For the past year, I’ve been working on outlining all my garden beds with bricks. I dig a trench around each bed, sink the bricks about halfway into the soil, and arrange them in a sawtooth pattern. The bricks add a nice, tidy edge to …
Last Friday after work, I embarked on a little decorating spree that lasted through Saturday evening. Around noon that day (Friday, I mean), I received in the mail a pair of vintage McCoy wall pockets—two sunny yellow ceramic flowers that I’d ordered off eBay. I …
Tonight I’m finishing up a rare four-day weekend. It was so much fun and felt like such a luxury! During most of my time off, I worked on a painting of a chubby baby bunny frolicking in a patch of bluets. I took breaks every hour and a half or so. I’d go out in the yard and water plants with my trusty watering can (it’s so dry here right now!) and pick armloads of ripe satsumas (we have three loaded trees).
I also strolled around our three acres with June, our smart little tuxedo cat, on her new harness and leash. She looked so cute walking along beside me through the still-green grass littered with golden leaves.
“She’s doing just as well as a small dog!” Rob marveled as we walked on Saturday afternoon. “June, you’re being so brave out here in the big, wide world!” (June is an indoor cat, so going outside on her leash is an exciting new adventure for her.)
June began practicing her bounding then (she’s so athletic!), and I had to run as fast as I could to keep up with her. After bounding all the way around the house a couple of times, she started rolling on the sun-warmed driveway to celebrate. She was rolling and squawking and just generally rejoicing in being alive. When I carried her back in the house, she was very disappointed.
I always get nervous about returning to work if I’ve been out a little while. Today I woke up with an especially bad case of the Sunday scaries, so I decided to comfort myself by whipping up a big pot of Sweet Potato-Black Bean Soup. It was delicious—full of rich coconut milk and my favorite spices. I ate it sitting in the backyard under a big Moonshadow sasanqua, which was in full pink flower. (Rob had left for Atlanta on a business trip so it was just me.) I watched birds and talked to the trees and pretended it wasn’t the end of my time off but the beginning.
2 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 large onion, minced
6 cayenne peppers, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons curry powder
3 teaspoons cumin
3 cups water
3 large sweet potatoes
2 15-ounce cans diced tomatoes
2 cans black beans
Salt to taste
2 15-ounce cans coconut milk
Heat the oven to 450 degrees and bake the sweet potatoes until they’re soft (about an hour). Let them cool, then peel the skins off and coarsely chop the insides. Set aside.
Heat the grapeseed oil in a large soup pot over medium heat. Add the onion and hot peppers and sauté until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the garlic, curry powder, and cumin and sauté for a few more minutes. Add the water, sweet potato chunks, tomatoes, and black beans and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and stir in the salt and coconut milk. Simmer for five to 10 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and puree the soup until smooth using an immersion blender.
On Tuesday, I took the day off from work. I really needed it. Tuesday was my day off, but I’m not going to tell you about Tuesday. I’m going to tell you about Monday night because it was even better than Tuesday. On Monday night, …
For the last half of January, all of February, and most of March, I was working obsessively (in the evenings and on weekends) on a small painting of our backyard. The painting was very hard for me to finish because the scene I was trying …
Last weekend Rob and I painted the trim in the back bedroom. The trim in there had always bothered me because half of it was painted and the other half was bare wood. Plus, the bare wood part wasn’t even stained or varnished and wasn’t even completely bare; bits of old white paint were stuck around all the nails. Obviously somebody, years before, had tried to strip the wood, but they hadn’t quite succeeded. I wanted all the trim to match, so Rob and I gave everything a few good coats of a nice neutral color called Mannequin Cream.
We had fun painting, and the cats got into the spirit too. The house was in complete disarray, and Buntin, June, and Frankie were making the most of it. All the bedroom furniture and decorations were piled up in the hallway, and the cats were climbing precarious towers of books and leaping from one wobbly end table to another. As we painted we kept hearing crashing sounds.
We took a break for lunch on Saturday at the Laredo Grill, one of Quincy’s few restaurants. It’s a cheerful place near the Piggly Wiggly and a great asset to our little town. The waiter at the Laredo Grill likes to tease me about my vegan-ness. I always order the Double A Combination Platter with “no cheese and no sour cream,” and whenever he presents me with my plate, he says, “For you, señorita. Extra cheese!” He says it in the most deadpan manner; he never cracks a smile.
On Sunday Rob and I touched up the trim with our artist brushes. Then, after the last coat had dried, we cleaned the cat fur off each piece of furniture and moved it back into place. We cleaned cat fur off the walls, too, with a dust mop.
The room was transformed; it looked so much better.
“I don’t know what made more of a difference,” Rob said, “the painting or the de-cat-ifying.”
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| Carl supervising the painting process |
This weekend was very satisfying, one of the best I’ve had in a while. I got to do all the dorky things I love, like playing with my cats and making cat videos and drinking too much Coke, but I also moved ahead on some …
On Saturday Rob and I touched up the paint on the breezeway and repainted the door that leads from the breezeway to the Little House. The breezeway gets lots of wear and tear because it’s open to the elements–and because it’s our cats’ very favorite …
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| Buntin enjoying the day in her uptight Buntin way |
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| Petunias and caladiums on the front porch |
Rob was out of town on Sunday, so I got to have one of my little “Leslie days.” It was extremely pleasant.
I started it with a delicious breakfast of popcorn popped on the stove. There’s nothing better than eating popcorn at dawn. As I ate, I read a cookbook (The Book Lovers Cafe Cookbook) just like I would a novel, for the pleasure of the language and for the little stories the author included about each recipe. I dreamed of Plumber’s Pasta and Sweet Pea Guacamole.
There were cats underfoot, of course. I turned on the faucet so Carl could play in the sink, his latest hobby. He likes to play with the dripping water, but if the water falls on his head he gets mad and bats at the faucet. Each morning he climbs in the sink and “yells” at me until I turn on the water.
Next I started doing a little unnecessary rearranging of my knickknacks, which is my most favorite pastime. I arranged them one way, and then another. And meanwhile, close by, gigantic Leroy was sleeping in a tiny shoebox. He looked very content. In his mind, Leroy is, I think, a very small animal.
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| Staffordshire sheep. He has a sort of wry expression, doesn’t he? |
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| Leroy in his shoebox bed |
I had some buttered toast for lunch, and then I babied my houseplants. I trimmed them up and fertilized them and carefully dusted their leaves. I rearranged the plant stands several times and rubbed the wooden ones down with Feed-n-Wax.
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| Ferns in the sunroom |
And so the day went, the whole day. At night I sat out on the breezeway and read a biography of Beatrix Potter, with Foxy on my lap. Foxy is our sweetest cat, so soft and babyish. She likes to be held and gently brushed, and she likes lying in sunbeams. Anyway, we were sitting together in the lamplight on the breezeway, enjoying the warm air. We could hear the owls hooting and the armadillos bumbling around among the fallen magnolia leaves behind the Little House.
“Don’t worry, Foxy,” I said, because she always needs reassuring. We were safe from the night but not separated from it. Moonlight striped the meadow, and a frog sang in the rain gutter.
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| Foxy |
