Life - grace grits and gardening

Fifty Fabulous Years

June 15, 2012 By Talya Tate Boerner

Judy, Talya, Norma, Becky, Anita

A gaggle of giggling girls, that’s what we were.

That’s what we will always be.

Best friends our entire lives, beginning in the mid-1960s.

This year we turn 50.

Nearly 50 years of memories.

These are the girls who know me best.

My strengths, my weaknesses, my fears, my dreams.

They know my natural hair color.

Mud pies, barbie dolls, Red Rover, matchbox cars,

birthday parties, play dates, giggling,

1970s

Sleep overs, scary movies, spin-the-bottle,

basketball practice, first loves, home ec, Yellow Jackets,

lake trips, Six Flags, cheerleading, trading boyfriends,

church service, first/last cigarettes, giggling.

Double dates, driver’s tests, football games,

pizza, love notes, Mid-South fair,

study hall, Murr Theatre, Rivercrest Colts, French class, laughing.

1980s

Prom night, Boone’s Farm, ACT, graduation,

Arkansas State, reunions, laughing.

1990s

Marriage, childbirth, careers, margaritas, road trips,

aging parents, empty nest, mother of the bride,

crying, death of parents, remembering, laughing.

2012
50 years later

Still laughing,

Always laughing.

I love you girls:)))

talya

Musical Pairings:

Ladies Night, Kool and the Gang

This One’s For the Ladies, Martina McBride

We Are Family, Sister Sledge

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

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.