Last weekend I helped my yard wake up from its long winter’s nap. I swept thick layers of leaves off the paths, did hours of pruning, pulled up loads of winter weeds, and planted pink and white dianthus around my three stone birdbaths near the …
On Saturday morning, I baked some sugar-free vegan banana bread. It was so good—mildly, pleasantly sweet due solely to the bananas, and nice and hearty and filling because it was made with whole-wheat flour. “It’s really good with butter on it,” Rob said. “Yeah,” I …
On Sunday, Rob and I put up our Christmas tree! As we worked, we listened to Christmas music (and the thunder and rain) and chatted about our childhood Christmas memories.
“We’d always put up our tree on a Friday night,” I said. “Back then, a Christmas tree lot was so festive that picking out the tree was a big part of the fun. The lot would be lit with strings of white lights, the trees standing tall, in rows, as if they were still alive and growing in a forest far up north. A fire blazed in a metal barrel, and Kris and I would run around and play in the shadowy, fragrant Christmas tree forest, dressed in our pajamas and winter coats.”
“The people selling the trees were always from Michigan or Minnesota or someplace like that,” Rob said. “They’d grown the trees themselves and hauled them down to Florida. You’d find that out because your dad or somebody would strike up a conversation.”
“I know!” I said. “The tree people were always from the North—from the North Pole, it seemed to me. I thought they might even know Santa, that they were in league with him somehow, kind of like the elves.”
“Yeah,” Rob said. “There was something magical about them, the way they appeared so suddenly at Christmastime . . . and disappeared just as fast.”
“We always chose a cedar tree,” I said, “because that’s the kind of tree Dad had as a boy in North Carolina. A cedar tree makes a really nice Christmas tree. It has a sort of delicate, ethereal, fairy-like quality, especially when you’re really liberal with the icicles.”
“I think we always had a Scotch pine,” Rob said.
“Kris and I always named our tree,” I went on. “And talked to her every day. And tried to plant her in the yard in January, even though she had no roots. And then she’d inevitably turn brown and fall over and I’d cry and cry.”
As we talked and decorated, the cats were up to their usual Christmas antics—climbing the tree, batting at ornaments, and napping on the tree skirt. Rob and I hung only tough, unbreakable ornaments, in case our furry friends ended up knocking the tree over.
“It’s too bad we don’t have any treats to eat while we decorate,” I said after we’d been working for several hours. “When you were a kid, did your mom used to serve any fun tree-decorating snacks?”
“We’d usually have Christmas chocolates of some sort,” Rob said. “Maybe some Christmas M&Ms . . .”
“Oh, that sounds good,” I said. “And when you were done decorating, did you go and stand in the street so you could see how the tree would look through the window, to people passing by?”
“Of course,” Rob said.
“It would be so late,” I said, “but we always had to do that, at the end. That was the last step. We’d stand in the street and gaze at the tree glowing through the living-room window and say it was our prettiest tree ever.”
Today I took the day off work and, to celebrate, I made some healthy sugar-free muffins using a recipe I found on The Conscious Plant Kitchen and modified just slightly. I also picked some of our homegrown Meiwa kumquats and enjoyed breakfast out on the …
Last Sunday, I had the best day ever, not because anything exciting happened but because of how peaceful I felt in my heart. I played with the cats, polished the furniture, carefully cleaned and rearranged my collection of Fiestaware, and hung a little garland of …
October is a magical month here in North Florida. The temperatures are pleasant, the leaves and grass are still green, and the meadows, vacant lots, and roadsides are abloom with yellow and purple wildflowers. After the long, hot, hard summer, the world seems fresh and new, and every little thing you do is more fun because the days are so cool and sparkling. Here’s how I’ve been enjoying this awesome time of year:
I made this little felt bat, a Halloween ornament, on a special day off, a Friday. It was so much fun. I got up way before dawn and sat sewing by lamplight in the living room in my pajamas as I watched a dumb Christmas rom-com called Something from Tiffany’s. Meanwhile, Buntin, my devoted tortie, snoozed beside me in a shoebox full of embroidery thread. Of course, she was sleeping on all the colors I wanted to use, and when I tried to very gently fish them out from under her, she growled softly, with her eyes closed. She was so cozy and cute in her little shoebox bed. When I petted her, she nibbled my hand, which is her own way of petting.
I’ve been thrifting and antiquing on my lunch hour. During one of my recent expeditions, I bought this little antique travel desk at Rabbit Creek Market in Tallahassee. I’d had my eye on the desk for many months. When it’s closed, it looks like a plain wooden box, but when you unlock it, it unfolds into an elaborate laptop desk, complete with a leather writing surface and cubbyholes to hold your ink, paper, and other supplies.
