Switched At Birth

Gazelles In The Kitchen

A herd of long-legged human gazelles breezed through my kitchen last night. Still wet from the pool, they dragged out cutting boards, the good knives, yellow and orange sweet peppers, an English cucumber, Havarti cheese, whole wheat crackers and red pepper hummous. They clustered thickly around the island bar. The air fairly crackled with their energy. And when they vanished, suddenly, as wild things do, nothing was left but the seedy carcass of a pepper, a cheese wrapper and a pile of shuffled knives.

My first image of them was as a cloud of locusts; or maybe a school of pirahnas. Then my focus cleared; I saw the beauty and grace of young gazelles.

Can anything compare to the hunger of a teenager?

The lone boy hunkered over his guitar at the opposite end of the bar, swiveling on the garnet barstool, strumming quietly and dipping Ruffles potato chips into a pool of catsup on a paper plate.

The youngest girl stayed in the pool alone, swimming infinity symbols in the lavender light, holding court with a yellow floating rubber fish.

I tasted pungent garlic from the grilled Portabello mushrooms all night. But I would eat them again in a heartbeat.

 

 

Walk To The Gate

I just discovered that my little camera will record short videos and that it has a microphone. This is my first attempt, so be sweet. I'm trainable!

The Woods In Early July

 

Lovely, carnivorous Sundews

I came back in from the woods around 7:50 this morning, a wide trickle of sweat between my shoulder blades darkening the back of my tank top. Something was crawling on the back of my leg, trying to sink a tooth in. I reached back and pulled off a very lively deer tick.

It's July in panhandle Florida.

Want to take a no-sweat (no tick) virtual walk with me?  Click here.

Leftovers

"So, what did you have for dinner tonight?"

"Oh, nothin'. Just some leftovers."

"Cheeper" By The Dozen

One of our resident wild turkey hens showed Buck and Maggie her babies today: looks like an even dozen. I have only seen wild turkeys once. They look like soft, moving pine cones with legs.

"Can't I get out and play with them?"

Maggie goes from truck to house to fenced back yard. She is gentle, with a very soft Labrador retriever mouth, but she would want to pick them up and bring them to Buck, babies would get soggy and Mama would fly hot.

No Pasta In The Pasta Bowl

But no worries. There's shrimp salad and an ear of corn in there! I get a craving for this shrimp recipe. It has some of my favorite ingredients: capers, lemon, garlic, scallions, olive oil, and, uh, uh -- oh yeah -- shrimp.

Getting What You Want

I have wanted to have a Publix grocery store close enough to shop at for as long as I can remember. That feeling goes way back. All the way back to those years as a newly married girl living in Tallahassee, working, going to college, and setting up my very own first kitchen.

It was a nice little apartment, during the era of harvest gold wall to wall carpet and avocado green appliances; or was it avocado green wall to wall carpet and harvest gold appliances? The local Publix was my first grocery store as a "married woman." It was where I almost daily selected raw materials from which to craft a life and a lifestyle.

Publix is a Lakeland, Florida-based supermarket chain that has had that "x" quality, an ability to be just ahead of the curve on trends which makes them seem to be delivering some new amenity that their target market doesn't yet know it was yearning for until suddenly they glide through the glass doors and find it at Publix.

I was newly wed, with brand new pots, pans, utensils, a set of sleek black Dansk china, chunky Scandanavian style flatware, and a red and white spiral-bound Betty Crocker cookbook. The year was 1971.

When Mother called to ask how I was getting along and I honestly answered, "Great! I'm having fun," she couldn't take yes for an answer and asked again, saying, "Tell me, really. How are you?" and when I once again affirmed my happy state, she stunned me by lowering her voice to a whisper and saying, "Honey, does he beat you?"

I laughed it off, then, but it gives me a chill now to think what darkling memory in her own dim past might have been behind that question.

Ah, well, that was so long ago and in another life; I wouldn't even be remembering it now if it weren't past midnight and I hadn't gotten back out of bed after being asleep for an hour, awakened and made restless by a thunder storm, and started thinking about Publix and my friendly neighborhood Albertson's grocery store.

Publix has bought out all four of the Albertson's stores here in Pensacola, and I am getting what I have wanted all these years. But now, I worry about that "R" word which comes into play when one corporation buys out another and a new corporate culture arrives with its own nation-building model. The "R" word is re-personnel.

Buck and I are in and out of "our" grocery store four or five times a week. We know all the faces and they know ours. We have cried together when one of their employees, a fellow I called Albertson's Ambassador of Goodwill, lost his courageous battle with leukemia a few years ago. I have commiserated with one of the clerks on her difficult divorce (is there any other kind?), and we enjoy bantering with the college boys who check out our grocercies as they hand off cans, jars, apples and oranges with the movement of athletes.

There is a guy who, I swear, lives in the produce department. I have never been in the store when he is not there: neat, cheerful and unfailingly professional, his hands always moving to pluck out an orange past its prime, or reorganize stacks of fresh sweet corn.

There's another guy I call "stump the band," because he's the one I look for anytime I can't find some item on my list. He not only knows where it is now, but where it used to be before the latest shelf reorganization. He reunited me with my half-full cart once when a nice older gentleman had accidentally made off with it, adding a bundle of flowers for his wife.

I'm thinking about a young woman with Down's syndrome who has been bagging groceries and helping out in other ways for some years at the store. You will never find a more loyal employee or one more proud of her job.

The manager reminds me of an old-fashioned shop keeper who appears to be a caring shepherd to his flock of workers and customers, always bustling about and opening up a new register to man himself when it's needed. "Come on over here. I'll take you on through over here."

I know that every employee in the store will, essentially, be fired and have to apply for their job again. This process has already begun. The mood in the store is by turns somber, hopeful, just plain scared, or cautiously optimistic.

