Family - grace grits and gardening

Kelsey’s Closet

May 17, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

When our neighborhood was platted and the homes constructed, property taxes were assessed per room. And a closet was considered a room. To avoid the closet tax, most Munger Place homes were built without closets. This didn’t much matter back then when people only had a change of work clothes and a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ outfit. Later, closets were added in corners and odd spots as needs changed. Now that everyone has way too much stuff and new outfits arrive daily on the porch steps via one simple mouse click for next day UPS delivery, those closets are stuffed with barely worn clothes and shoes and prom dresses and halloween costumes and business suits that haven’t seen daylight or a boardroom since business casual became the new professional norm.

In our house, Kelsey’s room has the coolest closet. It’s big and spacious and comes with it’s own stained glass window. I do some of my best shopping in that closet. Full of treasures, it’s convenient and the price is always right. Some items were left behind when she moved to Austin for college and some were left behind when she moved to Washington DC for work. On a rare trip home, usually around the holidays, she may leave clothes and take others. So the inventory sometimes changes.

I scored an awesome Michael Kors bag in there. Never mind that I probably originally bought it…. Only so many purses could go off to college. Sometimes I find the perfect tank top right off the rack for a special event. And I found the best pair of J. Crew skinny jeans after Christmas that I can actually wear! Clearly if they were really skinny jeans, she wouldn’t have left them, but they make me feel better anyway.

There is also a shopping bag full of beauty supplies like nail polish remover, lotions of all kinds and shampoo. I haven’t bought toothpaste in a long time. We don’t wear the same size shoe unfortunately, but that’s just as well – she managed to make room for the best of those.

The closet is also full of memories. Like the plastic tub of drill team things, the box of toys including Baby. She never went anywhere without Baby, until she did. And board games we played for hours. There are boxes of awards and ribbons for her many school age accomplishments. The needlepoint “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” I made for her nursery before she was born, rests behind an old jewelry box on the closet shelf.

Kelsey is happy and thriving, busy working and preparing for law school. As she should be. Her baccalaureate poster sits on the closet floor, and sometimes I like to go in the closet to look at the photos on it, just remembering. The closet still smells like her perfume.

Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Musical Pairings:

“This One’s for the Girls”, Martina McBride
“I Hope You Dance”, Lee Ann Womack

“A daughter is a day brightener and a heart warmer.” – Unknown

Our Painted House

May 15, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

laugh lines?

Until you paint every nook and cranny of a house, repairing cracks and spackling hundreds of nail holes in the most peculiar places, I don’t think you really get to know her. Standing on a rickety ladder looking at the top of the never-before-painted dusty door moldings or lying on the kitchen floor painting the floor trim underneath the built-in shelving, you become pretty cozy with one another. Until then, I’m not sure you can really claim her.

We’ve painted every square inch inside our Munger Place home. And because of this, we can confirm there are no square inches in this house. Her floors slope and creak and doors shift from time to time resulting in the reappearance of certain hairline cracks. Like wrinkles. After 102 years, she’s allowed.

Years ago, I worked with a strange girl who bought a 60’s ranch style home near Ft. Worth. Once she was settled into the home with her furniture and children arranged to her liking, only then did she paint around the furniture. The trim behind the couch was stained dark brown but on either side the trim was white. If a chair was slightly budged from position, the dark trim behind it would shine like a rotten spot. HOW did she sleep at night? I could barely even go inside, just knowing this.

When my mother turned 40, she decided to paint the outside of our home in Arkansas. After years and years of living in a boring white house, she thought it was high time for a color change – beige. Willing to tackle the project single-handedly, she explained her plan to Daddy who was completely against it. He felt sure she would get one side painted and quit. He feared her painting work ethic would be much like her cotton-chopping work ethic. The Tate girls weren’t his best cotton choppers.

She ignored his advice, didn’t mention it again, and patiently waited a few weeks until he started picking cotton. Now, if you weren’t raised on a cotton farm, you may not be aware of the delicate art of picking cotton. When the bolls burst open, there are only a few weeks to harvest before the yields begin to decline. So there’s no lollygagging around during this time. No sleeping or eating, no laughing or vacation days, no television watching or smiling. It’s an amazing race against Mother Nature, and not for the light-hearted. To keep things interesting, this all happens just at that time when vast tropical storms are lined up back to back in the Gulf of Mexico.

Daddy left the house before daylight and dragged home well after dark. And he worked 7 days a week until all the cotton was out. The first day he started picking, Momma started painting. High up on a ladder, she painted the eaves, the side, around the windows, all day every day. She cleaned up or hid all evidence before he lugged himself home late each night, dog-tired. She collapsed each night as exhausted as he, sore and achy. For a couple of weeks he unknowingly snored in a two-toned house. The next morning, she started back again right after he left. She too was in a race.

Tate Farm House
aka BAT cave

Perfectly timing the entire project, she was finishing her last day of painting on his last day of picking. And that’s the day he decided to come home for lunch. Driving into the driveway, he saw her atop a ladder painting the last section of the house. He must have been shocked. He must have laughed to himself. The entire house was a different color. And the shutters were brown. She washed her hands, made him a sandwich, and he never said a word about it. Ever.

While he was busy picking cotton, he had no idea what had been going on under his roof. Of course, he never really did.

talya

Musical Pairings

Johnny Cash, “I Never Picked Cotton”

Miranda Lambert, “The House that Built Me”

from a pew away…

May 13, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

At Brinkley Chapel we all wore roses pinned to our dresses on Mother’s Day Sunday – white if our mother had already passed away and pink or red if our mother was still alive. I really don’t know if this is a tradition everywhere or just at our little church in Arkansas. We had lots of unique traditions there.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Momma ordered a corsage for Nana from the flower shop in Osceola. It was always a white Gardenia, her favorite, the most fragrant of all flowers. I could smell it from a pew away.

Momma wore a red or pink rose corsage with a bit of baby’s breath, but Staci and I were too little to wear big, fancy, store-bought corsages. We ran outside on Sunday morning, getting our shoes wet in the grass, and clipped a tiny pink rose from the bush beside the driveway. Luckily the rosebush was always in full bloom on Mother’s Day, as if it understood the importance of its job.

Momma always told us to pick one of the buds not fully open. If we wore one of the pretty big roses already in full bloom, the petals fell apart before the invitational hymn leaving only a pin and a thorny stem on your dress. No telling what the significance of that might have been.