On Sundays, Rob and I love to cook big vegetarian feasts. They take all afternoon to make and usually include country-fried seitan steaks, mashed potatoes, cornbread, field peas or butter beans, sautéed kale, and my Not-Too-Sweet Sweet Potato Casserole. I wanted to share the casserole …
I spent the last two weeks of February reorganizing the back bedroom. Every night after work I’d hurry home, eager to get started. I’d change into my comfy fleece pajamas and socks and sit on the rug in front of the bed to sort through clothes, knickknacks, and other treasures and ponder how best to store or display them.
When I began the reorganization process, clothes, Christmas decorations, and photography props were scattered all over the house, hidden (and often forgotten about) in various trunks and cabinets. My goal was to group all like items together and designate a single spot for each group. In the back bedroom I planned to keep only my clothes, some figurines and other pretty things for decoration, my camera equipment, and the props I’ve collected for my toy photography hobby. Everything else would be moved out.
Reorganizing was cozy, lamp-lit work. Cats purred and rolled on the rug as I sorted and arranged faux pearl necklaces, doll hats, human hats, and other odds and ends. I listened to audiobooks and sipped hot tea. I guess what made the sorting so much fun was that it gave me a chance to appreciate all my little “valuables” and savor the memories attached to them. For example, I got to spend some time admiring a sweet little puppy finger puppet that I rescued from a parking lot in Atlanta nearly 30 years ago. I remember I saw him lying there lost (it was obvious he’d been there for days and had been rained on and run over) and I felt so sorry for him that I had to take him home with me and give him a bath and stitch up his wounds. He’s now got a very nice, snug little home in the back bedroom. He’s relaxing in the old doctor’s cabinet, in a teacup.
I was able to whittle down my wardrobe enough that everything fit neatly in the back bedroom’s tiny closet. No longer do my T-shirts and jeans spill over into the large cabinet nearby. Instead, I’m able to devote that entire cabinet to my toy photography hobby—to my stuffed animals and props. I’ve filled it with Beanie Babies, San Rio characters, antique teddy bears, doll-size parasols, fake cupcakes and candy, hand fans, silk flowers, rhinestone tiaras, and other bits of whimsy, and when I open its doors I feel like I’m entering a small wonderland. Every last item in the cabinet “sparks joy” now, as Marie Kondo would say—so I think my reorganization effort has been a success!
I’m proud of how tidy the bedroom looks in these pictures. I just hope I can keep it this way!
I took last Friday off and had another long weekend. Hooray! “I have so much to do!” I said to Rob on Thursday night. “Well, you won’t be able to get to it all,” Rob warned kindly. “But I’m going to try!” I said. Here …
Last Monday at my lunch hour I ran over to Rabbit Creek, a great new antique mall in Tallahassee, and bought a rocking chair and footstool I’d had my eye on for a while. The owner of the booth where I found the chair was …
On Saturday I made a new improvement to the back bedroom. When Rob went out to get his hair cut, I ran up to Bainbridge, Georgia, and bought an old doctor’s cabinet I’d seen at Sharon House Antiques.
Bainbridge is a little town 20 miles north of Quincy. Getting there involved a pleasant drive through the country. I passed pecan orchards, Lady Moon Farms (a big organic farm), and the FAMU Research and Extension Center (260 acres of farmland, pines, and lakes). The road was bordered on both sides by banks of brilliant, sun-drenched goldenrod.
Bainbridge is such a cool little place, with oak-shaded streets, charming old homes, and a thriving downtown with a lovely green park at its heart. Just across from the park, which features a fountain and a Victorian gazebo, is Sharon House Antiques. The shop is a treasure trove, jam-packed with china, glittering glassware, paintings, carpets, furniture, and even glamorous old evening gowns!
As I browsed around the shop, another customer exclaimed, with a dazzled, deliriously happy expression, “Oh, wow, this is just like . . . sensory overload to me! There’s so much to see!”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t you love it?”
“Oh, I do!” she said.
Once I had made my purchase, I had to carry the quite heavy and extremely unwieldy doctor’s cabinet down the sidewalk by myself and hoist it into my car without looking like I was struggling. I don’t think I was successful; I was definitely struggling. I sailed back home, then had to get the cabinet into the house by myself since Rob wasn’t there. Believe me, I had plenty of trouble carrying the cabinet in. Cats escaped. The word crap was said. The screen door kept closing in my face until I tied it open with a jump rope.
