So, as Easter was now a month ago I figured it was finally time to finish up posting the rest of the Easter photos.

That morning I had gone to Home Depot and Walmart to look for already started eggplants because the some of the ones we’d started from seed had not survived. While there I noticed the clouds darken and it appeared it would rain.

Rain it did. So, we had Easter egg hunting inside!

The cake my sister in law made…it was yummy!

Grayson (<---see, I'm spelling it right! (aside: I have friend with a Greyson and lately I've been screwing the spellings up between the two) ) is still too young to have figured out what is going on so it was mostly Zoe hunting eggs.

Zoe showing PawPaw her egg!

I don’t know about this!

This is my sister in laws mom helping Zoe figure out where a hiding egg was—love Zoe’s expression!

I think I’ll eat this instead of hunting eggs.

Getting some love with Nana (SIL’s mom).

I know there is one in there!

There it is!

I loved this shot of everyone, mostly because Stephanie, my sister in law, was playing with Grayson!

Zoe with her egg haul!

Isabelle wasn’t too happy with all the commotion, but she can’t really hear or see anyway so it must’ve been a bit confusing.

And that was Easter! Seems like so long ago!

Yes, I know Easter was a few weekends ago. I’m terribly behind on processing photos! Sorry! And I took so many that I’m going to have to do two separate posts!

This set is from an egg hunt at my brother, sister-in-law, and mom’s church. It was packed!

Who couldn’t love this face??

Zoe loved the petting area with several farm animals. I think she would have carried them the way she carries her cats if she could.

Grayson very happy!

My dad and Grayson! Love this picture!

Zoe in the egg hunt for her age group. Apparently she is in the stage of learning to bite her fingernails. But the photo looks like she is pondering for a moment in all the excitement what to do next.

Hunt more eggs of course!

And getting her reward!

She also got to meet the Easter Bunny and was very intimidated at first…

But managed to pose for a few photos!

Grayson loves his dog!

And my brother burning some extra calories with a 7 month old baby on the front.

More to come!

I don’t often write about my friends—I do have them!—mostly because I don’t get to see them a lot since they live in different cities and states. At the end of March most of us were able to get together, three others were unable to attend. We all met back in college, most of us while sailing on the Texas Clipper II back in the summer of 1998. This photo, nabbed from my friend Michelle, second from left (her daughter in front there), is definitely reminiscent of the type of photos we took in college. I think this was outtake #10 or something because we couldn’t stop laughing. It started with me leaning over onto Michelle because I was tired, then Rosemarie followed (far right) and then of course we decided it was a photo-op and well, here you have it!

We came together because Rosemarie was in town for a rare appearance, she lives in California, and Stephanie had her first baby in January.

Michelle is giving the pouty face because she really wants another child but forces beyond her have kind of put that on hold. If you are feeling kind and generous maybe you’ll help kick those forces by donating to the MS Society.

Stephanie with her Greyson. (Yes, another Grayson/Greyson…oh, and there are also two Kylen’s in the friend family too!)

I think Rosemarie looks good with a baby!

Miss Kylen is a ham and a half—love her to bits and pieces! She is mini-me of Michelle.

Rosemarie won’t be around again until perhaps Christmas since she lives in California, but her family is in Austin and so that at least lets us possibly see her. It had been 3 years since I had seen her.

Moving to Texas helped with seeing my friends more, definitely better than while in Florida (though I am missing my long-lost Eliana!), but still everyone has their own lives here in Texas too and it is always difficult to coordinate with everyone else’s schedules.

But, these are my friends. I love them and miss them.

I had a whirlwind weekend up in DFW spent mostly with friends, dear friends, and a smidge of time spent with my family. Zoe got to spend the night at my parent’s house Saturday night which meant hanging out with Aunt T (me) a lot, only I had to leave earlier than I would have normally so I could spend some time with friends, particularly one that only comes to town every so often because she lives full time in California. It was an excellent weekend and I will share some photos soon.

(I’m pretty sure Zoe has a mouthful of Fruity Pebbles, so hopefully you can’t see the chewed up pieces!)

My week ‘off’ of blogging last week was great. I accomplished *some* of what I wanted to get done but not everything, which is normal because I always put too much on my plate. Finally I relented and decided to focus on one thing which helped because I got a lot done. I’ll let you know what that was soon because I’m not completely done with it.

This week will be similar, light on blogging but I have a few posts up my sleeve—hopefully.

I’m also at Sprout Dispatch today!

How was your weekend?

Slowly we’re starting to think about purchasing our first house with some land to go with it. Not a lot of land, but bigger than your typical suburban lot. It’s funny, we’ll be married 10 years this June and for those 10 years we’ve rented our abodes, bummed with our parents for awhile, called a flame orange tent home, as well as a couple of motels/hotels. So, it is a little strange to think that we would be actually putting money towards something that in 15-30 years we could call our own (because really, it is still the bank’s until we pay it off).

