And taste as heavenly.
Every now and then I fall hopelessly in love. I’ve tumbled hard for a spider, a redbird who chirps relentlessly when I forget to fill his feeder and a squishy pair of flip flops. (The latter being a painful subject having found one recently in my pup’s mouth.)
It’s horrible.
I need to be tending to my children.
Yesterday look what I found.
What to do?
It’s a baby watermelon hanging by a thread off a cliff.
Even a greener than Granny Smith farmer like me knows this probably won’t end up well for baby.
Try as I might, don’t think there is anyway to untangle the vines with out doing irreversable damage to it’s lifeline.
Only thing now is to wait and watch.
Only problem is this is who my daughter discovered directly under baby.
This guy (or gal) is directly under hanging by a thread baby.
If heaven forbid, anything should happen to baby, there is no way Miss Farther-along Watermelon could miss the carnage.
Too much drama for me. A mini garden soap opera.
Guess nature will take its course.
No telling how As the Watermelon Turns will eventually end –
My very own horticultural cliff-hanger.
Every year my husband’s family gathers at the beach for a week. That’s not so unusual for a family to gather at the beach. But every year this crew holds a putt-putt golf tournament for the coveted Miracle Miles Cup.
Picture a dented challis. Don’t have a picture of it for it is still in Charleston. Last year’s winner didn’t bring it. Guess he thought it wasn’t going anywhere so why bother.
I won a long time ago…and had it in my grasp a few years ago. Only to choke it to a violent death with pitiful putting.
The winner’s name is engraved on the cup and the prize gets to reside with winner all year long….
You see, there are these two guys, the two Jims, who assume they are going to take the cup home every year.
Once the play started, I did okay. Lots of two putts and in…then like always there were holes I tanked…and my chance to take the cup back to Madtown faded away.
This year not unlike years in past, the cup went to a dark horse. Papa Jack. My father-in-law. And if I couldn’t win…Yay for Papa.
I’ve decided on a new strategy for next year.
Learn to golf. (Novel idea, I know.)
Some dear brave friends promise they can teach me to play on a public course — and not do any injury to myself or others.
We’ll see.
Fore now, I only have myself to blame.
Because I really, really stink.
My son. Late yesterday he asked me to watch him take his bait out. He fishes for sharks. Last week he caught a tiger, bull and two black tips.He ferries his bait 400 yards out in the Gulf on a kayak. The only thing I ask is that he let someone know when he is taking the bait out. What we could do for him bobbing out there if something happened I’m not sure — but at least we would know he was bobbing out there in his life jacket.
I thought I was on watch duty — not watch the line duty.
Turned out he wanted me to hold the line with my hand as the boat when out. That way the drag doesn’t have to be so tight. Tight drag means it’s hard to pull out. Okay — this is what happened.
The minute I let my hand up thinking I was set to lose a digit with the razor-sharp line….
I saw this and knew that he was going to kill me.
the line started zipping up in the reel and there is absolutely nothing you can do, except look at your 16 year-old who was 200 yards out in the Gulf and know you don’t want to be anywhere near when he saw this on the sand.
So I left.
Marching up to the house and waited for him to come in and see it.
He was going to be furious because he is like me.
Most important point lost in all the fury….I didn’t volunteer for line duty.
Well, there was lots of groaning and moaning. How he’d just lost $100 worth of line. How his grandfather and 11 year old cousin have no trouble doing this.
Volunteering to undo the line, I spied a yellow sandcastle mold. This was going to show him, that you don’t give up and that no matter how terrible things…..
This is how far I got. I was so cotton-picken insane that when I took this picture my ugly-@*@- feet were in it and…
I didn’t even care.
There the line sits just like that 12 hours later.
My son hasn’t talked to me much. He still has other fishing reels, but this was his super-duper Stratocaster – PennSenator something or other.
Wish there was a tidy resolution to this fish tale but none as yet.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to …. do something we should never have been asked to do in the first place.
So there.
Build it and they will come.
Before this summer, I didn’t know much about farming. Like how farmers get up at dawn to draw water, pick beans and whisper sweet nothings to their tomato blossoms.
The morning's haul.
My children have been gone all week. It’s been odd. (Will leave that onion to peel in another post.)
With all this free time on my hands, after prying myself out of bed in the morning, I get in the garden and poke around.
Here are the goodies I found yesterday.
