grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Alabama Girl Trip ~ Part 2

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Alabama Girl Trip Part 2

Hey there! If you’ve been waiting for Part Two of my recent Alabama Girl Trip, your wait is over. If you missed Part 1, click HERE to catch up. (Part 1 contains highlights of Days 1-3 including Rosa Parks, live jazz, and an accidental train yard adventure. Among other things.)

Alabama Girl Trip ~ Part 2

Day Four:

Question: What should one do on Sunday morning in Montgomery, Alabama? (It’s a no brainer. Especially on MLK weekend.) Answer: Attend church services at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist where Martin Luther King served as pastor. THIS was the cherry on top of an already decadent devil’s food cupcake.Continue Reading

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

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What's blooming at Headquarters House

Where have all the flowers gone?

I can always find flowers at the historic Headquarters House in Fayetteville. The girls and I walk through the gardens almost daily. Only two blocks from our headquarters, we consider the grounds to be our personal secret garden. I’ve written about the period gardens and the house HERE, and I won’t repeat myself other than to say the place it holds in Fayetteville / Civil War / American history fascinates me. No matter what’s going on in the world (or in Arkansas), the Headquarters House is a peaceful place, a calm reminder of the vastness of life—the good and the ugly. It’s a spot that fills me with calm and restores balance.Continue Reading

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

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