Over the rainy Thanksgiving weekend, Rob and I put up our Christmas tree and I started sewing some new felt ornaments for it. The cats got busy too—messing things up (lol). On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as Carl splashed in the water in the tree …
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 …
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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 my flowers) the entire time.
Some of my coworkers were skeptical.
“Oh, but you don’t understand,” I said, laughing. “This is my dream vacation!”
And it didn’t disappoint me, not a bit.
On Wednesday evening, I sat on the front porch and watched the sun set over my beds of woodland sunflowers. I waved to my neighbor Doretha, who was sitting on her front porch, and, as we often do, we had a shouted conversation across the surprisingly busy street that runs between our two big front yards like a river. As usual, neither of us could quite hear what the other was saying, but it didn’t matter. Shouting back and forth across the street in a friendly fashion is always a pleasant ritual.
Doretha’s front walk is lined on both sides by wide, sun-drenched boxwood hedges, which she often uses for clothes-drying. The hedges are cut into long rectangles, so the clothes can lie on top nice and flat. Doretha’s house is so pretty, with a deep, shady porch and trim painted sky-blue. I love that her house, surrounded by woods, is part of the view from my own porch.
Oh, I had lots of fun on my days off. And it was wonderfully slow, unexciting fun—my favorite kind.
Everything I did, I did as inefficiently as possible. For example, when I carried out the trash, I took the scenic route to the garbage can. I walked around the whole house just so I could enjoy the ferns, banana spiders, trumpetflowers, and lemony pools of sunlight along the way.
There’s a line from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town that I’d been thinking about in the days leading up to my staycation: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it … every, every minute?”
What I wanted to do over my long weekend was try to realize life, to slow down and appreciate it. So I watched birds in the backyard and fed watermelon to the box turtles that roam in our old vegetable garden. I played with my cat Carl as he rolled and curled (so cutely!) on the rug in the bedroom and made bunny paws. I picked pears, sun-warmed and snowy white inside, and I tried not to fret about the future or the past but to focus on now, sweet now.
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| Glorious sun on the south side of the yard |
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| My bunny shrine on the breezeway |
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| This bench is one of my favorite things. I bought it when I was young, and it took me a long time to save up for it. |
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| I always end up feeling sorry for my garden statues and bringing them inside. |
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 …
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 …
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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 |
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 …
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 inside.
I’m pretty proud of our pecans, so I’ve been pouring them into various crystal bowls and taking pictures of them in different locations. They’re just so cute in their tiger-striped shells. They make great decorations—and great cat toys (the cats are batting pecans all over the house).
Fresh pecans taste so much better than the pecans you buy at the grocery store. They’re extra sweet and oily and buttery-tasting, not at all bitter or dry. I’m planning on spending lots of winter nights cracking them and drinking hot tea and telling the cats heartwarming stories of my childhood.