I took all those green beans — pole beans, snap beans, whatever you call them — stringed ‘em, snapped ‘em and put them in the crock pot with a bit of water, salt, bacon and the extra special ingredient, a good sprinkling of sugar.
Cooked them till they were good and mushy as all southern veggies are supposed to be.
This was done at the suggestion of Michelle as she healed my torn-up backside the day before. During a most wonderful massage at the hands of Michelle, we talked of our gardens. She mentioned fixing up a bunch of beans in the crock pot (she didn’t add sugar, that was my addition). Her husband and mother LOVED them, but when she tried them…Eeww! Michelle didn’t like them — at all.
“They didn’t taste like canned green beans, did they?”
“No ma’am, they sure didn’t.”
I got it. There is something so very comforting about canned greens beans. Opening a can of green beans, sniffing that wonderful scent, transports me to school lunches on plastic green trays (with four compartments) at Audubon Elementary.
Makes me happy.
But so does the taste of pole beans stewing in their own juice, salt and bit of bacon all afternoon.
Yum. When those beans have come out of your very own garden ~ that’s just plain good eating.
And rather surprising for me. In fact, the whole gardening, cooking thing is quite miraculous where I’m concerned. Not that I’m complaining being the recipient of a minor miracle, especially one that tastes so good.
The Jekyll Island Club Hotel has its roots in the 1880’s, when the world’s richest and made it their winter home, forming the Jekyll Island Club.
J. P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Joseph Pulitzer and Marshall Field. The membership possessed one-sixth of the wealth of the entire world. They built the club, and then a colony of little “cottages,” many of them in the 7 to 8,000 square foot range.
We were there for the Georgia Press Association Annual Meeting, more specifically the dinner and awards ~ for I love placards, amulets and the like.
That’s my barometer for choosing half marathons. Do they hand out finisher’s medals?
I was there to pick up a nice finisher’s medal and we decided to stay a few nights.
One bit of conversation my husband and I had all weekend was proposed development for the island. Right now 65 percent of the island is a nature preserve, development only allowed on 35 percent.
Lots of controversy over the development, but for now due to economics - looks like plans have stalled. Even if a point is moot — why miss out on a lively discussion (all weekend) with your mate? Hubby, like good entrepreneur, thinks land should be allowed to find the highest value for the owner.
I agree completely ~ with lots of exceptions.
Jekyll Island quickly became one of the exceptions after tooling around on bicycle with friend and seeing the stunning landscape.
The next day, Hubby and I tooled around for hours on bikes. Felt rather like a honeymoon in sense that there were lots of pictures of me standing in front of things and shots of him edging up to some ruin. No children and never anyone around to take a picture of us together ~ except lots of water fowl, deer and bunnies.
I could not get over the trees. The old, old live oaks, their limbs straining from the weight of Spanish moss.
Unbelievable.
Half way through riding the trails of seaside wilderness, my husband just said, “You are right.”
Sometimes a land’s highest value is not a strip mall with grocery and t-shirt shop. Or luxury high-rises.
“You’re right.” Unbelievable.
Not really. He’s a pretty smart fellow.
My husband and I disagree on lots of things, but one issue comes along every two or three years.
The smilax screen on our porch that must be killed — so a new green, beautiful screen can take it’s place.
This should be done every April, but my husband hates the thought of it. We live on a very busy street and part of his enjoyment of being on the porch is tied to the smilex that weaves it’s way through the decade’s old rusty iron screen.
There is only one problem with this. After a year or so, the deep down smilax gets strangled by the other vines and dies.
Leaving brown ugly dead.
Here’s our marital conflict. My husband would rather have brown, ugly, dead cover than no cover.
I (though not usually a slave to aesthetics) can’t stand the dead leaves.
Every two years or so when I can’t take it anymore I cut, hack, get scratched and scraped to the max and strip it bare ~ so beautiful new green vines can cling on the rusty iron.
Yesterday was D-Day after dear hubby drove off. (This is what he gets for leaving me alone with the children all day.)
I kept pulling and cutting and finally….
All done.
We got a great rain last night so hopefully that smilex up early this morning eager to climb.
Sometime you got to do dirty work when hubby’s gone. He’ll thank me.
Maybe not tonight, but he will.
June 15 ~ the day the hedge came down. Let’s see how long it takes.
Wonder if he’ll speak to me before then?
