grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Time in a Bottle

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removing curtains and rods
There is no free lunch at the Bat Cave. In five days I shortened curtains, removed huge cornice boards and curtain rods, vacuumed the bugs between the windows on the sill, changed two light figures, decluttered and rearranged 4 rooms, made several trips to the grocery store, Walmart & the post office, cooked dinner, and removed and replaced the trim around the laundry room door so the new dryer could be moved inside. I returned to Dallas exhausted.
I got 30 minutes for lunch.
One of my projects was cleaning out drawers in my bedroom. Every drawer was stuffed with cards and letters and papers and report cards. And pictures. School pictures of everyone I ever went to school with from 1st grade through high school graduation.

I opened the top drawer and there was Charles Mobley staring at me. Charles Mobley, my 8th grade boyfriend, in his football uniform. Vinnie Barbarino-y. Handsome as ever. And pictures of Anita and Becky and Judy and Jackie and Trina and Craig and Graham and Vic and Doug and Carrie and Mary and Bryan and Robert and TimH and TimA and TimS. Pictures of everyone I ever knew. From every year. A time capsule.

Does everyone open random drawers and find elementary school photos of classmates from the 1970s? Or does this only happen in my family? To hoarders? To people who live in the same spot on Earth for eternity? I hope NO ONE has any pictures of me in their junk drawer. Frightening thought.

I straightened and organized the photographs, disposing of only a handful – those with giant fingers blocking the entire picture and the Polaroids with totally bleached away images.

If anyone reading this needs an old photo of anyone from Keiser or Rivercrest, let me know. I bet I can find it. I have a few Osceola folks too.
talya
P.S. Gary H….I found a picture of you too.

Musical Pairings:


Lisa: Someday when I’m a grownup, maybe I’ll go back and look fondly at our house.
Bart: Well stop in and say hi to me because I’ll still be there chilling in my basement bachelor pad.
Homer: Make sure to water my backyard grave.
Bart: As long as I can dig you up and stick you on the front porch every Halloween.
Homer: Just don’t dress me up as a woman.
Bart: We’ll see.
(The Simpson’s)

Field of Dreams

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At home in Arkansas, I walked around the rice field each morning. Now that the field has been leveled and irrigated, we have our own private walking trail all the way to the drainage ditch at the South end. There were so many things to see in the early morning. Every day something new revealed itself.

Life is abundant. In addition to the rice and corn and wildflowers and vine covered trees, there were FrogsBeaversDucksDragonfliesButterfliesSnakes….
frog
Each morning I walked and sweated and explored, digging up rocks and shotgun shells and pieces of old rusty farm equipment. Daddy’s equipment?
Something shiny caught my eye. A small silver tip nearly hidden in the dirt. It was an aluminum baseball bat buried at the far back corner of the field near the beaver dam. An odd place to find a baseball bat. Field of Dreams?
My corner:)
My favorite part of the walk was the far Southeast corner which is shady and breezy in the morning. Almost cool. I spent extra time there studying the water and the ditch bank which concealed the occasional pearly white shell formed thousands of years ago when the Mississippi River covered the entire delta region.

Over the past week I slowly gathered all these little found objects and piled them in an old rusty hubcap I uncovered in the field. I placed the hubcap filled with treasures near the edge of the bank as an offering to the rain gods. I hope it works…

talya
Musical Pairings:
“With us, when you speak of “the river,” though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi.“

~ William Alexander Percy 

This Could Be Heaven or This Could Be Hell

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just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
a tale of a fateful trip
that started from the lake side cliffs
aboard this tiny ship. 

The lake is very, very low. This makes all the landmarks appear different. The cliffs are higher, the coves are shallower, the docks are shifted. This is our excuse anyway.

For years we had a cabin in a perfectly secluded cove past Buzzard’s Roost Marina. Before Buzzard’s Roost was a full service marina. We KNOW where Buzzard’s Roost is located on the lake. It’s a familiar spot we can find as easily as driving to Newcomb’s in Osceola.
After a morning of jumping from the cliffs, we boated over to Buzzard’s Roost for gas and ice. Just a short ride around a few coves. The sky was partly sunny. It was hot. Beautiful perfect long-awaited lake day.
Tate was a mighty sailing man, 
Nana crazy for sure. 
Five passengers set sail that day 
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour. 
Approaching the marina the sign prominently displayed in front said Blue Heaven Resort. WHAT? Suddenly the marina was moved or sold or renamed? Or we were lost? Surely not, but there were no gas pumps to be found. The buzzards circling overhead clearly identified we were in the correct place, or else they too were confused. 
Maybe the buzzards follow us due to the condition of our boat and the smell of our skin sizzling?
Slowly trolling while discussing this strange development and scanning the docks for pumps, Ms. Stalya came to a complete abrupt stop, as if we had hit rock bottom jolting the prop. And then she wouldn’t start. No sound. Rude silence. No ice. No water. Buzzards.  

A quick inspection of the motor revealed the ski rope harness had somehow become tangled in the motor, wrapping it tightly until choking it off. The harness, made of coated thick wire, would not budge.  And then, like a scene manufactured in the unnatural Hunger Games arena, a small black cloud appeared only over us. It instantly burst open pelting us with rain. Driving hard stinging rain, seemingly out of nowhere, drenching everything in the boat.
the weather started getting rough, 
the tiny ship was tossed, 
if not for the courage of the fearless crew 
the Stalya would be lost, the Stalya would be lost. 
Just as suddenly, Nana was wearing her purple flowered retro swim cap rendering everyone hysterical but keeping her hair dry. And we knew we would survive.
Surprisingly, we managed to untangle the rope harness from the motor, the boat miraculously started….again, the rain disappeared as quickly as it popped up, and we got the hell out of Blue Heaven cove. 
This was day one.
talya
Musical Pairings:
Skipper: Gilligan, why don’t you stop that. You don’t know anything about space.
Gilligan: I know one thing about it. You take up more of it than I do.
The Ms. Stalya and her namesakes
in MUCH younger days…

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!