Lately I’ve made a little project of adding some finishing touches to the back bedroom. I’ve been scouring eBay for vintage solid-brass switch plates, curlicue picture frames, and Roseville and McCoy pottery in blues and greens. Boxes have been arriving on our doorstep, and I’ve …
On Thursday Mom had a pumpkin-carving party and she gave me these adorable felt ornaments she made. Whenever you go to Mom’s house she always gives you something: old newspapers to use as garden mulch, maybe, or an interesting catalog she got in the mail. …
Last night I made Vegan Orange Coconut Muffins, flavored with a little orange extract.
Whenever I bake, something always goes wrong—maybe not horribly wrong but at least slightly wrong. Last night was no exception. I ended up spilling pretty much an entire bottle of orange extract on the floor. I had to drive to Winn-Dixie to get another, which was kind of a pain, but I must admit, now that I’ve safely returned from Winn-Dixie, that the mishap had its upside: The kitchen smelled delicious.
While the muffins were baking, I did some peaceful, easy little chores, like winding the clocks and brushing our very large, ball-shaped cat, Leroy, whom Rob has recently taken to calling “Mr. Hunky.”
“Just relax, Mr. Hunky,” I was saying.
When the muffins were done, I ate one in the living room while watching an episode of The Rockford Files in my pajamas.
Rob likes to make fun of how lame I am. Last night he got home around 10 and I told him about my evening: “I ate a muffin and watched Rockford with a bunch of cats,” I said as we stood in the curiously orangey-smelling kitchen.
Rob grinned and replied, “Now that’s partying Leslie-style!”
Vegan Orange Coconut Muffins
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon ground flaxseed
3 tablespoons water
1/4 cup melted vegan butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon orange extract
11/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
11/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup coconut
1/3 cup canned mandarin orange sections, chopped small
Topping:
2 tablespoons melted vegan butter
3 tablespoons sugar
Directions:
In blender, mix the flaxseed and water until thick and creamy. Add the flaxseed mixture to a large bowl. Add the butter and sugar and mix. Add the orange juice and almond milk and mix again.
In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until just blended. Gently fold in the coconut and mandarin oranges.
Pour into a lined muffin tin and bake at 375 degrees F for 20 minutes or until slightly browned on top.
When the muffins have cooled, dip the tops in melted butter and roll in sugar.
On Friday Rob asked me to go to Native Nurseries on my lunch hour and get some garlic for planting. I did, and on the way back to work I texted him, “Got the garlic.” I didn’t mention that I’d also bought a statue of …
On Friday night after work, I made muffins. Of course my cats were involved, since I plainly prefer my baking ventures to be as unsanitary as possible. Buntin, our black and orange tortie, really seems to relish the hustle and bustle of baking–and seeing what …
It happens every year in late summer or early fall, often after a heavy rain: At the end of September or the beginning of October, the old yards and cemeteries around Quincy are festooned with the bright red flowers of surprise lily (Lycoris radiata). It’s an eye-popping display. There’s nothing subtle about surprise lily. It’s as red as a Red Hot, as red as an Atomic Fireball, as red as a Swedish Fish.
Surprise lily is a perennial bulb, a member of the amaryllis family, and a native of China. The flowers appear suddenly, without leaves, without warning, in brilliant clusters crowning a tall bare green stalk called a scape. As long as the flower clusters are in bloom, I can’t stop admiring them and taking pictures of them.
Other things I can’t stop doing: talking about them and trying to think what they remind me of. “They’re kind of like those light-up spinner wands they sell at night at Disney, aren’t they?” I’ll say to Rob. “No, they’re like cat faces with extra-elaborate whiskers!” But this year, after decades of consideration, I’ve decided that they’re most like the fantastical, turning, singing valentine that Snoopy whips up, magically (in about two seconds), in Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. Do you remember this, fellow middle-aged people? Snoopy uses only a pair of scissors and some red paper to produce an intricate, frilly, three-dimensional card that’s also a music box. His creation is as fancy, delicate, and amazing as a surprise lily.
After the flowers fade (they last maybe a week or two), the leaves emerge. They look a lot like daffodil leaves—narrow and grass-like—but the color is different, more blue-green or grayish, and each leaf has a distinctive silver stripe down the middle. The leaves persist through fall and winter and most of the spring. Then in late spring they turn yellow and die back. The plants will be in hiding all summer. You’ll forget about them until they emerge again to welcome fall with all their delightful, gaudy fanfare.
Surprise lilies are easy to grow, truly maintenance tree—no watering, no fertilizing, nothing. I usually plant mine in fall, when the bulbs are featured items at the nurseries around town. Plant pointed side up about 3 inches deep and 8 inches apart. Keep in mind that the flower stalks will grow about 18 to 24 inches high and the leaves will stick up about half that height. I like to site my surprise lilies among other, somewhat smaller plants that will help hide the leafless flower stalks (but not the flower clusters) and the foliage as it declines in spring. Surprise lilies are adaptable when it comes to soil type, so they’ll grow almost anywhere. Just don’t plant them in deep shade; they need some sun to bloom.