Last week I solved a problem in the sunroom that’s been vexing me for years! I could never figure out what to put against the north wall. For a long time I had a little green-painted chair there, but the chair was low and the wall above it looked stark and empty. Well, last Thursday during my lunch hour, I found a neat pagoda-shaped knickknack shelf that I thought I could hang above the chair to fill in the empty space. I rushed home from work that night and hung the shelf, but there was still some awkward emptiness above the chair. Darn. It seemed like the new shelf was a bust. I stared at the wall for a long time, and finally I hit on a solution. I moved a plant stand (with a big fluffy fern on it) under the shelf, against the wall, then placed the low green chair beside it (to the south). The fern and the plant stand did a perfect job of filling in the empty space! I can’t tell you how proud I was of solving this “enormous” problem. I took pictures and bragged and boasted to Rob. Ha ha, I felt like I was on par with Einstein himself!
The high point of the month was the annual Farm Tour. Mom, Bunny (my sister), and I got to tour four local farms on a sunny Saturday. We picked armloads of zinnias at Orchard Pond Organics, and a big bucket of Fuyu persimmons at Perfect Persimmons. We also got to see—and pet and feed—some adorable animals. At Redemptive Love Farm, a rescue farm in Miccosukee, we played with a litter of baby pigs!
“Look at their tiny tails!” Bunny said, delighted.
“And look at their tiny hooves!” I said. “It’s like they’re wearing dainty high-heeled shoes.”
Bunny nodded. “Their spots are so cute.”
“And it’s cute how they like to hang around together,” I said. “See how they’re strolling about the pen with their little sides touching? That’s too cute.”
Bunny agreed.
We also got to spend time with some llama ladies at Redemptive Love. As we walked near the llama enclosure, a beautiful white llama approached us in the funniest fashion. She spied my bag of food with her lovely large black eyes, then ran—fast, gracefully, and noiselessly—toward me, gazing intently at me as she went.
“Strong eye contact,” Bunny chuckled.
The llama ran right up to Bunny and me. She stopped about two inches from our faces. She was taller than we were.
“She’s so pretty!” I exclaimed.
“And kind of intimidating,” Bunny chuckled again.
We ended up falling in love with the llamas. We fell in love with the whole farm.
“Well,” Bunny said, as we walked reluctantly back toward the car at the end of the tour, “I guess this was the best day ever!”
For the last six years, I’ve been using the dining room as a makeshift crafting room, sitting at the big table to paint and sew. Well, the other day Rob and I started talking about how I needed better spot to work in, and we decided to turn half of the Little House, the small outbuilding that serves as our home office, into a cheery crafting space. Heck, while we were at it, we said, we’d redecorate the whole place. (The Little House is not at all pretty, and its furnishings have sustained a lot of cat damage over the years.)
I was full of ideas on the subject: “Let’s paint the Little House so it’s not so drab,” I said. “Let’s paint it a pretty pastel green or maybe a light salmon pink. And let’s get a big closet-like cabinet to store all my crafting supplies, and let’s trade our big, heavy desks for enamel-top tables. Oh, and I could get an old card catalog to hold all my little jars of beads and sequins.”
While I couldn’t convince Rob to start painting right away, he did agree to go furniture shopping on Saturday. We spent six hours driving from store to store in Tallahassee, coming up empty at every place. I was in low spirits when I got back home, but after a while I rallied. I decided to shift gears and work on another project Rob and I have been discussing—removing the Vine House, our once-cute-but-now-rotting little shelter by the driveway.
I started prepping the Vine House for demolition by stripping it of its decorations, moving my collection of Christine Sibley wall sculptures to the breezeway. Up on a step-ladder, I spent hours festooning the breezeway with Sibley creatures, including mermaids, a giant butterfly, and a leaf-man. Every time I went out to fetch another Sibley from the Vine House, June, our smart little tuxedo cat, would run outside too. She wanted to frolic, eat grass, and roll on the sun-warmed driveway. I’d jog along behind her as she romped, and pet her as she rolled and squawked and made a big fuss on the driveway (she was so excited!). Then I’d bring her back inside, where she’d await her next opportunity to escape. As she waited, she kept herself busy by climbing to the top of my step-ladder, batting my screws around, and burrowing into the cordless drill’s carrying case.
“June,” I said, “you’re being so cute I can hardly stand it!”
When I got all the Sibleys hung, the breezeway looked lush and fancy, I thought. The Vine House, on the other hand, looked forlorn and empty, so I dreamed about the plants I would replace it with—native wax myrtles that would soon be full of berries and birds and maybe even a bird nest!
It was just about dark when I switched gears again and went back to the Little House project. Rob had been cleaning the Little House, and we decided to go ahead and move some of the weird old furniture out even though we had no new furniture to replace it. We carried an old bookshelf to the garage and planned how we’d try to sell it on Facebook Marketplace. Then I spied a little folding table in a corner behind the lawnmower and decided to set it up in the Little House as a temporary crafting table. The folding table gave me a place to put my easel and my Sta-Wet Palette. Then I had another flash of inspiration: I realized I could use the cedar chest in the Little House to temporarily store the rest of my painting supplies until I could find the big cabinet I was envisioning.
I spent the rest of the night and pretty much all the next day happily emptying out the closet in the dining room and organizing my canvases, paintbrushes, paints, rags, and other supplies in the Little House. The dining room looks awesome without my crafting mess. Now maybe we can start actually dining in it again!
As a side note, here are a couple of examples of the kinds of crafts I like to make. These are my two latest acrylic paintings:
