On Saturday Bunny had her annual Halloween party. Everything was so festive. The old greenhouse (which Bun and Matt now use as a little outdoor sitting area) was lit up with strings of ghostly white lights. Skeletons hung in the trees over little groups of crooked tombstones …
I’ll start this most random post with a funny little story about my nephew, Jake: Today Jake stayed home sick from school and spilled a bowl of Froot Loops on his favorite blanket, B. So B had to go in the washer. “I will put …
Jake was the judge of our annual pumpkin contest. Guess whose pumpkin won first place.
Friday night was Mom’s annual pumpkin-carving party. I came over after work, carrying two pumpkins, and Mom’s house seemed so inviting. There were bowls of Halloween candy on the table—orange saltwater taffies and gummy mummy pops. A big pot of sweet-potato soup was simmering on the stove, and Pillsbury crescent rolls were browning in the oven. The tablecloth in the dining room was black lace and looked like a fancy spider web. . . .
Everybody was out back at the picnic table, already hard at work carving. Mom was wearing one of her many Halloween T-shirts. This particular one glowed in the dark. “I have three Halloween T-shirts,” Mom said proudly. “And do you know I’ve worn every single one this year!”
Mom had made all the ladies special fall aprons to wear while we were carving. Sophie got one too, in a cheerful harvest print. She looked so cute, hard at work in her apron, the dotted horsemint and swamp sunflowers blooming all around her, lush purple and gold, glowing in the sunset.
Sophie was being so good, working so hard; she had the great idea that her pumpkin was going to be throwing up. She’s so funny. She is the cleanest, tidiest child who generally hates to get her hands or feet dirty. But then sometimes a strange mood will come over her and she can’t resist rolling in the mud . . . or reveling in pumpkin guts. That’s what happened to her at the party. The mood came over her. She had a whole bowl of pumpkin guts that she was going use to make throw up, and she couldn’t help continually squeezing the guts and rolling them into balls and throwing a few of those balls at whiny little Jake. . . .
Jake was having a bad day. He was cranky because he got up too early, so he kept getting in trouble. In fact, he spent most of the pumpkin-carving party pouting. There is this place in Mom’s yard that we always called The Secret Garden (it’s overgrown and hidden away), and Jake spent a large part of the party pouting there, sitting under the giant oak leaf hydrangeas with his arms crossed and his bottom lip sticking out. Kris kept trying to appease him. She played tag with him while the rest of us carved. But he was never quite satisfied. He kept accusing her of cheating and “not even caring.” His accusations were completely groundless and quite hilarious. “You cheated and you don’t even care!” he’d cry, truly outraged. “You do not even care, Mommy!”
He kept getting bored and wanting to start some new activity. “Hey, who wants to have an egg race?” he cried in a hopeful sort of way.
“Uh, I think you’ve got your holidays confused there, Jake,” Matt said.
“How about you have to run carrying a tub of pumpkin guts on your head?” Kris suggested. But Jake didn’t like that idea. The smell of pumpkin guts makes him gag.
Sophie was being so serious about her carving. She and Bun and I sat in the grass together, working.
“Did you know that Martha Stewart is available on demand?” Sophie said. I loved the way she was making such polite, ladylike conversation. “She’s got some great ideas for Halloween. “
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, um, you can make these eyeballs out of golf balls. You just take some, like, construction paper and cut out the pupil . . . and the iris. . . . And you can draw, like, veins. . . . They’re really cool. . . .”
Bunny told us how she and Matt like to pretend their cat Jelly sells things on eBay–stray socks and bits of string and other stuff she finds in corners and carries around in her mouth, then hides in the fireplace.
Matt joined us and said, “What was that funny thing that happened this week that we wanted to tell Leslie about?”
“I don’t know,” Bun said. “I already told her about Jelly’s eBay site.”
Matt thought for a minute. “. . . Well, that was our week!” he said sheepishly.
“But, man, was it funny!” Bun said.
Then Jake ran up and punched Sophie in the stomach.
“Stop!” Sophie cried. “Mommy! He punched me in the stomach!”
“Okay, Jake!” Kris cried. “You’re going home! I warned you!”
“I’m not going home,” Jake said with a sort of forced nonchalance.
“I warned you,” Kris replied.
“No, you didn’t,” Jake said.
Kris rolled her eyes: “You don’t remember the entire ride over here?”
