grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

Imagine

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This morning I am enjoying my first cup of coffee outside. Two days after the city aerial bombed us with poison, there are no mosquitoes. I am skeptical, still waiting for a sting, and worried the war on mosquitoes has destroyed all life in my back yard.


Thankfully I see a dragon fly buzzing around the pool seemingly unaffected.

The temperature, still warm, has a hint of fall tucked within the slight breeze. Is it my imagination? I watch the clouds overhead. They watch me.

As kids, we spent hours flat on our backs in the front yard studying the clouds. Our grass blanket itched and stuck to our sweaty legs, but we didn’t mind. Cloud gazing, an impromptu cool down from cartwheels or freeze tag, wasn’t planned in advance, so a quilt was never considered. 

We called out the shapes of animals and objects like a game of I Spy. A dog. A rabbit. A donut. A boat. White and fluffy, the clouds adding color to sunset. I wondered where the clouds ended up after drifting over Mississippi County. 

Overhead, thin airplane vapors were always exciting to see. At the top of the sky, curving, never stopping in Arkansas. I imagined where the lucky people were going. I imagined where I would go.


Today I see the remains of jet vapor – a straight line with hash marks. A white picket fence. A railroad track. I imagine where the busy people are going. I am content to be drinking coffee. I imagine I am not the only one. Just watching.

talya

Musical Pairings:

Imagine – John Lennon

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds. Henry Thoreau

Cruel Summer

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Here we are again. Sitting smack dab in the middle of another sweltering summer. Another obscenely hot and cruel summer. Motionless and glaring. Water droplets from sprinklers evaporate before touching the parched grass. Mother Nature sends no rain for the crops.  Evidently she holds a grudge.

Yesterday I fried an egg in the backyard by the swimming pool. The pavement burned my feet and the skillet handle scalded my hand, as hot as the oven. The pool water is probably hot enough to poach an egg. Even the kitchen tap water is warm. 


Every night the super enthusiastic weathermen of Dallas try to inject a new twist into the forecast. Something to justify their time slot before sports. Before the Olympic news and Dallas Cowboys training camp. But there is nothing new. There won’t be anything different until that first cold snap on Halloween, if we are lucky. The high’s and lo’s are fancifully displayed and the heat index is thrown in for effect as the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex collectively gasps. As if there is a distinct difference between 110 and 112.

No matter how high the mercury soars each day this summer, the record high temperatures hold firmly in place. From 1980. Nothing compares to the summer of 1980. The summer I graduated from Rivercrest High School. The summer we did rain dances in the front yard in air that cloaked our bodies like gauze.  The summer daddy had a scorched crop yet forked over college tuition. The summer we nearly had to bury him on the banks of Little River.

In 1980, thousands of lives were lost and crop damage totaled in the billions. Beer sales in Texas were at an all time high.
Irrigation. Rice. Tate Farm.
Thank goodness we irrigate the crops now. 

Only 51 days until Autumn….

talya

Musical Pairings:

Long Hot Summer Days, Sara Watkins
Cruel Summer, Bananarama

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.” Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.

Time in a Bottle

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removing curtains and rods
There is no free lunch at the Bat Cave. In five days I shortened curtains, removed huge cornice boards and curtain rods, vacuumed the bugs between the windows on the sill, changed two light figures, decluttered and rearranged 4 rooms, made several trips to the grocery store, Walmart & the post office, cooked dinner, and removed and replaced the trim around the laundry room door so the new dryer could be moved inside. I returned to Dallas exhausted.
I got 30 minutes for lunch.
One of my projects was cleaning out drawers in my bedroom. Every drawer was stuffed with cards and letters and papers and report cards. And pictures. School pictures of everyone I ever went to school with from 1st grade through high school graduation.

I opened the top drawer and there was Charles Mobley staring at me. Charles Mobley, my 8th grade boyfriend, in his football uniform. Vinnie Barbarino-y. Handsome as ever. And pictures of Anita and Becky and Judy and Jackie and Trina and Craig and Graham and Vic and Doug and Carrie and Mary and Bryan and Robert and TimH and TimA and TimS. Pictures of everyone I ever knew. From every year. A time capsule.

Does everyone open random drawers and find elementary school photos of classmates from the 1970s? Or does this only happen in my family? To hoarders? To people who live in the same spot on Earth for eternity? I hope NO ONE has any pictures of me in their junk drawer. Frightening thought.

I straightened and organized the photographs, disposing of only a handful – those with giant fingers blocking the entire picture and the Polaroids with totally bleached away images.

If anyone reading this needs an old photo of anyone from Keiser or Rivercrest, let me know. I bet I can find it. I have a few Osceola folks too.
talya
P.S. Gary H….I found a picture of you too.

Musical Pairings:


Lisa: Someday when I’m a grownup, maybe I’ll go back and look fondly at our house.
Bart: Well stop in and say hi to me because I’ll still be there chilling in my basement bachelor pad.
Homer: Make sure to water my backyard grave.
Bart: As long as I can dig you up and stick you on the front porch every Halloween.
Homer: Just don’t dress me up as a woman.
Bart: We’ll see.
(The Simpson’s)

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!