A Cheery Saturday Morning
Saturday morning was so strangely cool and bright, a welcome change from the usual July humidity and haze. I ran around the yard taking pictures and feeling wildly happy. My giddiness reminded me of the way I used to feel …
Author: Leslie Kimel
July: An Appreciation
I love summer at home in the yard: the warm nights, owl sounds and frog cries, fireflies, pungent groves of dog fennel, box turtles eating slowly out of the cats’ bowls . . . the mountainmint busy with all different kinds of bees and wasps and colorful flies. . . .
Maclay Gardens on a Sultry Evening
My sister Kris, my niece, Sophie, and I did a photo shoot at Maclay Gardens yesterday when it was literally 100 degrees outside.
I went over to Kris’s house to get ready, and my nephew, Jake, who’s six, was embarrassed because he was running around in his underwear when I arrived.
Later I said, “Jake’s being mean today. He wouldn’t even say hi to me before.”
And Jake cried, all put-upon, “Because I was naked!”
Aunts can be so annoying.
We headed over to Maclay Gardens (a beautiful public garden lush with Spanish moss), and as the sun was setting, we were trudging about under the live oaks, taking pictures, sweating, dreaming of icees, and pretending to be characters from Toddlers and Tiaras, Sophie’s favorite TV show.
Sophie was Madisyn, a feisty pageant contestant, and Kris was her mother, Kelsey. “Madisyn’s a real pistol, ” Kris-Kelsey said. “She’s a fighter, and it is paying off for her. We’ve been doing pageants for like two years, and so far she’s won a gift certificate and $200 towards college.”
I won’t go into any more of the dumb things we were saying, but we stayed in character pretty much the whole time—until we came to a big field full of stinging nettles. For some reason, Sophie was terrified of the nettles—perhaps because I likened their sting to an electric shock.
“Carry me!” she cried to Kris.
“Are you high?” Kris said.
Sophie is nine and a bit large for carrying.
She was wearing a fancy brown satin dress (her Christmas dress), with a crinoline . . . and little high heels . . . and a florescent green Silly Band around her ankle.
Kris was mad about the Silly Band. “Well,” she sighed. “I guess I’m going to have to airbrush that out.”
The best part of the day was when we finally got our icees. Kris and Sophie served themselves beautiful, artistic ones, in tall, clear cups. They looked like parfaits—with frosty layers of banana and cherry and blue raspberry. . . . We stood around drinking them and talking about “spray tannin'” in our Toddlers and Tiaras accents. By then, the fireflies had come out and were all around us.
Fence-Painting Progress and Lots of Tomatoes
This weekend was my favorite kind of weekend—full of home projects and lots of wholesome homey fun.
Rich in Cats
Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I guess it’s best to be honest–Rob and I have 15 cats. See, there was a feral cat population explosion in our neighborhood recently, and Rob and I, softhearted fools that we are, ended up fixing and adopting …
House Proud
Um, this picture is a little dorkier looking than I had intended—but anyway, here we are, Rob and Leslie, standing proudly in front of our lovely old house in Quincy, Florida.
It’s a Florida cracker house (a vernacular wood-frame house), built in 1850. Like all old cracker houses, it’s very plain and solid, with big rooms and deep, shady porches and excellent air circulation. Cracker houses come in many different styles. Ours is a four-square Georgian, meaning it consists of four identical square rooms, two on each side of a wide central hallway. In the beginning, that’s all there was—four rooms (not counting the outbuildings)—but later (probably in the 1920s), a bathroom, sunroom, and kitchen were added to the main house. The original detached kitchen still stands (I think it looks like a little white country church), but the other outbuildings are long gone.
Our property backs up to the old Floridin mine, a fuller’s earth mine, and in the old days, we’ve heard, the mine’s foreman lived in our house. Just about the only other thing I know about the house’s history is that by the 1970s it was standing vacant—abandoned. The city was about to condemn it and tear it down. Apparently there were vines growing up through the floorboards, and you couldn’t even see the house from the road anymore because of the jungle of weeds that had sprung up around it.
Luckily, in 1972 a young couple rescued the house. They bought it for a song and spent the next 20 years fixing it up, doing all the carpentry and construction work themselves.
Rob and I bought the house in 2004. Since then, we’ve restored the front porch, added a breezeway to link the main house and the old detached kitchen, and done loads of landscaping with native plants and heirloom vegetables. We still want to redo the bathrooms and kitchen, put “Quincy green” shutters on all the windows, paint the garage barn-red, and plant about a million more plants. Stay tuned for updates on our progress!