I ran into some more difficulties when I began setting up my new purchase. I managed to get it up on the old red desk in the back bedroom, but it was top-heavy and unstable. To prevent it from toppling over, I tried a million schemes that failed, including “gluing” it to the desk with museum wax and stacking bricks on the bottom shelf to act as a sort of ballast. Finally, I ended up securing the cabinet to the wall behind it with screws and wire. Ha ha. I was dealing with that cabinet all day long.
I kept hitting more snags and finding myself in some new pickle.
“Oh, shucks, why did I buy this dang cabinet?” I said to myself at one point, when I realized it was leaning to one side. The floor was slanted, I discovered, so I had to put some little feet under two legs of the desk to level the desk and the cabinet.
The problems kept coming, but luckily, in the end, I solved all them all. By around 7 that evening, the cabinet wasn’t wobbly anymore. It wasn’t crooked. It was adding some nice height to the desk and providing handy storage space for tea cups and other small, cute props that I use in my toy photography hobby.
I was really tired when I went to bed that night. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the cabinet gleaming softly in the lamplight and looking just like I had hoped it would when I set off for Bainbridge that morning.
I think this post needs at least one more picture, so here’s a shot of a painting I finished recently. The composition isn’t my own; I followed a tutorial I found on YouTube.
For years I’d been bothered by a certain little spot in the yard, a weedy, unkempt area at the base of the giant spruce pine that grows by the living room windows. Every time I’d walk past it, I’d say to myself, “Boy, that looks …
I wanted to show you a few more pictures of my pond garden. This is a garden I’ve really struggled to get right. Rob and I built the pond in 2010, and I’ve been working on the surrounding garden ever since. The garden is contained …
In October 2017 Rob and I started developing our latest garden bed—a large curving area under the giant pecan tree in the backyard. For years this new bed looked rather awkward and scrawny, with lots of bare spots and weedy spots, but recently it’s had a glow up. The summer rains have made it so lush that I think I can finally share some pictures without getting too embarrassed.
The first step I took when creating the bed was to build a little stone patio to serve as the centerpiece. Usually my homemade patios are extremely bumpy and slanty, but this one actually looks pretty good. I’m not quite sure why. I think it may be due to the nice flat large stones I was able to procure at Native Nurseries (my favorite nursery in Tallahassee).
Once the patio was in place, Rob and I used garden hoses to help us come up with the shape of the surrounding bed. We traced the outline with blue marking chalk, then went over it with our edger so it would be a little more permanent. We put down heavy-duty brown paper from the hardware store to kill the grass and weeds, and then we covered the paper with pine bark mulch, which we bought by the bag at Roses. When leaves fell on the bed in fall, we let them lie. We even supplemented them with loads of extra leaves that we found on our neighbors’ trash piles.
Because the bed is rather big, mulching it took a while. But filling it with plants took longer; it took years. I like my shade beds to look really natural, like little forests, with an herb layer, a shrub layer, an understory layer, and a canopy layer. In this particular bed, the herb layer is made up of lady ferns, southern wood ferns, Christmas ferns, chain ferns, yellowroot, golden ragwort, and wild violets. The shrub layer consists of coonties, mapleleaf viburnum, camellias, needle palms, hearts-a-bustin’, and wild azaleas. In the understory you’ll find red buckeyes, an Ashe magnolia, and two young cedars, while the canopy is formed by the grand old pecan tree, a beech tree, and a southern magnolia.
In March of this year, I added a tidy edge around the whole bed using bricks arranged in a sawtooth pattern. The brick edging gave the bed a more finished look, and I started feeling pretty pleased with it.
“The new bed isn’t looking so bad anymore,” I said to Rob one day in April.
The animals that live in our yard seem to like it too. I often see box turtles sheltering under the fern fronds, and white squirrels (we have a population of white squirrels in Quincy) scurrying up the trunk of the pecan tree.
Even though I say I’m satisfied with the bed now, I know I’ll keep adding plants and decorations. And the plants will get bigger and more beautiful every year. One of the great things about a garden is that it just keeps getting better over time. It becomes lusher and more detailed; it grows in character. To see it changing and improving is a wonderful reason to get up every morning.
