cracks a smile.
On Sunday Rob and I touched up the trim with our artist brushes. Then, after the last coat had dried, we cleaned the cat fur off each piece of furniture and moved it back into place. We cleaned cat fur off the walls, too, with a dust mop.
The room was transformed; it looked so much better.
“I don’t know what made more of a difference,” Rob said, “the painting or the de-cat-ifying.”
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| Carl supervising the painting process |
Last Saturday my sister Bunny, Dad, and I went to the Tallahassee Camellia Society’s annual show. It was held in Eyster Auditorium at the Doyle Conner Agricultural Complex. The auditorium was full of tables covered with row after row of red, pink, and white blooms …
Last week we got our sunroom and kitchen floors refinished. Both really needed it. The sunroom floor had water damage and most of the old finish had peeled off, and the kitchen floor was painted dark green. Both floors are wood (pine), and we had …
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| Mansion in the Garden District |
Over Thanksgiving weekend, my mom, sisters, niece, nephew, and I went on a little trip to New Orleans. We had so much fun. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Canal Street, toured the Garden District, shopped on Royal Street, and ate tons of beignets and pralines and other New Orleans specialties.
We saw so many neat things. At night in Jackson Square, fortune tellers read tarot cards by candlelight. There was a girl dressed up in faded 19th-century clothes, including high-button shoes and a hoop skirt. Holding a tattered parasol, she posed by the iron gates of Jackson Square Park, her face painted like a skull. A white horse pulled a carriage past her, but when we looked closer we saw that it was no ordinary horse; it had glittering hoofs, a single white horn, and white feathered wings.
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| Urn in Jackson Square Park |
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| Cocoally is a really cute shop in the French Quarter. |
I’m tempted to write about everything we saw and everything we did, but I know that would be boring. Instead, I’ll just tell you about two funny little incidents involving Sophie and Jake, my niece and nephew:
On Thanksgiving Day we ate at Chartres House. It took a while to get seated. As we waited around on the sunny, warm sidewalk, Jake kept dancing next to Sophie and playing an invisible saxophone. He seemed to be playing some smooth jazz. Sophie was so embarrassed. She kept coming up to Kris and saying (she was just teasing), “Mommy, if you don’t take control of your child, I’m going to throw him in the street!”
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| Sophie, Kris, and Jake at Cafe Du Monde |
One of our favorite shops in New Orleans was a little place called Adorn that sold surreal (but cute) cat portraits by the artist Cary Chun Lee. There was a whole wall of these bold, bright, funny, cool cat paintings. We were mesmerized. Some cats held voodoo dolls. Others held cigarettes or flowers or pizza.
“I like the little guy eating a piece of toast,” I said, pointing.
“It’s a beignet,” Sophie said, teasing again, rolling her eyes at me. “You’re uncultured, Leslie.”
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| Sophie! |
Last Saturday Rob and I put up our Christmas tree. As we “labored” (as Rob likes to say) we drank hot apple cider out of some festive Spode mugs. The mugs were my favorite part of the day; they have handles that look like candy …
I spent Veterans Day gardening, revamping the bed in front of the breezeway. The bed isn’t very big, but it’s in a pretty prominent spot, right near the main entrance to our house—so I’d like it to make a good impression. The first thing I …
This weekend Rob and I spent all day Saturday cleaning up our vegetable garden. The outer beds, where our pomegranates and clown peppers grow, had become jam-packed with wild petunias (Ruellia caroliniensis), so we dug those out. I felt bad removing them because wild petunia is a beautiful native wildflower, a great nectar source for butterflies, and (at least in some areas, I read) a larval host plant for the common buckeye. Wild petunia has gone crazy in my yard, but I’m only removing it from the vegetable area. It’s welcome to stay in other spots, because it truly is a terrific plant. It blooms for months and tolerates drought. There’s really nothing not to like. It’s just a little overly enthusiastic sometimes.
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| The vegetable garden, all tidied up |
A few months back, Mom gave me this adorable fall wreath. She made it herself. I love it. Mom is always up to something, and I want to be just like her when I retire. She’s constantly sewing and crafting. In the evenings she knits scarves and shawls and even stuffed animals as she watches Father Brown. She’s a member of a circle group at church and bakes breads for the church bake sale every Sunday. (She volunteers for everything.) Her yard is the lushest place, and she’s always got something she wants to show me in it. The other day it was her clementine tree; it was loaded with bright orange fruit, and nearby her Mr. Otto sasanqua was blooming, full of pink flowers as delicate as butterflies.
On Friday Mom had her annual pumpkin-carving party. We ate chili and hot apple crisp and carved our pumpkins on Mom’s kitchen floor. My brother-in-law Matt’s pumpkin was particularly awesome. It was nose-less, and it was throwing up pumpkin guts.
“That’s great,” I said to Matt. “I like how he doesn’t have a nose.”
“Oh, but he did,” Matt said. “You see the scar, right?”
And, yes, right in the middle of the pumpkin’s face were a big silver scar and a dent, as if his nose had been cut right off.
Jake, my 12-year-old nephew, went a different route and carved a scene rather than a face on his pumpkin. He carved a ghost with a flaming grin rising from the grave. I kept hearing Jake in whispered negotiations with Mom. He wanted her to judge the pumpkins and award him first prize.
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| Photo by Kris Kimel |