With that I’ve starting seriously thinking about what I want in my yard, how I want my house to look—well, not quite, I have ideas, but honestly I’m thinking on the outside realm more than anything. I’m thinking about the food I want to grow, the flowers I want filling the rest of the yard, the types of trees I want if the yard isn’t already full of other trees, and also the animals I want.

Chris wants to keep bees and I want to keep chickens. Apparently Chris wants to grow his own wheat, too. I asked him about sugar cane but he said we could continue destroying the Everglades for that. All of these thoughts about what I could grow in the semi-near future had me doing some internet reading on homesteading, gardening and small-scale farming.

What I was surprised to learn was that there was a backlash against the whole urban farmstead/do-it-yourself trend. Frankly, I was dismayed about the backlash. Now, I don’t expect everyone to want to grow their own food, cook organically, go to the farmers market, or go out back to get the eggs for the cake they are baking that night, but what I do expect people to understand is that we aren’t that far away generationally from when all of these things were mainstream in society. Perhaps 60+ years of so-called conventional farming and lifestyles have deluded our sense of heritage, but more than likely (I’m generalizing here, I realize people come from all walks of life and heritages) if you look back to your grandparents, maybe further to your great-grandparents, you are likely to find someone who grew most of their food or cultivated a large garden, someone who sewed clothes for the family or made quilts to keep them warm at night.

The backlash wasn’t strictly related to food, it also seeped into the creative realm in regards to people picking up knitting and crocheting.

A term I was only recently introduced to by Keely is the word femivore. She told me about it so I did some searching and it stemmed from this article with many negative rebuttals on the internet about the word. While the word does have some weirdness to it, I don’t get the hatred of the back-to-your-roots idea. Some of the rebuttals were in regards to a glorification of the past, farming and simplicity, others were about th efeeling of women needing to have it all, a career and doing it all themselves at home (which is so ironically funny because lots of men are doing both, too (and I loved this cached rebuttal, original link is not working for some reason)). Of course all of this was completely different 100 years ago when what grew or didn’t grow meant starving or going without for much of the year. It meant you couldn’t pay your bills or you had to barter to get things you needed. Sewing your own clothes or piecing together a quilt might not have been necessarily to give as a gift for a baby or wedding but instead it was because you only had five dresses and you couldn’t afford another so you had better mend this one until it was in rags. And then you made a quilt out of the rags.

I get that. Our times now are not our ancestor’s times then. On the other hand, outside of the ‘trendy’ movement to do all of this, there’s everyone else who has been doing it anyway, despite mainstream living; the people with land in the country who keep a donkey, horse or cow, who might keep chickens in the yard all the while living a seemingly regular life. It’s not something new. Gardening is one of the most popular hobbies in the U.S. and whether you are growing food or a rose garden, you are still carrying on in some form, part of your heritage.

I think the thing that bothers me most is when simplicity and doing things the old way is turned into somehow that you are being elitist. Small back-to-nature magazines have been around for a long time, heck Mother Earth News has been rocking it since 1970. None of this stuff is new. It’s only undergoing a revitalization and becoming more understood and less shunned—or somewhat less shunned. I remember in 2000 when I was in college, I joined the Sierra Sea Club. Their primary objective, other than general environmental issues, was to promote organic foods. This was the first time I’d heard the term and I remember it being rather strange and weird. Most people just equated it with PETA and crazy hippies. Here we are 12 years later and the term is widely known, though sometimes slightly green-washed. Being organic/living organically, in the sense of returning back to your roots and doing things a more natural way will easily get you labeled ‘crunchy’, ‘granola’, ‘hipster’, or ‘hippie’. If my great-grandmother who had chickens in her backyard in Azle, Texas would be called a hipster, then let me be one too! Organic is doing without all the extra crap—whether that is living an organic life with less stuff in your personal life or taking it the foodie way and purchasing your food without GMOs, pesticides and fertilizers.

There will always be the naysayers and people who don’t agree. And they are right, growing things for yourself, learning how to build things or taking up an old craft, isn’t for everyone. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be denegrated.

Me, I prefer to keep the crochet, remembering the jars of food stored on the tight shelves in my Nanny’s small hallway off her kitchen, thinking of the moments of sitting outside with my family as a kid—talking and playing around in the yard, going on campouts and learning about the natural world, cooking up old recipes from both of my grandmothers (reading their scrawl almost makes me think they are there), and trying to gather up all the bits of information I can on what is left in my natural heritage. I’m so glad I learned to make my Nanny’s chow-chow recipe because now when I taste it I am taken back to her kitchen in east Fort Worth, the blue morning light in the kitchen, the table a little sticky from her millions of things stacked on it—the margarine bowls and placemats, the smell of her freezer as my brother and I opened it to get the Blue Bell (or grocery store special) ice cream out. When I, someday, gather eggs from my coops I want to think about the chickens in my Granny’s yard, the scraps from lunch or dinner carried out in a round, tin plate. As I mow the lawn around my future house I want to think about my dad mowing his lawn, how the sound of the mower starting up signaled us to get outside and play, the fresh grass beckoning to be walked on.