So. After all these years I am finally getting what I want: a Publix to be my very own neighborhood grocery store once again.

I just hope we'll be seeing all our old friends wearing the new corporate logo, that life can go on substantially as before, and that we can continue to stroll companionably down the aisles together.

Good Morning Deer

 Third from left is a young buck whose spike antlers are still cloaked in velvet. This "gang of seven" are regular visitors.

Listening To Minton Sparks

"Bein' too much of oneself needs no forgiveness."

Minton Sparks, from "Mississippi Moonshine"  - Middlin Sisters CD

 

Two events collided to cause the works of spoken word artist Minton Sparks to reach my ear. Honestly, sometimes I hardly know where I have been.

My dentist is Mickie Parker. His office has the usual collection of magazines, ranging from news digests and fishing to lifestyle periodicals. When I was there a few months to have an ancient filling that's been in my mouth since the last century replaced, I scanned the reading material while I was waiting, and saw a magazine I had never seen before.

Garden and Gun. No kidding. I laughed out loud when I saw the cover. I laughed some more when I flipped through the glossy pages, past images of young women in designer gowns holding expensive limited edition rifles at some fancy country estate surrounded by gorgeous horses and high bred hunting dogs. About that time, one of Mickie's assistants opened the door to the back shop. "Hey, Beth, come on back, how you doin' today?" she said.

I kept the magazine and settled into the cool dental chair. When Mickie came in, I kidded him about Garden and Gun mazagine. Chuckling, I waved the magazine and said, "Hey, Mickie, what is this? Some kind of spoof?"

Mickie's genial countenance got serious. "No. Hell, no. It's the best magazine I know. It's great. In fact, I just got a new one in today and it's got a terrific story on the resurgence of longleaf pines. Stay here. I'll go get it out of my car."

There's something about Mickie you should know. He's a fine dentist, but one of his true loves is a side-line to his medical practice. Mickie represents a longleaf pine nursery in central Florida and sells strong, container-grown seedlings. We have bought a beaucoup of them over the years. Most of them are higher than my sixty four inches of height today. So he knew I would be interested in a story on how longleaf pines are returning to the South. Soon, he returned with the magazine. "Here, take it home with you. Now, open your mouth and let me have a look."

Later that day, I read Jack Hitt's story, "The Longleaf Pine Rebuilding the fireforest of the Old South." Fascinating story, with terrific accompanying photographs by Andrew Kornylak. There was a whole lot of good writing in this lovely magazine. It's a pretty thoroughbred, true, but it's also Tabasco spiced and smells of ribs, smoked low and slow. There was a terrific insider's tour of Oxford, Mississippi in this issue, led by author Lisa Neumann Howorth, also known as the Night Mayor of Oxford, a profile of painter C. Ford Riley by author Padgett Powell and a plethora of other really good stuff.

I became a subscriber that day.

Then, last week, when our friends, Jim and Betty, were visiting from Charlotte, NC, Betty was telling me about a song she wanted me to listen to on her iPOD. You won't believe this (early adopter of technology that I like to think of myself), but I had never actuallly held an iPOD in my hand, and really didn't understand how they worked. Sure, I've seen young kids wandering around with earpieces in their ear. Grandson twelve year old Alex occasionally holds an earpiece from his iPOD up to my ear so I can hear "the hardest rocking love song ever written," but I had never focused on the slim rectangle as a tool for pleasure and creativity for my own self.

When Betty showed me how it worked, and how I could download Podcasts from National Public Radio or fiction from The New Yorker, in addition to music, it was just a matter of time (seconds, actually) until I decided I had to have one. Buck deserves some credit for the idea, too. He has been suggesting to me, every Christmas and birthday for several years, that I might enjoy some kind of good quality music machine.

My sleek black iPOD arrived earlier this week and my oh my I am sleeping less and enjoying it more.

And then I had a chance to read the May/June edition of Garden and Gun. Singer/songwriter/author Marshall Chapman wrote a terrific piece called "Minton Sparks Catches Fire The love child of Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams lights up the stage." Somehow, I've just missed the rich world of spoken word artists.

I went to iTunes, bought and downloaded Sparks' 2005 CD, "Middlin Sisters." When Buck and I turned out the lights last night, I lay in bed and listened to Sparks speak her Southern Gothic story poem vignettes (mostly about her childhood in Tennessee) to the accompaniment of the picking of singer/songwriter/musician Darrell Scott. I just ordered her latest selection of stories called "Open Casket."

I talked to my sister who lives out in Arizona yesterday. She is older than me by ten years and is by far the better repository of family memories. She told me some stories about when she was little, and when our mother married my father and took her and our oldest sister away from the old homeplace in Mississippi down to the tip end of the mainland of Florida, to Miami. We talked alot about family stories, the perspective of children at different ages, the perspective that time and the river sometimes brings, and why we live where we live as adults; how sometimes it has everything to do with love.

Minton Sparks' accoustic voice and sharp truth-telling style that would have offended my mother sounded just right to my ears last night, and are leading me to some old memory albums of family history: acid-etched, time burnished and strangely sweet.

57

Turning 57 wasn't tough at all. I have a grateful heart for all the many unmerited gifts in my life, and most especially for the stunning love of my darling Buck and the love and affection of all of my family and friends. (Photo taken by Stacey at our favorite Pensacola restaurant, Skopelos on the Bay.)

Chef and owner Gus Silivos outdid himself with this lovely fresh grilled amberjack, topped with baby shrimp in a saffron cream sauce. Yum. Oh -- and I almost forgot. The fish was on a bed of fried baby artichoke hearts which we dubbed "Greek popcorn" -- gosh, they were good. 

Gotta go. We're back home, in our soft clothes, and the chocolate ice cream awaits.

Sweet dreams, y'all.