Apparently the two of them had been going at it all day.
Bunny was very nervous about her pumpkin. She always wants her pumpkin to be scary—every year—but it always turns out cute. This year she was determined to carve a scary pumpkin. She made sketches for about an hour before she even made the first cut. She gave her pumpkin a scar and one shrunken eye. But somehow, amazingly, it still looked jolly.
“Oh, how cute!” Rob said, and then he saw Bunny’s face: “I mean, scary. That is the scariest pumpkin!”
Rob’s pumpkin was a triumph as usual. He spent about five minutes on it and it turned out truly bizarre–and truly inspired! It looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or maybe like Igor of Frankenstein fame.
It was so neat seeing all the jack o’lanterns lit and lined up on the picnic table, glowing in the dark. It was a perfect fall night, warm with a full moon.
After we hogged out on Mom’s sweet-potato soup, warm pasta and spinach salad, crescent rolls, kale chips, and baked apples, we played a game of ghost in the graveyard, a game we knew was doomed because Jake was in such a crazy bad mood. It was fun to be running around in the shadows, in Mom’s jungle-y yard. But Jake was not to be trifled with! On our first round, the boys were hiding and the girls were chasing. I came upon Rob and Jake in the darkness, and I could see that Rob was carrying Jake. Then, suddenly, Rob threw Jake at me, crying, “Here! You can have him!” So I tagged Jake and tickled him, and Rob ran away into the night.
Well, of course Jake started crying. He was crying so dejectedly, saying, “It was a trick! Rob played a mean trick! It isn’t fair!”
He went in the house and sat crying with his arms crossed, and Rob had to go in and apologize and explain that he was only trying to be funny and promise that we’d do that round over and that it didn’t count.
So Jake came outside again, cheerfully talking trash with tears on his face. And we played again, but Jake was soon sobbing even harder than before. See, he ran to the Adirondack chair instead of the swing so Sophie tagged him, and he said, “It doesn’t count, Sophie. I already made it to the base.”
And Kris said, “Um, the swing is the base.”
And Jake said, “You said the chair was!”
And Kris said, softly, “Uh, I actually said it was the swing.”
And so Jake started crying and crossed his arms again and ran away. “You lied about the base, Mommy!” he cried.
And so we had to comfort him and apologize and do that round over too.
And this time we let him get to the base. Nobody dared to even touch him! Bun tagged Matt and I tagged Rob, but we let Jake go so he’d be happy. And he was happy for about a second, celebrating and talking trash. But then he began to get a nagging feeling. He began to feel that maybe his victory was a hollow one. He said softly, sadly, putting his head down, “Mommy, I don’t feel like I really won in my tummy.”
Rob tried to comfort him and help him ease his conscience. He tried to get him to settle down and watch a kids’ show.
“I don’t remember being like that as a kid,” Kris said to me later. “I know I must have had temper tantrums, but I don’t remember it.”
“Oh, I do,” Rob said. “I had them all the time. There are even pictures. Yep. It’s well documented. It was a problem.”
Jake stayed at Mom’s to rest while Sophie, Bun, Kris, Rob, and I took a walk in the nearby cemetery (Roselawn Cemetery). Mom gave us flashlights to take along. Of course, they were all kind of weird and old. One was a tiny dental flashlight. (Why does Mom have a dental flashlight?) Kris got that one.
“What?!” Kris cried. “Mom gave me a flashlight that you have to keep pushing in the whole time?! It shuts off immediately if I stop pushing the button.”
“Kris,” Rob said, “that’s really not the weirdest thing about that flashlight.”
We were walking down Mom’s street, Avon Circle, the street where we grew up.
“I don’t really have a lot of confidence in the battery situation here,” Bun said. (When we were kids, a live battery was always tough to come by at our house.) “We better turn off our flashlights if we want them to still be working by the time we get to the cemetery.”
As we walked in the moonlight in the cemetery, under the gothic old live oaks, Kris told this funny story about Jake: “Today Jake told me he thought it would be a good idea if we started praying together as a family. ‘It’s fun!’ he said, trying to persuade me. ‘I especially like that almond part!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess we better start learning the basics. . . .’”
The moonlight was so magical. The full moon was the same color as the softly shining tombstones, only brighter. And the trees were so huge and inky, dripping with black moss. We talked about scary dreams we’ve had lately, and Bunny remembered her childhood spent playing in the cemetery. “It was a happy place to me,” she said. “It was never sad or scary.”
When we got back to Mom’s house, Sophie taught me how to make a koala bear out of modeling clay while Jake played on Mom’s computer and acted very anti-social (“Jake won’t even talk to me,” I kept teasing).
Sophie was a very patient teacher. “Now you want to take a piece of clay about this big and turn it into a little bowl,” she said in a cheerful, encouraging voice. “Actually, you need to make two bowls. . . . Um, you might want your bowls to be a little thicker. Yeah, that’s good. Good job. . . . And now you need to make a little coil for his foot. Do you know how to make a coil? Do you want me to make one for you? It’s really easy. There, now you’ve got a foot. See? . . . Okay, and now you need to make some little balls for his eyes. Like this. You might want to make them a little smaller. . . . Hummy, do you have a strainer?! . . . We have to use a strainer to make the hair. Do you want a little hair or a lot of hair? You can decide. It’s really up to you. . . .”
Mom packed my finished koala in one of her funny old Cool Whip containers so I could take it home. Mom finds so many uses for old Cool Whip containers, it is truly amazing. In general, you can’t leave her house without a Cool Whip container full of something. That’s because Mom is so generous, even more giving than the Giving Tree–really.
When Jake realized the party was wrapping up, he was full of regrets. “Oh no! Mommy!” he cried. “The party’s over and I was bad the whole time!”
He cried a little on the way home.
Sophie, master pumpkin carver
Sophie’s barfing pumpkin
Clay koalas and a baby, made by Sophie and me
When I was 27 I spent a year teaching English in Taiwan, in a little town called Chang Hua. Here are some excerpts from the journals I kept then: January 31, 1994 We live in a little house, a little wood-frame cottage, attached by guy …
On Saturday Rob and I drove to Thomasville, Georgia, to order stone so we can make paths around our pond. I always enjoy the drive to Thomasville, but it’s especially beautiful at this time of year, when the country roads are …
We are drowning in sweet potatoes!
Last week my nine-year-old niece, Sophie, had to write an essay for school about “an interesting person.” She chose to write about my sister Bunny. Sophie said to Kris (her mother), sighing, “I thought about choosing Lez, but she works at an insurance company—and that’s not very interesting.”
Kris said, “Uh, she doesn’t work at an insurance company.”
“Yes, she does,” Sophie replied.
For the record, I do not work at an insurance company now, nor have I ever. But I’m sure Sophie will remain unconvinced even if I pull out my résumé.
I would have loved to see her this weekend (so I could bore her to tears with shop talk about accidental death benefits and deductibles), but I didn’t have the opportunity, unfortunately. I did get to see Bunny’s chickens, however. I went over to Bun’s on Friday (it was such a warm, lovely evening), and we watched the girls take a dust bath. We were sitting in Bunny’s herb garden, surrounded by low-hanging clouds of purple-blue ageratum, and it was so funny to see them “splashing” in the warm dust, and rolling and reveling.
Beatrix and Millie are best friends. They kept cuddling and cooing in the wonderful dust, and whispering sweet nothings.
“See?” Bunny said. “They like to be right together all the time. They have to be touching.”
They’d gotten extra big and ruffle-y since the last time I saw them. “It’s because they’re piggy,” Bun said. “Here. We’ll feed them some bread and you’ll see what I mean.”
I was trying to crumble the bread before I gave it to them, but Beatrix kept grabbing whole slices and running away. “Come back here!” Bun would say. “Beatrix!” She looked at me: “See? They are pigs!”
Before I went home, Matt (Bun’s husband) gave me a little lesson in antique silver collecting. He told me what marks to look for, how much I should be willing to pay, etc. And he showed me some of the great pieces he has in his amazing collection—candlesticks, flatware, salt and pepper shakers, baby cups, a stamp dispenser, and a tea set. . . !
He and Bun have found most of their treasures at garage sales, so they gave me a few tips for successful hunting: “If you get to a house and you see a bunch of baby clothes, turn around,” Bun said. “Because you’re just wasting your time. You’ve got to know when to cut and run.”
Rob and I found just a few garage sales happening in Quincy on Saturday morning, and we didn’t find any silver. I did, however, buy a hilarious pair of pink zebra-striped flannel pajamas.
“I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of these,” I said to Rob. “I predict you will soon grow to hate them.”
