In the ironweed patch Last night, as Rob fried up some delicious beer-battered seitan sticks and the kitchen floor became dangerously greasy, I made vegan banana-walnut muffins using this recipe. It was another cozy, fun, unsanitary baking session, with Carl on the table cuddling with …
We celebrated Jake’s eighth birthday on Saturday. We had pizza, and Sophie made cupcakes, and I brought the stupidest, most low-rent snacks—Sweet and Sour Filled Twizzlers and Hot Fries. …
Sophie trying to catch a grape in her mouth
I keep forgetting to write down this funny story Kris told me about Jake. The other weekend they went to the Grand Reopening Party at Fashion Pointe, a ladies’ clothing store, and Jake got to spin a wheel and try to win a prize. He ended up winning a sparkly ladies’ watch with rhinestones and a hot-pink band. He wore it around the store proudly, but after a little while he began to wonder if it wasn’t maybe a trifle girly and he said to Kris in his cheerful, can-do way, “You know, I might sell this.” I just love it. He’s seven and has no way of selling anything.
On Friday after work I went to Windy Hill, a vineyard near the little town of Monticello, to pick muscadine grapes with Mom, Sophie, and Bunny. I couldn’t believe Sophie came along because she hates fruit—but apparently she likes to pick things. The vineyard is so beautiful, with hazy blue hills and row after row of muscadine vines. Kimels like the “Fry” variety, a golden grape that gets nice and fat and sweet, so we filled our buckets with Frys and talked “girl talk” with Sophie.
“What are you going to do this weekend?” I asked Sophie.
“Work on my heritage project,” she said happily. I couldn’t believe she was so excited about doing her homework.
“Heritage project?” Bunny said. “Oh, that sounds like fun. You know what you should do? You should interview Hummy about her life on the farm. She grew up on a farm, you know. That’s a really interesting part of your heritage.”
It soon became clear that Sophie was kind of fuzzy on the meaning of “heritage.” “No,” she said, “I’m not doing any interviews. I’m not supposed to. It’s about my heritage. I have to say what I’ll be doing in 10 years and 20 years and 30 years.”
“Oh,” I said, “and how are you going to answer?”
“I’ll be acting,” Sophie replied. “I’m going to be an actress.”
“Ah,” I said. “You do have a gift for entertaining.”
“I want to be on L.A. Ink and Real Housewives.”
“But that’s what you’ll be doing in 30 years, right?” I said. “When you’re washed up?”
Sophie rolled her eyes at me. I think she’ll make a marvelous actress.
I kept trying to get Sophie to try a grape, and in response she would pelt me with grapes.
Sophie’s doing safety patrol after school, she told us. She has a special badge and belt that she wears, and she tries to do a very good job, but apparently she has to deal with a lot of mouthy kids:
“There was this girl playing on the steps,” Sophie said, “so I told her to stop. So she told me she was going to tell her mom and her brother and her brother was going to come to school and beat me up.”
“She was bluffing, Sophie,” Bunny assured her. “Her brother’s not going to do anything.”
“How old was this kid?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sophie shrugged. “Like, first grade.”
“Gee,” I said, “there are some pretty scary first-graders at your school.”
Patrol sounded like a pretty thankless job to me, but Sophie is the most involved, engaged student. She’s awesome. She’s not like weird old alienated me–thank goodness.
Sophie did quite a bit of picking for a girl who doesn’t like grapes. She also threw grapes in the air and tried to catch them in her mouth, though she would spit them out promptly if she did happen to catch them.
We strolled from vine to vine, following Mom, who was picking with real determination, as though it were her job, or as though she were relying on grapes to make it through the winter.
Sophie was walking along and she said, “Oh my gosh, my panty’s showing!” (It was jacked up over the waistband of her pants.)
“Well, we’re way out here, right?” Bunny replied sweetly. “So who’s going to see?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie smiled. “Grapes.”
Rob was out of town this weekend, so I was on my own. On Friday night I had so much fun doing girly things. I shopped online for Wild Strawberry Wedgwood, the new pattern I’m collecting, and watched old eighties videos on YouTube. I highlighted my hair, and then I read The Go-Between by lamplight in bed, with a bunch of cats on my legs.
All weekend I had fun. I got the house really clean, and then I walked around admiring it. I baked oatmeal cookies and amused the cats with catnip, and I wore my brand-new super-soft fleece pajamas even though it’s August and “hot as balls,” as Rob likes to say.
On Saturday the cats engaged in some very stereotypical behavior that I felt was a bit beneath their dignity: They played with yarn. I was making yarn balls to display in this wooden dough bowl I have, and they were playing with the yarn just like little dumb baby kittens do in storybooks. They were biting the yarn and wrestling with the skein and I was giggling and “scolding” them, but of course I didn’t really want them to stop.
I went to Havana and bought a couple little things—an old goose decoy, and an old turpentine pot to put dried flowers in. Then I puttered around, setting them up in the living room.