I’ve purchased a lot of my surprise lilies at our local nurseries, but I’ve also gotten some from other gardeners. Surprise lily is a passalong plant, a living gift shared between friends, neighbors, and generations. When I first moved into my house in Quincy, surprise lilies grew in the front yard in several long rows, a present from a gardener I’d never meet. I moved the bulbs carefully, placing them here and there in the planting beds I was creating. I also gave a few to my office mate, who was very generous and farsighted; she was always giving me seeds, including some gorgeous acorns from a prized oak in her yard.
People who grow surprise lilies seem to want to share them. A few years ago my mom and sisters and I procured some bulbs from a surprise-lily enthusiast who had filled his whole Tallahassee yard with the Swedish-Fish-colored beauties. You could get six bulbs for $10, and all the proceeds went to charity. He’d dig the bulbs right out of his yard for you while you waited, and he tossed in a free garden tour with every purchase.
Yesterday on my lunch hour I bought a large Christine Sibley stepping stone shaped like a sunflower. I was very excited. After work I wheeled it in the wheelbarrow through the wild petunias and positioned it in front of my favorite bench. Then I stood …
Today Rob and I made vegan meatballs. We’d been dreaming about them for weeks. Rob wanted to call them “Everything But the Kitchen Sink Meatballs” because they had so many ingredients—walnuts, oats, panko, tofu, nutritional yeast, sautéed mushrooms, and more. We baked them, then deep-fried …
About three years ago I started collecting Wedgwood’s Wild Strawberry pattern.
One day Mom was at my house, looking in my china cabinet, and she said, “You know, that was Aunt Nancy’s pattern.”
“Oh, my gosh,” I said. “That’s so interesting! I have such strong memories of her china. I’ve even written about it before in stories, but somehow I didn’t remember it was Wild Strawberry. And yet at some deeper level I must have remembered . . . and that’s why I was drawn to it and why I started obsessively collecting it!”
Visits to Aunt Nancy’s house were rare and special. She was actually my father’s aunt, my great-aunt. She and Uncle Bill (Granny’s brother) were rich and had a big house in Winston-Salem, the city where my father’s family had lived for generations. Dad always talked about Winston in the most glowing terms. Cakes tasted sweeter there. The daffodils and dogwoods grew more beautifully and flowered more profusely. I could never understand why we lived in Tallahassee instead, and why, when Winston was so wonderful, we so seldom visited.
It was all very perplexing to me.
I was shy and always felt like a stranger in Winston since we hardly ever went there. I don’t think I ever really said anything to my relatives (I mostly nodded and smiled), but I wanted so badly to be accepted by them, to be a real part of the family.
Whenever we went to Uncle Bill and Aunt Nancy’s, I was fascinated and would roam the house agog. Aunt Nancy kept her china displayed in the dining room, on a long table with a white table cloth, and I thought the delicate dishes looked like seashells on a white, white beach.
Aunt Nancy used to let my sister Kris and me play with a special doll she had, her own doll from when she was a little girl. The doll was not a child, like most dolls, but an elegant lady with an extensive wardrobe, including dainty kid gloves, high-heeled sandals, and a pearl necklace. Kris and I would sit in front of the fireplace in the living room and dress her up, but even as I was playing, I was listening to the adults, eavesdropping, trying to decipher their secret codes, trying to understand why things were the way they were.
Something had happened before I was born. Something momentous. My grandfather, Dad’s dad, the leader of the family, the star of the family, the one who made everything happen, had died. Dad always talked about him in tones of awe. In fact, all Dad’s relatives talked about him in this way. He was so funny, so smart. Daring. Stylish. Creative. Innovative. Ahead of his time.
But he had a darker side, too, though nobody said this outright. Somehow I knew, I always knew, that he was an alcoholic.
Dad’s father had owned a successful sign company, the J.D. Kimel Sign Company, and Dad used to work for him after school and during the summer when he was young. (Uncle Bill worked for him too.) When my family was visiting in Winston, years later, Dad would drive us around town at night so we could see the neon signs, glowing like stars, that he (Dad) and his father had built so long ago.
“Yeah, that was one of ours, kids,” he’d say, pointing out the window, and his voice was wistful though he smiled.
Two years before he died, Dad’s father had gotten very sick with congestive heart failure and had been forced to sell the sign company. He wanted to give it to Dad, but Dad wanted to stay in college; he was the first in his family to go to college and had decided to pursue a Ph.D. in physics. So Uncle Bill bought the sign company.
As a child, I could never understand why my father had given up the sign company, why he had given up everything, all connection to the past, why we lived so far away, in such isolation. I could never understand why we lived the way we did. It always seemed, to me, we were in exile. Dad spoke so highly of his family, but we rarely saw them. Winston was the greatest place on earth, yet we hardly ever went there. Why? As a child, this was my constant, secret question.
Did Dad secretly hate his family? Had he been somehow hurt, driven away? Or did he simply lack the capacity to be close to people? I could never figure out the answers, but my greatest wish was that our separation would end.
And so on those precious trips to Winston-Salem, to Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bill’s, I would gaze at Aunt Nancy’s china with delight and secret envy. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Aunt Nancy collected Wild Strawberry and now I do too. Even the smallest, most frivolous decisions (like what kind of tea cup to buy) are often influenced by ancient memories and desires.
