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(Decatur, Texas. Last week.)
Lovely trip home for Thanksgiving. Lots of family, lots of good food. Cousins running about. Lots of love.
And then the moments above: a trip to the Ranch with my Dad and the boys. And some time with the horses. Watching my dad work with his best mare. And then some time just sitting on the porch, talking. Simple but very very rich.
Those are my boys!
He was hungry. I said "I have goat cheese." And there was the seed of inspiration for a whole new dish, by the chef known as little brother.
Chevre, almonds and honey.
The best part: he ate it.
(In the last years, little brother comes to the table and resists whatever is put in front of him, no matter what it is. Unless it is sweet.)
I ate it too. As did the Daddy. And do you know, it was really good! The chevre was mild, like cream cheese. What should we call this dish? "Little creamy sweet balls, rolled lightly in almonds"?
Little brother doesn't care. He just loved the experience of being independent and doing something for himself and others (with a great big knife).
This little guy of mine has extraordinary powers. He can find things.
We ask him: "have you seen my phone?" or "do you know where the flashlight went?" and more often than not, he'll say "I know where that is!" and he'll run off and get it.
Sometimes he finds things that he doesn't have any business with, such as Daddy's belt, or the charger to the computer.
We've decided it's a superpower.
Within 10 minutes of being outside the other day, he found both of the missing kitty collars. One in a tree, and one in the neighbor's yard. Both. He knew I didn't like kitty outside without them (because the kitty is such a hunter). And he went and found them.
Really, truly. That gets a WOW in my book.
I adore that little series. A delighted little brother running in his determined way across the yard, evading the Daddy as best he can. There is little that makes these boys happier than a good game of CHASE.
Along the road in front of our house, there were the remnants of a fence: old rotting pine, pulled apart by the vines and bushes that had grown up over the years. Add to that the snow and the plowing in the winter and the digging out of the roadside ditches each summer. It looked a bit disheveled. So I decided to try to disentangle the wooden bits and clean it up.
"Hey guys, would you like to help me?"
Would they ever. They pulled out the tools. We got out the work gloves. And I let them have at it.
I stood in the road and made piles. In less than an hour we had removed every bit of that wooden fence from where it had once been tangled, and there were piles of old fencing in the ditch.
And that wasn't all. Today the boys got to work chopping up the larger sections into smaller pieces so that we could burn them during Advent season in the fire pit.
(complete!)
And then, of course, we just had to:
It was totally satisfying, you could tell. It was their project. They were allowed to use the axes, they engaged their muscles. They took something less-than-useful and turned it into something utterly useful. And they brought the project to a tidy completion. It was... empowering.
(If only could get them to wield a vacuum cleaner and a broom in just the same way.)
It's called: go get the kitty.
Little brother shows me how kitty was hunting on the woodpile when he found him.
Good kitty.
This is a set of little letter stamps that came from my Grandfather's house. It was something I found tucked in a dresser drawer in one of the back rooms. He had all sorts of crazy things in those drawers. "Take that home with you," he said. And so I did. That was years ago now.
I find them fascinating and delightful. They are very simple. But there's something about them that makes me filled with wonder -- in part about how they were used in my mother's childhood home. There's a story there I'm sure. Someone practiced stamping in the lid of the box, and the little words and phrases offer clues. Some of the numbers are missing (largely the numbers that were in their address.) I'm sometimes amused with how much I love these things, but I do.
We pulled them out today for a project. And when the stamps come out, so does little brother.
My mom had sent me this link back in the summer -- that I just loved. We had just returned from Plum Island -- bursting with beach treasures. Today (three months later), I assembled them into something worth sharing. And I used my precious little stamps to mark them. Plum Island.
"Very Martha Stewart," said the Daddy.
"Exactly," I said. "Thanks."
When I started working with the shells, out came all of this:
Plum Island sand. When you're there, and sand is in everything, you think, "argh sand!" But when you're here, and it's November, and all the leaves are off the trees and the autumn light is coming in low through the windows, and it's chilly and getting chillier, that little pile of sand on the table brings to life a little bit of summer goodness and warmth.
