We went up to Havana the other day and found a few new treasures–four very old painted chairs and a floor lamp with a copper base. We got a mahogany plant stand too, with a marble top, but it’s not pictured because we don’t have …
This weekend was extra nice because it rained three inches, a welcome relief after months and months of burning, dusty drought. Florida is supposed to be a rainy place. When I was a child, the summer rainy season could be counted on, was always drenching wet. …
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
On Sunday we cleaned the house from top to bottom and made a few little improvements. We’ve now got a chalkboard in the kitchen, a slightly–no, very–tacky tall lamp on the sugar box in the living room, and a fancy, frilly brass and marble plant …
New old mirror in the sun room
Purple coneflowers in the vegetable garden
Granite owls
Pond garden
Sad owl by the pond
A few new pictures: My new old tray table in the sun room. I got it at Out of the Attic in Tallahassee. Here I am in the cilantro patch. Doesn’t the bolting cilantro look like Queen Anne’s lace? Another shot of the Swiss chard. I can’t …
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 …
The courthouse in Quitman was built in 1859.
On Saturday Rob, Mom, Kris, Sophie, and I went antiquing in Quitman, Georgia, a small town about an hour and a half from Quincy. It was a brilliant day in Quitman, so bright and sunny. And what a beautiful, forlorn place it was, with a white courthouse like a wedding cake. Around the courthouse there was a shady park with a gazebo and lush live oaks and magnolias and cabbage palms.
Quitman was definitely a sleepy little town, forgotten by time. Rob couldn’t get over how many restaurants there were though—it was a functioning little town. We stopped at a little pizza and ice cream shop, and Mom got lemon custard and Sophie had cookies and cream, and we ordered french fries and Cokes too. All the food was great. And the owners’ kids were working. Our waiter was maybe 11 years old and completely professional. He had freckles and a turned-up nose and he called Sophie “ma’am.” (Sophie’s nine.)
A lot of the antiques stores in Quitman had a sort of haunted quality. One featured scary monkey dolls and lots of dust and a huge collection of hornets’ nests, all hanging from the ceiling. “This is only about half of my mother’s collection of hornets’ nests,” the owner explained proudly.
Probably no need to bring in the rest. I can’t imagine sales of hornets’ nests would be too brisk.
Another shop, across the street, had pump organs. Rob and Sophie kept playing them, filling the musty, dim place with spooky sounds, the kind you hear at the Haunted Mansion in Disney World. The building this shop was in was so old, it was fun just exploring, creeping up the old creaky stairs. Every floor was crammed with gothic treasures–huge scratched mirrors, enormous stained glass windows, Louis the XV chairs upholstered in faded torn flesh-colored silk. . . .
It was neat to be in Quitman. There was just something so familiar about it–because Quitman is exactly the way that Carson McCullers (one of my favorite writers) described small Georgia towns in her novels. It was hot and lonely, but still alive. . . . The old brick buildings had ferns sprouting from their cracks. The old sidewalks blazed in the sun. Rob and I bought a can of tuna for a hungry stray dog and she was so excited. She ran off with the can to finish it in private. She was brindled and shy. She expected people to be mean to her, but she was very gentle even so. She hadn’t become mean herself. She was so thin, all her bones showed. Rob spent a long time on his cellphone trying to contact the Brooks County Animal Rescue. He’s softhearted, but I think he was also a little bored with shopping.
Sophie was really into teasing me during our antiquing trip. In one store she pointed to a little set of figurines and said, “Oh, Leslie, look at them!”
And I said, “Oh, what a cute little pig family!”
And Sophie said, “Uh, they’re not pigs. They’re cows. Duh!”
And I said, “Ah, yes. Clearly you are right, Sophie. I don’t know why I thought they were pigs.”
And then I said to Mom, “Whenever Sophie’s around, I always realize all anew that I am none too swift.”
I could hear Sophie saying to Rob, “Rob, Leslie thought these were pigs!”
Sophie was appalled by the knowledge that I was wearing used shoes from Goodwill. (She is a very tidy, germ-phobic child.) In one shop she found some dusty old ’70s suede wedges in about a size 11 and she held them up, taunting me in a little sing-song fashion, her eyes sparkling with devilish merriment, “Look, Leslie. Don’t you want them? Secondhand . . . !”
I tried to get her back by making her look at taxidermy. But I was torturing myself too.
Sophie and Leslie laughing and squinting. Photo by Kris Kimel