The weather has been so brutal lately; we’re still in the throes of a terrible drought, and it’s hot; it was 100 degrees today. So I did a lot of watering this weekend, and lots of worrying about global warming. There’s not much that’s pretty in the yard right now, except the woodland sunflowers, which are as tall as I am and loaded with yellow flowers.
One of our gorgeous habanero peppers
Marvelous Carl
Elegant Becky
Oxeye sunflowers and mint blossoms
A cute little Japanese carved-wood owl in the living room
This morning I baked vegan oatmeal cookies as the cats strolled about on the table and jumped up on the stove. It wasn’t even light out yet, and I was wearing my new fleece pajamas, and the house was all lamp-lit and golden and cozy. …
On Saturday Mom was babysitting Sophie and Jake’s foster squirrels, Mable and Cuddly, so Rob and I stopped by to visit them. The babies were so cute. Their eyes are open now, and they are such good eaters …
Poke berries are poisonous to people, but birds devour them.
August in North Florida brings with it certain special beauties–blue morning glories, jewel-like poke berries, puddle-loving smartweed (which I always called “bead flowers” as a kid), purple muscadine grapes, and butterflies galore. Whenever I see a ripe poke berry or a wild grape, it reminds me that it’s August, and it makes me think, inevitably, of another August, when I was 12. That year many bad things were going on in our house, but that summer ended up being my very favorite because my brother and sisters and I practically lived in the woods behind our backyard; we made our own, better life in the woods.
Nowadays the little wooded area I’m talking about is choked with ardisia and other invasive species, but back then, 33 years ago, it wasn’t yet. It was bigger–much bigger–and it was clean and park-like, the ground relatively open between the trees. The summer I was 12, Kris, Bunny, Jacob, and I set up housekeeping in the woods, in a “cave” under some wild muscadine vines. We carpeted the floor with hay and decorated the shady rooms with our collection of figurines–porcelain bunnies and kittens and such. We used sea shells for dishes, and Bunny (who was two) slept in a laundry basket. I remember hanging up necklaces to create a beaded curtain separating her room from the rest. She was always “Aunt Jane” in our games, even before she could talk.
We’d play all day long in our “scuppernong house,” as we called it. We had all day to play and observe our woodsy world. We’d swing on Tarzan vines and sit on the sandy banks of the “stream” (really more of a drainage ditch), pretending to fish with bamboo poles. I remember the big sweetbay magnolias around our stream (their trunks were smooth and silvery), and I remember the crayfish and water skaters. Wearing checkered aprons (mine was pink and hers was yellow), Kris and I would pick bead-flower bouquets and make elaborate meals out of mud and mushrooms for our dolls. Our granny was sick that summer, and we’d often picnic by the stream on ham sent by well-wishers.
Yesterday I spent most of the day weeding, crawling around on my hands and knees among the bushes, discovering poke berries and black-swallowtail caterpillars and other fruits and nuts and creatures that filled me with a sense of the season, of where we are now in the year. And they also made me strangely nostalgic for that other August, when I was 12 and completely free to play and watch water bugs all day, to retreat to my own, kinder world. I had the dirtiest feet, stained semi-permanently with poke juice, and sticks and tangles in my hair; it was truly a terrific way to be.
Today I dug around in a trunk and found my “day book” from 1978, and I was actually able to find the entry that describes the making of the famous scuppernong house:
Friday, August 4, 1978
At 10:00 we made mud cookies and mud bread. Then at 11:30 we went out and played in a big hay pile in the woods. We made hay beds out of hay-stuffed burlap bags. We rested on the big fallen tree in our burlap beds. We looked at the beautiful sky and rested. Then we found candles and a basket and a cutting board. We played in the hay and then we invented a house under a big bush thing. We put hay on the ground of it. We put our hay beds in there, and then we made a box table and chairs. We found some spoons and a glass and a pitcher. We cleaned up our house and played in it till dark. Then we found a lantern, and we lit it in the dark, and it sparkled.
I will try to explain this passage a little bit. When I say we “found” things, I mean we found them on trash piles around the neighborhood. And when I say we found a lantern, it was an old kerosene lantern, and we were playing with matches, lighting it in the woods, lighting up our little cave-house. I can remember doing that. I was terrible about playing with matches. And another terrible thing: The “hay pile” was the beginning of a construction project that would soon eat up most of our woods. Very soon, the scuppernong house and the Tarzan vines and the hills and the sweetbays and the sandy banks would all be gone forever.
Right now, the bronze fennel is overrun with black-swallowtail caterpillars.
Sophie and Jake are fostering two orphan baby squirrels (gray squirrels) through St. Francis Wildlife Association, and today I got to meet the little cuties. They’re all arms and legs …
A few of our lovely homegrown peppers This weekend we did a lot of weeding in the brutal heat and sun. Sometimes I feel sorry for Rob because this is what I like to do on the weekend; I like to labor. And so he …
Here is Sophie getting her sun block put on. (Her mother is putting it on.) Thus, the pouty face.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: Everybody who used the Badger Grease got sunburned.
Jake perseveres through his disappointing snow cone.
On the path to the sand boils
Some nonsense going on
Jake rockin’ out
Just being cute