grace grits and gardening - ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

the Colors of Easter

April 3, 2015 By Talya Tate Boerner

iris

I recently told my friend Laurie that my dream job would have been working for Crayola, specifically naming the crayon colors. Since I was a kid, everything about crayons fascinated me from the fresh smell of the wax to the way something so simple could transform a plain piece of paper into a refrigerator-worthy work of art. A new box of Crayons with the colors lined up sharp and perfect, or an old coffee can filled with broken stubs and unraveled wrappers—I’ve always loved them all.

Since my Crayola dream job has long been taken (I checked their website) and the crayons have already been christened, I decided to match up crayon names with the soft colors of Easter. It’s something I automatically do while walking the dogs. Those daffodils popping up everywhere? They come in various Crayola shades including canary, unmellow yellow and sunglow.

During this Easter season, Fayetteville is bursting with blooms. Pastels as soft as spun sugar. Tufts of fresh green grass begging to hide a dyed egg. The color of someone buying me an ice cream cone for no reason at all (Lemony Snicket). Happy, happy colors.

Easter is such a gift. A gift I don’t deserve.

Outrageous Orange

Banana Mania

Spring Green

Goldenrod

Inch Worm

Cotton Candy

Carnation Pink mixed with Wild Strawberry

Razzle Dazzle Rose

Blue Violet

White

If you are a Crayon nut like me, here are a few fun facts from ColourLovers.com:

Crayola crayons currently come in 120 colors;
An average of 12 million crayons are made daily;
The average child in the U.S. will wear down 730 crayons by her/his 10th birthday;
The first box of Crayola crayons was sold in 1903 for a nickel and included the same colors available in the eight-count box today—red, blue, yellow, green, violet, orange, black and brown.

There’s nostalgic goodness in every box of Crayons. Sometimes that’s just what this world needs. Especially at Easter.

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Musical Pairing:

Discovery – Swing Tree

Gardening, Writing and Making Enchiladas.

March 31, 2015 By Talya Tate Boerner

Gardening, writing and making enchiladas will keep a girl busy. My mother (aka The Bat) thought I had either croaked, lost my phone, or dropped it in the toilet because she had texted me several times over two days, and I hadn’t responded. I hadn’t posted on Facebook or blogged either.

First of all, I never received the texts because of a mysterious change in my iPhone settings. How does that happen? Anyway, after a bit of research, I fixed it without a call to AT&T (which would have severely cut into gardening, writing and making enchilada time, for sure). Yay me.

As far as being absent on social media, I’ve been on a self-imposed schedule that involves a) working on my book in the mornings, and b) gardening in the afternoons. And yes, I did make enchiladas the other day, but more on that later. So here’s an update. The book? I think it’s going well, but it’s taking longer than I expected. That’s mostly okay by me because when I’m done, well there’s the whole finding-a-publisher-thing which is way harder than breathing life into dead pansies.

And the gardening? You already know it’s one of my most favorite things to do in this life.

Here are a few of the plants John and I bought at Westwood Gardens, my go-to local (Fayetteville) garden center. A trunk full of plants leads to an afternoon well spent.

One of the things I did yesterday was attempt to spruce up our front porch pots. After the snow and ice, last fall’s pansies were soggy and shriveled and looking rather pathetic, BUT since the pansy growing season in Fayetteville is soooo much longer than Dallas, I decided to revive them instead of throw them away. I dug them up, trimmed the dead leaves, added more soil, and replanted them with snapdragons and asparagus fern. The pots look much happier now, and I believe the pansies will make a recovery.

Believing is an essential part of gardening.

End of Winter (left pot) / Beginning of Spring (right pot)

Here’s another before and after shot showing my pansies going from pitiful to perky.

Check out this cute little succulent. This one is named “Pig Ear”. Perfect for Razorback land, don’t you think? I put him in one of our most unique pots, a container we purchased at Redenta’s in Dallas. (It was handmade by an Arizona artisan whose name I don’t know, or I’ll tell you.)

