Under a Red Roof

Squeezing In

June 4, 2021 in Celebrating, Cooking + Baking, Gardening + Nature by Colleen | Permalink

We celebrated my Mom’s 72nd birthday with a weekend of fun at our house. Pizza, waffles, prickly pear margaritas to accompany a Tex-Mex BBQ of epic proportions, four varieties of homemade ice cream (peanut butter & chocolate, mixed berry, walnut {the most popular!}, and coffee), and a wicked good triple-decker strawberry frosted birthday cake, modeled by my fabulous nephew Tyler.

The Grandma Tess celebration rose is festooned with hundreds of blossoms and smells divine!

As promised, our newly mulched and planted garden. The rain came right after Greg got all of the meat off the grill, with some wild torrents and furious waves of baby hail (no damage, woot!) before turning rather lovely and Portland-like for the better part of the next two days. Heavenly.

Juniper squeezing in amongst the columbine.

Our first official butterfly sighting in the garden. Here’s hoping it is a banner year!

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P.S.

A sincere note of gratitude to the best man I know (GREG!!) for replacing my computer’s power supply. You make this blog possible, and I super appreciate it.

Encounter Defeats

June 3, 2021 in Quoting by Colleen | Permalink

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, and how you can still come out of it.

Maya Angelou

Tags: Quoting

While the Sun Rises

May 29, 2021 in Cooking + Baking, Gardening + Nature, Remembering by Colleen | Permalink

It is now the blessed season that, when the sun rises on weekends, we are out in the garden, sipping coffee on our favorite chairs. There are too many and too few words at once: leaves glowing, birds chirping, Juniper darting. The quiet joy of being in the right place, embraced by light and nature. Home.

I have taken to buying clothes on etsy, mostly bespoke linen dresses from Lithuania. This one, freshly off and tossed onto the bed, just so, no fussing over it, and begging for a photo. I obliged.

I am on The Lost Kitchen mail list, and this dazzler of a dessert, Spoon Cake, came with their last missive. Theirs was made with a straight rhubarb compote, but since mine is booger-green, which is not a failing, just the color of this particular variety, I mixed in some berries to pretty it up. It did not disappoint, in look or flavor. Huzzah!

Last year’s onions, which did barely anything during their proper season, came to life over winter and spring. How about that?

One of the wonders of living in an Air Force town is to be summoned by the roar of high flying technology and dash into the garden to gaze upon it. This is a Stealth Bomber.

Not since I was a teenager have I owned white footwear. The last, an unfortunate pair of K-Swiss, which I saved for ages to buy, only to have hurt my feet. Wah. I am happy to report these are quite the opposite. And how about the flowers? 100% why I bought them. They sparkle!

The first iris bloom and Juniper on her very best behavior. Everything good at once….

Pondering

May 28, 2021 in Thinking by Colleen | Permalink

I read, once, a story about a poet who could feel a poem coming, usually while outdoors, and would rush headlong at the house, or anywhere that might hold a pen and a scrap to write upon. I know this feeling, though not as intensely. It is more like a sudden and steady tumble from within. I need only sit still and gaze upon the words with my mind’s eye, transcribing onto neat legal pads. Never the computer.

The writings arriving at the keyboard exist on another plane. Cultivated. The tumble down-on-paper variety are more like a surprise visit from a beloved friend. Peggy or Andie. Effervescent and alive.

I am surrounded by disease and death. The daughter of a friend, a walking buddy, and a relative all with cancer. Greg’s cousin, died in a forest, unexpectedly and too damn young. A once musical finch found, stiff and floating, in the stock tank; the woman whose book I just finished. A time and phase of the here and now. I try to be okay with it, not to get completely sad and overwhelmed. It befalls every last one of us, after all.

But. Still. It is the end. Flesh to ashes, consciousness on the wind.

I have no thesis here. My words are a wretched scribble. Maybe that’s precisely it, the knowing, the pondering, that matters. A flicker in the background to make a body consider the precious nature of life, how it could vanish at any second.