Two Saturdays ago, I finished this ridiculous portrait of my teddy bear Cecilia. I spent a pleasant three weeks working on it, sitting at the dining room table in the evenings and on weekend mornings, the cats gathered around me to nap or take very …
Last Thursday and Friday I asked off from work so I could have a long weekend. But I didn’t plan to go to the beach or Disney World or St. Augustine or anywhere at all. No, I planned to stay home (with my cats 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 eat satsumas off our tree. I sat there like a lizard, soaking up the sun, and my thoughts were very simple. I was thinking about satsumas–how pretty they are and how good they taste.
I played with the cats and spoiled them terribly. I let June sit in the laundry basket, for example, for about an hour, on top of the clean laundry. She was quite pleased. She looked very proud, so I guess in cat culture relaxing in a laundry basket is considered cool and not absurd.
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| June in the laundry basket |
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| Carl dozing nearby. He tried to take a turn in the laundry basket, but June wasn’t sharing. |
I weeded around the front steps in a careful, unhurried way, coming across a cocoon and a sleepy little snake. There were lots of earthworms where I was working, and the whole bed smelled like Christmastime because it was covered in a layer of spruce-pine needles.
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| Snapdragons |
My supper wasn’t exactly fancy. It was cranberry sauce, my favorite dish to make. The recipe’s so easy, and it’s fun when the water boils and the berries start popping. I like to eat my sauce piping hot, which most people think is weird, but it sure made for a cozy meal. I ate in the kitchen by candlelight (orange Halloween tealights) as a cold front moved in. The screen door kept banging in the wild, dark wind.
Summer is my favorite season at Spruce Pine Cottage. It’s the green time, the lush, sultry time, the time when the rosinweed blooms and the garden is full of tomatoes. Box turtles come out in the rain. Nighttime is even better than daytime because there …
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 …
Here’s just a quick list of some of the sights and sounds of the weekend:
Lovebugs everywhere
Wrens chattering in the sumac
A little eggplant harvest
Muscadine grapes, fresh from the vine
Open windows
A strange breeze (from the hurricane)
Tiger swallowtails on the ironweed
Red mushrooms in the grass
Cats lounging in sunbeams
Yesterday I did a whole bunch of weeding while Rob mowed the lawn and cleaned out the gutters. I actually love to weed. It’s so peaceful and it gives me a chance to really look at my plants, really study them and their surroundings. Yesterday while I was weeding I discovered all kinds of interesting things: cute mushrooms, raccoon tracks, and tiny fiddleheads. I saw ladybugs and toads and hummingbirds and big, float-y tiger swallowtails. If I hadn’t been weeding way back in the back of the big bed along North Adams Street, I would’ve never even known my old roses were blooming; they’re so hidden among all the raucous perennials—the purple coneflowers and ironweed and bearpaw—that you have to wade in really deep to see them. You have to get up close.
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| Here’s Baronne Henriette de Snoy. |
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| Baronne Henriette de Snoy again |
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| And Maman Cochet |
Aside from weeding, I also did a lot of cat brushing out on the screen porch. The cats were so lazy this weekend, especially today. Carl slept on top of the pie safe, and Francie lay on her back on the couch, her long white feet in the air to catch the breezes.
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| Here’s how the breezeway looks with the new Coke sign we got in Dothan last weekend. |
I made a peach cobbler today, and vegan macaroni and cheese with a miraculous creamy sauce concocted from ground raw cashews. Rob made the best seitan, flavored like sausage with sage and crushed red pepper. We ate on the screen porch surrounded by napping cats and, farther off, the shaggy August meadows. I could see the rosinweed flowers as round and yellow as happy faces, and the complicated surprise lilies (they look like whirling eggbeaters, I think).
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| I should have taken a picture of the surprise lilies, because they won’t last long. Oh, well, here’s a picture of the back of the house as seen through the lemongrass. |
I’ve had the nicest morning. I got up obscenely early, which is really fun for me (I feel like I’m stealing time, cheating the system). I was sitting in the sun room in my pajamas when I saw a big barred owl in the backyard, …
Last weekend we started harvesting pecans from our giant pecan tree. We have a handy “pecan picker-upper” that makes gathering the nuts really easy. It’s a little round cage on a pole, and as you roll the cage along the ground, the pecans get trapped …
An assortment of heirloom tomatoes and hot peppers fresh from the garden
Lunch on Sunday
Sleepy Greg
Last weekend was a pretty typical summer weekend for us. We spent it gathering baskets of tomatoes from our garden (the Romas and Matt’s Wild Cherries are doing so great) and making fresh salsa and other tomato-y things. We have a patch of Matt’s Wild Cherries that is so tangly and crazy; the plants are all volunteers, growing next to our lemon tree. Some of the tomatoes in this area aren’t the Matt’s variety, however; they aren’t any identifiable variety. One plant has larger round red cherry tomatoes, and one has little shiny yellow tomatoes shaped like pears. We always kind of “hate” picking in this area because the plants are so entwined and chaotic; the little tomatoes are very hard to reach. We’ll be squatting in the mosquitoes and gnats, sweating, saying cheerfully, “Hey, this sucks, but we sure are getting some great tomatoes!”
We mowed the lawn on Saturday and edged all the beds and ran the weedeater. Finally, we’ve gotten a tiny bit of rain, so the grass is green again, but we’re still suffering from a terrible rain deficit here in Gadsden County. So as I was weeding and edging I was worrying over all my plants. I see the effects of the drought everywhere. The Hana Fuyu persimmon has died, and the mountainmint is stunted and yellow and didn’t really flower with any sort of gusto this year.
In spring we filled our various pots around the vine house with petunias, and they looked great until June, but then they really started to decline. So we recently replaced the petunias with torenia–and I must say torenia is a wonderful plant. It looks so fresh even now during the dog days. The green tendrils and leaves cascade over the edges of the pots, and the plants are dotted all over with perky purple or pink or white flowers that look a little like snapdragons (they’re very cute and cheerful). With its hanging pots of torenia, our little vine house is looking quite splendid now. The pipevine is curling around the wind chimes, the coral honeysuckle is sporting bright red shiny berries, and the powderpuff plant (Mimosa strigillosa) has made a ferny carpet right in front of our purple lounging chairs. (I love powderpuff plant; the pink flowers stand straight up on little stems so they look like lollipops–but they’re ethereal lollipops . . . so delicate and feathery.)
On Sunday we made a huge lunch that incorporated a bunch of our fresh produce from the garden. We had stir-fried kale (the kale is still going strong), biscuits, oven fries (made from our Kennebec potatoes), watermelon, mushrooms fried in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, soy sausage, and a tofu scramble full of our own cherry tomatoes, eggplant, and garlic. It took us hours to make all this stuff and about two seconds to eat it. Then we had to start doing the dishes.
Our cat Maggie has been sick, but on Saturday we got to visit her at the vet’s office (where she had to spend the weekend), and she had rallied, so I was really happy. She was so cute. She was so happy to see us. She was kneading the air and the wire floor of her cage and purring like crazy and running and taking bites of food in her excitement. We were petting her and complimenting her, and Doctor Larry was telling us how happy he was with her progress. Unfortunately, visiting hours are very short at Quincy Animal Hospital.
I tried to spend as much time as I could with the other cats at home. I gave everybody catnip and Party Mix, and Rob and I sat on the rug in the sun room and watched their various wrestling matches. I brushed Jammer and Foxy and Carl, who all love being brushed. Playing with cats is probably my favorite weekend activity. I also love making popcorn . . . the old-fashioned way, on the stove.