My sister-in-law gave me lots of irises, day lilies and onion sets from her yard! “Dig up whatever you want,” she said. Now that’s a gardeners dream, right? Receiving plants from someone else makes the world even more special, and some of these plants originally came from my mother-in-law’s garden which makes me happyhappyhappyyyyy.

I planted a row of them along our rock wall. This is a hot spot, so they should flourish.

Others I planted around this boulder (along with phlox).

So where does making enchiladas come into this story? I made a big platter of chicken enchiladas last weekend using an old favorite recipe from my Baylor Cookbook (recipe tweaked a bit and coming later, maybe). We ate supper outside around the fire pit while enjoying the beginning of spring.

This is an Arkansas meal. Chicken enchiladas made with Tyson chicken + Riceland rice.

Thank goodness, gardening burns calories:)

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

[tweetthis]Trunk full of plants + belly full of enchiladas = perfect day. @Redentas @TysonFoods @RicelandFoods #WestwoodGardens[/tweetthis]

Musical Pairing:

Travis Tritt – It’s a Great Day to be Alive

Two Degrees of Separation

March 26, 2015 By Talya Tate Boerner

Everyone knows about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? The idea that everyone is six steps away from anyone else in the world. I’m convinced that as the world has continued to shrink, six degrees has dwindled to something more like two degrees of separation. It seems to me that at any moment, I appear to be connected to most every person I come into contact with, and there’s very little separation. My husband thinks this is naturally occurring as I morph more and more into my mother. I think we are all connected, we just don’t take the time to find out.

I have two recent examples to prove my theory.

Example One. This picture was taken at the most recent Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer Retreat I attended in Piggott, Arkansas last November. I met several new (to me) writers including Ruth, the lady standing beside me.

Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writing Retreat (Why did I wear a silly poncho on picture day?)

Ruth and I chatted quite a bit throughout the week. She lived in Little Rock. I had just moved to Fayetteville from Dallas. Somehow Baylor University came up.

I graduated from Baylor, I said. My daughter graduated from Baylor, she said. We discovered our Baylor years overlapped. Small world, we agreed.

A few weeks later, Ruth called me. Her daughter read through the anthology published after our retreat and recognized my name.

My daughter, Anne, roomed with you one summer at Baylor, Ruth said. And of course then it all came back. Anne and I were roommates in Alexander Hall during the summer Lady Diana married Prince Charles.

She (Anne not Lady Di) had long blonde hair, was an English major who planned to go to law school. And she did. She’s an attorney in Little Rock. WHAT are the odds I would attend a writer retreat with my Baylor summer roommate’s mother thirty-three years later?

Example Two.

Last week, I spent a few days in Texas. (If you missed my trip, you can catch up HERE but this isn’t a sequel so don’t feel compelled, even though I always appreciate the page views.) While in Dallas, I went for my annual physical because I don’t have a new doctor in Fayetteville yet. I’ve been going to my Dallas doctor for years, and my Dallas doctor has had the same nurse for years. The odd thing about this is that after all this time, I learned that my doctor’s nurse is originally from Arkansas. When she said, Oh I’m from Arkansas and I said, yeah, where? and she said well I lived in Blytheville, went to school in Luxora and was born in Osceola but I’m sure you’ve never heard of those towns, I nearly fell off the table. Because I was born in Osceola and had friends in Luxora and know Blytheville as well as any place on earth. Before I left, we talked about friends of friends, American Greetings (where lots of people worked), Big Star (the best grocery store), Erman Lane (the street to drive to get anywhere), and Bobby George’s liquor store (ahem)—things no one except people from there would dare know about. The same doctor (Dr. Fairley) delivered both of us only a few years apart. He was THE doctor in town.

Shared from Main Street Osceola Facebook Page

So perhaps right here, right now in the comment section of this post, we should all figure out how we are connected, because we probably are. And probably by way less than six degrees of separation. It’s a crazy small world, don’t you agree?

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

[tweetthis]Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? I think it’s more like two degrees. We are all connected. @hpmuseum [/tweetthis]

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon