grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Fitzgerald Museum: how much the heart can hold

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Fitzgerald Museum

Last April, I toured the Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s taken me this long to write about it.

In the Beginning…

They met at a country club in Montgomery, Alabama. Scott was a mid-western boy, a 2nd lieutenant assigned to a nearby infantry. He was a Princeton dropout. Zelda, an uninhibited southern belle, was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Alabama Supreme Court Judge.

Zelda needed a husband who could maintain a certain lifestyle. The lifestyle she’d always known.

He was desperate for her. For the wannabe writer, it was love at first sight.

After some urging, they married on April 3, 1920 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, one week after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was published.Continue Reading

Savoring January

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Savoring January 2017

Did you blink? Today is the last day of January! I’ve done my best throughout January to savor the moments. You may or may not know I chose SAVOR as my One Little Word for 2017. And dangnabbit I plan to do it, even amid all the chaos surrounding us. The photo above depicts my visual effort to savor the month—one picture taken each day in January.

Savor—to taste, smell, relish, delight in. Doing something slowly.

Savoring FLAVOR…

I’ll start with food because that’s the first thing I imagine when I think of savoring something. In January, I cooked at home, a lot. And I came up with several new recipes including an easy cauliflower soup I’m pretty excited about. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll share the recipe on a later post. Simple and healthy, it has become my go-to sustenance for January.  Continue Reading

Glimpses of Us

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Denver trip - glimpses of us

You know what’s cool? Having an adult son who is more than willing to hang out with his Momma and show her all around his city.

You know what’s strange? Walking through the Denver airport when I first arrived and being flooded with a memory I hadn’t thought about in years. A memory of being delayed at the Denver airport for ten hours with two small children. My children, of course, and while I did my best to entertain them, I was tired and they were energetic with sticky hands and busy minds. In that moment, life felt exhausting. Everything felt exhausting. A quiet, empty area in the corner of a terminal became our refuge, the comfy chairs arranged around a small table, not typical waiting-to-board chairs, thankfully, and we camped out there with our gear and kid backpacks and no telling what all.

At some point, an elderly couple joined us, and we adopted each other because they too were stuck at the airport trying to get to Dallas. At some point, Kelsey and Tate taught the elderly couple to play a certain card game, the name of the game I don’t remember, and for hours we played game after game, chatting and laughing, and the time passed as quickly as possible.

Friday, as I walked through the same airport in Denver, I found myself thinking about that couple. And I found myself looking for that quiet corner with the comfy chairs. Looking for glimpses of us back then, sitting together, me no doubt harried, the kids no doubt bouncing off the walls, and the elderly couple helping me by just being there.Continue Reading

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

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