That’s what it is all about. Because it is all we have. If we can’t remember some of the basics, learn the things our predecessors knew, we’re just losing a culture. But maybe there’s hope?

Last weekend I went up to DFW to visit my family and to see one of my good friends who had recently had her first baby. I was excited to be going up there because my niece and nephew were going to be staying at my parents house for the night on Friday. Slumber party!!!!!

You can see Zoe above making ‘poop and pee panckes’. Yep. That’s right! Her imagination runs wild! And yes, I had to ‘eat’ a few of them too.

Zoe crashed in my bed and boy, definitely not your best sleep. But, that’s ok because I got to snuggle with her as we fell asleep to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. In the morning she woke me up (as I was rolling over to try to go back to sleep) and say “Look, Aunt T!”, pointing to the window. “Good morning sun!”

Then we brought Grayson in where he watched Zoe as she watched a video on my mom’s iPhone.

While I usually see this kid smiling in all of my brother and sister in law’s photos, he did cry a few times. But, he is still a very happy baby!

Mom took this on her phone at Carrabba’s. Zoe had just told me that I was a CuddleBug! LOOOOOVEEEE this kid! Even when she is being bratty you can’t help but want to eat her up, especially when she says things that you don’t know where she pulled them from. I can’t wait for Grayson to talk (though I don’t want to rush him too much, he’s a blast right now!) and see what kinds of things he comes up with.

Red the cat is not doing too well. He’s been vomiting and not eating much and his normally thin self is even thinner. The vet thinks he has lymphoma or something else fatal. They are feeding him wet food as much as they can and trying to pamper him. He attitude has changed a lot, even from a year ago. His attitude changed when my cats showed up, I think they showed him how to be more loving. But now he will even let me kiss his face and snuggle up in his face more than he used to. I was bitten once because I lingered too long, years ago. Now, not so much. I think he knows it is nearly his time to go.

I don’t remember taking this photo, I think my brother snagged my camera.

And Grayson being a cutie pie….

with Zoe coming around and playing with Grayson. She’s finally getting more playful with him, but she is still in the ‘me’ mode, wanting you to put Grayson down so you can play with her. My sister in law caught another vantage point of his exchange. I almost took photos but I am glad I opted for video instead. As I went to get the camera I was worried she’d change her mind and stop playing, but as you can see in the video she knew we were watching and I think enjoyed the attention too. Don’t mind the tv and background chatter—we’d just found out about Whitney Houston and were trying to come up with two other celebrities who’d recently died. Etta James and Don Cornelius.

It was a happy weekend! Times like this I wish I lived closer. But, at least I am in Texas.

If you’ve only recently started reading my blog you might not know that I have a second niece. She was born two years ago today and unfortunately only lived for 104 days.

She died when we were on the Appalachian Trail, so after we returned back to the trail from home after the funeral, cairns become something symbolic for me with her, Ashleigh. Typically cairns are used for marking a footpath or a particular place on a mountain but occasionally we’d come across great areas of them for no particular reason. The ones above, at Sunfish Pond in New Jersey, were simple and modest but they reminded me of her.

When we came across the ones at White Rock Cliffs in Vermont I made a tiny one for her. I didn’t take a photo of it at the time. But it is there among all the other cairns alongside the trail. It really is an amazing sight to round the corner and see the forest full of cairns.

And when we came to Galveston a few weekends ago and I saw the cairns lining the rocks on the Seawall near Fort Crockett, I knew I had to walk among them and make my own for her. They are a little hard to see in this pano—and it isn’t that great of one because I was not using a tripod and just a point and shoot camera.

I only met Ashleigh twice and never held her. Her parents, my brother and sister in law, of course had the privilege as did my parents, but when we left for the AT she was not in good enough health for other people to hold her just yet. And so, I had always hoped to be able to connect with her as I have my other niece and nephew but I never did in the way I thought I would. Instead now I try to remember her in these ways, building something more for myself to remind me of her, but also to leave a mark upon on the Earth for her, to let others knows whether they realize it or not, that a sweet little baby girl was here for 104 days and made a remarkable imprint on the lives of those who knew her.

Happy Birthday Ashleigh!