We dug 29 pounds of sweet potatoes on Sunday morning! We found some real monsters, too—bigger than footballs. It was so much fun digging them up. With each one, there was such a sense of surprise and delight. We kept marveling at their size and their beautiful, perfect coral color. There were so many! We made a huge pot of sweet potato-kale soup for lunch—and everyone we know will be receiving a gift of sweet potatoes this week.
We planted a bunch of seeds on Sunday too—Ruby Swiss chard, Lacinato kale, Purple and White Globe turnips, Gourmet Blend and Detroit Dark Red beets, and cilantro. After we finished, Rob kept coming out and staring at the fresh, bare hills and furrows: “Grow,” he’d say. “Come on. What’s taking you so long?”
Note: The pictures that follow are completely irrelevant.
On Wednesday I found these awesome vintage cookie cutters at Good Finds.
More gratuitous cuteness: Carl!
Last night I came across my journal entry about Jake’s fifth birthday party in September 2008 (one of the funnest parties ever). It’s pretty funny, so I thought I’d share:
Last Sunday Rob and I made vegan pesto (with our very own basil) and some great bruschetta too.
No, it’s not a hummingbird or a fairy; it’s a hurricane lily.
This is a level of frou-frou-ness unparalleled in the world of flowers.
Right now I just want to eat up the world because everything is so pretty! Suddenly we have hurricane lilies–everywhere! They come up without leaves, without warning. The bulb sends up this ridiculously fancy flower that reminds me of the Forsyth Park fountain in Savannah (the fountain is two-tiered, with Tritons, and the flower is really over-the-top like that).
Our yard was looking so boring, worn out by the heat–and then the hurricane lilies showed up. And then it rained and the temperature dropped, and all sorts of other stuff started blooming, too–ageratum (purple and powderpuff-like), cutleaf coneflowers, golden asters, Georgia asters, goldenrod, and rosinweed. I’ve been seeing lots of box turtles around the yard, and fat banana spiders. Rob said he saw a possum eating out of the cat food bowls the other night. Rob always says our cat Leroy looks like a possum, so he claimed the possum was Leroy’s father.
We’ve got a lot of our fall vegetables in the ground now. Last week we planted 64 cloves of Inchelium Red garlic, and when we looked at them today we realized that they’ve already sprouted! We planted Holland Red shallots last weekend too, and kale, collards, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and purple and white cabbage. We’re still harvesting lots of clown, habanero, cayenne, and datil peppers–oh, and some Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes.
But nothing’s doing as great as the sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes take the cake! Today we dug our first Beauregard sweet potatoes and we were totally amazed and elated. These things were HUGE–literally football sized!–and they were erupting out of the ground all on their own, just bulging out of the dirt. Digging them was so much fun and so easy, like mining in a magical land salted with enormous gems. Rob said that as we pulled them out “we were both squealing like preteen girls at a Jonas Brothers concert.”
Our biggest sweet potato weighed three pounds all by itself. It was perfect–bright coral pink inside and so sweet. We used it to make an awesome curry. Here is the recipe:
Sweet Potato Curry
Main Ingredients:
Olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
8 clown peppers, chopped
4 habanero peppers, minced
3 lbs sweet potatoes, chopped
2 baking potatoes, chopped
1 head cauliflower, chopped
2 cans coconut milk
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 small bag frozen green peas
2 Tbls mustard seeds
Curry Paste Ingredients:
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbls vegetable oil
1/4 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped
1-2 Tbls fenugreek leaves
2 Tbls cumin
2 Tbls coriander
1/2 tsp asafoetida powder
1/2 tsp paprika
2 tsps ground ginger
1 tsp garam masala
Salt to taste
Directions:
In a large soup pot, sauté the peppers and onion in oil over medium-high heat until the onion is tender and translucent. Add the sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cauliflower. Cover the pot and sweat the vegetables over medium heat until they are tender (about 20 minutes).
While the vegetables cook, prepare the curry paste. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and process with an immersion blender until you have a smooth paste.
Add the curry paste to the pot with the cooked vegetables. Then add the coconut milk and diced tomatoes. Add the frozen peas. Stir everything together until it well combined. Cover and cook over medium to medium-low heat for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent the curry from sticking to the bottom.
The amazing Beauregard sweet potato haul!
Look at the size of this thing!
Gratuitous cuteness: Becky on the screen porch
