More Than a Welcome Mat

My friend Trink enjoys two great gifts: humor and love. She epitomizes the old saw of having never met a stranger.

I stopped by this afternoon for an unannounced visit, and even before I entered the house, I stopped to enjoy her most recent creation. As a result of her stroke, she could not have arranged this tableau with her own hands, but I know her directing eye saw the arrangement through to completion. (The red wagon, by the way, was until a year ago in frequent use. She hauled groceries, garden clippings and plants, paint supplies, logs and kindling.)


Trink's visitors greet the musician, lost in thought and interior music before taking the steps. What a way to say, "A woman with a score of humor and love lives here. Come on in and join the orchestra."

Thank you, Trink, for the invitation and for the harmonious conducting.

Fried Shrimp on Toast

At 17, I visited a New Orleans friend and received an education in good food. Her mother was a terrific native gourmand and gourmet. In her tiny, old fashioned kitchen, she made delicious meals, which, years later as her neighbor, I frequently shared. Whenever she tried something new, she'd call and ask me to dinner, saying, "John will eat anything and not know if it's good."

During that visit, Mrs Little took my friend and me to dinner one evening without her husband and ten-year-old daughter. We went to her favorite restaurant, and it instantly became one of my all-time favorite restaurants: Casamento's.

photo found online at http://z.about.com/d/neworleans/1/0/1/-/-/-/casamentos1.jpg

If you don't know Casamento's, look at its website (http://www.casamentosrestaurant.com/main/main.html) or watch a video I happened to see the other day when channel-flipping (http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/chefs/channel/0,1000011,FOOD_32077_8957,00.html). All you need to know is that it's tiny, tiled, no frills, delicious, and closed all summer.

That evening, I watched in wonder and admiration as Mrs Little consumed oyster stew, a dozen oysters on the half shell, and fried oysters, announcing each one as the ultimate in the preparation of the slimy delicacy. I love the fried soft-shell crab on toast and the fried shrimp po-boy.

Just writing about Casamento's makes my mouth water and my whole body miss the sticky humidity of an evening on Magazine near Louisiana and my heart miss Mrs Little and my friend, both of whom are gone but live still in my memory.

Lazy Afternoon

A lazy early afternoon on the deck with The New Yorker, a glass of iced mint tea, a cat, and things that scurry and fly.





































I dare you to say waste of three hours.

Hydrangea

The hydrangea spreads its flower-laden limbs much too far out over my walkway, yet I cannot bring myself to trim them. Blossoms shimmer like tiny dollops of Brocato's spumoni ice cream, violet joining the green, cream, and pink.




I love this bush and the tiny flowers that bloom all summer long into the fall, and I'm not alone.

In ten minutes, I counted one tiny red bug and 12 assorted spiders. Each rested, snuggled in a comfy spot, still damp after light rain, decorating leaf, limb, bloom with motley pattern, surprising color, and spindly legs.
















One day, I'll have to trim the limbs, but this isn't that day.

Look-alikes

My niece recently took this photo of her daughter.


Celebrate the pure joy in her face.







Celebrate the image of her mother in her face.

I do both, and I love both, and the joy.

The Swiss Pantry

In Belvidere (home to wonderful artists Susan and Tom Church), The Swiss Pantry, a Mennonite institution that appears on the Tennessee Backroads site), offers bulk foods, fresh bakery bread, wonderful pies (fried and otherwise), and other delicacies that tempt folks from the wider neighborhood.


I have sampled candied ginger (which adds sophisticated flavor to my scones), pumpkin butter, Jerusalem artichoke pickle (not quite as good as my deceased Aunt Bertha's), whoopie pies, fried coconut pies, wild rice and multi-bean soup, a luncheon sub, and other products, many from Amish companies. I have also attended one of the special events -- a barbecue complete with free donuts for dessert.

Even though the Swiss Pantry is a 40-mile roundtrip drive from Sewanee (and sometimes, as happened today, does not have what I want), I enjoy the journey through rolling countryside dotted with nurseries.

Pine Sap

Thin cones
grow downward
from the long-leaf pine,
weep sap
in oily globes.