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 …
Some time ago I worked with a very nice man who loved fall. On the first slightly cool day in October during the first year that I knew him, he arrived at work exhilarated, full of happy plans for the season, and he shared those …
On Saturday, Mom, my sisters (Bunny and Kris), and I went to Mule Day in Calvary, Georgia. It’s a big old-fashioned country celebration with a sunrise breakfast, a mule parade, cane grinding, meal grinding, syrup making, plowing contests, arts and crafts, a petting zoo, live music, and tons and tons of food. A huge golden field is filled with 500 booths of arts, crafts, food, and antiques. Plus, there are mules everywhere, and old-fashioned buggies and wagons. The parade starts at 11 and is a real spectacle, with high school marching bands, mules, horses, donkeys, and antique tractors.
The fun is for a good cause. Mule Day is put on by the Calvary Lions Club and raises money for Lions Club sight programs (which work to prevent blindness and improve eye health) and local charities.
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| Havana, Florida, is a little town we pass through on the way to Mule Day every year. Havana is right up the road from Quincy. |
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| A little more country scenery |
We parked in an old pecan orchard and walked to the festival grounds. There are so many booths at Mule Day, just acres and acres of them. Some of the booths are selling antique tools and dishes and quilts and furniture. Others have craft items—handmade birdhouses, Christmas wreaths, scarves, soaps, candles, pottery, fancy aprons, and more. There are people selling their own homemade cakes, pies, cookies, and Christmas candy—peanut brittle, divinity, sugared pecans, and fudge. Then there are the food trucks—dozens and dozens. You can get barbecue, roasted corn, turkey legs, greens, cornbread, cotton candy, sweet potato fries, hush puppies, boiled peanuts, fried pickles, fried green tomatoes, hotdogs, hamburgers—just about anything you can dream of.
One of the first booths we came to had a beautiful display of stained-glass wind chimes glowing in the sunlight. Fragments of purple and ruby and orange stained glass dangled on beaded strings from hunks of driftwood. The chimes looked just glorious in the dazzling early-morning light.
“Oh, they’re so pretty!” I said.
“I can make them sing,” the owner of the booth said. And she started gently shaking the poles of her tent so the chimes began to tinkle.
She kept shaking the tent and smiling proudly. She looked around at all the beautiful, glowing, tinkling, trembling wind chimes and said, “They sing! They dance! They do everything but do the dishes!”
A little later we came to a booth selling a bounty of fresh produce straight from the farm: sugar cane, huge bundles of turnips and turnip greens, scuppernongs, boiled peanuts, pecans, white acre peas, satsumas, and sweet potatoes. A lady had just purchased a bunch of turnip greens and she stood holding them like an enormous bouquet, like she had just won the Miss America pageant. A man working the booth suggested she freeze some of the greens for Thanksgiving.
“Oh, I plan to!” she said. She was really excited about her turnip greens.
Live entertainment is abundant at Mule Day. There’s lots of music and dancing. This year, a group of cloggers was performing in costumes emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. We stood around and watched and cheered. Kris would like to learn to clog, and I kept encouraging her to really do it.
“I’ll come and see all your performances!” I promised.
People were walking around in official Mule Day hats—straw hats with fake mule ears sticking straight up, taller than the hat’s crown. Everybody was having a great time. They were eating cotton candy and turkey legs and buying stuff left and right—homemade layer cakes and pound cakes, bright yellow-blooming cassias, mayhaw jelly, barbecue sauce, bags of kumquats, big wooden cutouts of Santa and the Grinch. . . .
The mule parade was the highlight of the day. It was so neat to see everybody rolling by in their carts and buggies pulled by mules or donkeys (or even miniature donkeys!). Some of the carts were decorated with chrysanthemums and other fall flowers, and some of the donkeys were wearing bonnets.
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| The roasted corn is so delicious. |
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| Cool stuff for sale |
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| Cuties at the petting zoo |
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| More tempting merchandise. The prices are always great at Mule Day. |
Last night, Halloween night, I whipped up some vegan pumpkin cupcakes as I waited for trick-or-treaters. I thought I might get quite a few visitors. See, I’d gone to our Quincy CVS earlier in the evening for some Hershey’s cookies ‘n creme candy skulls, and …
I had the day off on Monday, which was nice because it gave me the rare chance to look around and appreciate. I could go slow. I didn’t have to rush. Rushing ruins everything. I had time to sit in the dry brown grass and …
I finally got a picture of Bernie, the old stray cat I feed (and truly care about). The quality of the picture isn’t very good (I had to take it quick before he got scared), but he sure is cute.
Rob says Bernie looks like a cartoon version of an alley cat, with his crooked ears and his sad eyes. Bernie isn’t tame. I can’t pet him or even get very close to him, but I love him nonetheless. Bernie is probably the father of just about all our 11 cats. I call him a “retired tom,” because for years he was the king of our country neighborhood, roaming about, fighting with the other toms and winning over the ladies, but now, in his old age, he has settled down. He spends his time resting on the landing outside our utility room, waiting for me to bring him his Fancy Feast. When I do, I always greet him and try to tell him how much I care and he always hisses at me. That is our relationship. When he hisses at me, I know everything is as it should be and that he’s doing all right. (I’m always worried about poor old Bernie.)
I wish I could have intervened earlier in his life, gotten him fixed and brought him inside. I think he would have made a great pet, because he’s really very gentle for a feral cat. He’s so small. And I love his sweet, forlorn expression, his puppy-dog eyes. The trouble was, we could never catch him, and now I feel it’s too late even to get him fixed. (I’d have to trap him, and he’d be terrified.) He doesn’t fight anymore. He just lies in the sun on the landing, sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. I feed him before I go to work and when I get home again. When I come in the door after work, Rob always tells me, “Mr. Bernie’s waiting for his supper.” And I go and fix up his bowl, fill it nice and full. (The reason Rob doesn’t feed Bernie is that he knows I want to do it.)
I’m glad Bernie’s getting a bit of rest now in his golden years. I’m glad the landing where he lies is sun-washed and warm and that it offers a pleasant view of the yard. I often see him blinking and looking sleepily around. Here are some of the sights that surround him on these early-September days:
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| Surprise lilies |
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| Ripening beautyberries |
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| Tabasco peppers |
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| Katie Road Pink rose hip |
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| Orient pears |
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| Caladiums in the Vine House |
Fall is here in all its glory. We’ve got camellias and sasanquas blooming like crazy, and our beech trees have turned gold. Bright satsumas and lemons hang like ornaments, like Christmas balls. The ageratum has turned ghostly. In the late afternoons the sun gets so …
On Friday, Mom, Kris, Sophie, Jake, and I went to the Tallahassee Museum again. We had so much fun. Hardly anybody else was there, so we played as if the 52-acre museum were all ours. It was such a warm, lovely day, the air so light; the hickory trees were gold and the sweetgums were red …
In fall, during cranberry season, I try to make cranberry sauce as often as I can. It’s beautiful and delicious—and it’s so good for you. Cranberries have more antioxidants than any other common fruit.
When I was little, it was always my job to make the cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. I loved the way the cranberries popped as they boiled (it just seemed so festive and merry), and I loved to eat the sauce hot, as soon as it was done. Warm cranberry sauce is so comforting.
Here’s the recipe I’ve always used, ever since I was seven or eight. It’s right off the back of the Ocean Spray bag, and it’s so easy even a child-cook can’t mess it up.
Cranberry Sauce
Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
12 oz fresh cranberries
Directions:
Bring water and sugar to a boil, and stir until sugar dissolves. Add cranberries and boil gently for 10 minutes. The cranberries will pop as they cook. Serve warm!