Our Chinese cabbage has been doing great but they are starting to bolt. We’ve been making stir fry with some of the cabbage and it has been great. Ok, *Chris* has made the stir fry. Anyway, I have been dying to make my own sauerkraut after seeing my brother make his own last year so that is on my agenda to make but I’ve also wanted to make chow chow. My grandmother used to make it a lot, well she canned most things out of her garden or from the farmers market and had a shelf full of jarred items in a small hallway in the house I visited growing up. I don’t remember eating a lot of chow chow, mostly because I thought it was a grown up thing to eat, but here I am a grown up and I wanted to make it.

I had my mom email me my grandmother’s recipe and I dug right in. Except I didn’t realize it was going to make so much! I mean, I know three cabbages, but geez, this was a lot! Her recipe also called for onion and green tomatoes, but her recipe also didn’t make nearly as much. I ended up buying one white onion and about six tomatillos because I couldn’t find any green tomatoes at the store. I should have bought about sixteen tomatillos and two more onions! But that’s ok, because in my research on chow chow, there are many different ways to make it. Some with less cabbage, some with more, some sweet, some tangy. It seems that there is no ‘right’ way to make it, which is really a lovely thought!

I nibbled a taste as I putting it into the jars and it tasted just as I remembered. I was worried as I was drowning the cabbage in apple cider vinegar that it was going to be too vinegary, but nope, pretty darn good! I’m planning on trying it out tomorrow morning with some hashbrowns and eggs for breakfast! But, I’m hoping I can expand the use of it, put it on rice and beans and other dishes that need a little kick.

Have you made chow chow?

On Christmas Eve I did not get to see these two, my niece and nephew, for very long, only a few hours in the evening. They were both sick and Zoe was dealing with a reaction to the medication she was on, so my ideas of visiting them at their house were sacked. But, I did get to see them for awhile and I got to see Grayson smile and laugh at me, and Zoe made me eat Christmas Eve dinner next to her at her kid table (me in the floor) while she watched ‘kid tv’—aka: Rio. I say ‘made’ me sit with her—but I really didn’t mind. I don’t get to see her but once every few months so I love to sit with her when I can.

And since they were both sick they both coughed in my face a few times so now I’m sipping Emergen-C in hot tea to see what I can prevent. I’m thinking that might not work so much since my brother was getting sick too…oh well.

I’ll have some photos from the chaos of presents on Christmas Eve tomorrow. I didn’t take many photos the entire weekend and instead spent it being rather lazy, reading, doing a smidge of crocheting and not being online except to find How I Met Your Mother episodes to watch while I walked on my parent’s treadmill Saturday morning. As a result of being lazy I am more than halfway through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, because as usual I am late to the game on books and the movie is out and I want to see it.

Hope your holiday was wonderful!

As someone who loves being home, wherever I am….since we were married in 2002 we’ve lived in two different apartments, a townhouse, a 70s ghetto house, a tent, two hotels, our parent’s houses, and most recently the small place we are renting now…the abode that we spend our time always forms memories. Every time we packed up a house I would walk room to room and remember the different things that happened in the room, the little memories that were made.

This summer when my mom and I went to visit her cousin and and daughter Elizabeth we all got to talking about the old places the grandparents had lived and what happened to the places. In particular they were interested in their shared grandmother on the Kincade side of the family so I finally got mom to take me over to one of their houses that happened to be less than a mile from where my grandmother, my mom’s mom had lived in east Ft. Worth. For 18 years I was over at my grandmother’s house frequently but had never gone or been taken that extra mile over the railroad tracks to the other house. (My grandmother moved to another house when I was in college because her neighborhood had slowly become very ghetto and though her neighborhood was bad, just on the other side of the tracks was even worse.)

So, over the tracks mom and I went that day. What we found was depressing.

We couldn’t determine if someone actually lived there or not, but the neighboring homes were occupied. Several homes on the street were in similar states of disrepair and it was evident people lived in those, so I am willing to bet someone lived in this house.

I wanted to fix this house up and live in it, knowing that wasn’t really feasible or possible. There are so many cute early to mid-20th century homes in this area that would be beautiful bungalows to fix up. In some areas they are nice, people take care of them, others, not so much. My grandfather, my dad’s father, lived in a neighborhood nearby up until this last year. It was a shame to let the house be sold, so much history and that there was a gigantic yard that grew lots of vegetables in year past…but that will be another story.

Here they are, Carson and Minnie in front of another house, I’m not sure whose. Perhaps it was the other house they lived in in another area of Fort Worth or maybe a friend or relative’s house. Carson died in the late 60s I believe, I should dig out my genealogy binder to check, but Minnie was alive until I was three and I have very hazy memories of her in a wheelchair at her nursing home. But that is all. I wish I had more.

I hope to continue this series over the months as I get more photos of various houses, dig a little deeper and remember my own memories of the three different houses I lived in growing up.