(I'm learning French, for the fourth time. Someday I'll voyage en France encore. Meanwhile...)
It's late morning, the second day of this blog. I began yesterday with this opening:
This morning I am making meatloaf, something I have not done in years, I would guess. (Who knows who will eat it?) But there has been a package of ground meat in the freezer for a month now, and its time has come.
On this second morning, I've been in the kitchen since 8:30 baking and cooking. Tomorrow is my neighbor Steve's 75th birthday, and in honor of that milestone his wife Holly, Joseph and Alexander and I will be bringing in dinner from Squid's, Steve's favorite seafood restaurant, to eat on the porch. I'm making a dessert I think will work for everyone. That's actually what I began with this morning, and then went on to a batch of almond cookies to bring to my nephew's wedding this weekend.
Aside from the celebratory sweets, I'm cleaning out the frig and freezer (hence the meatloaf), prepping for my trip north. Not far north, no...the wedding is in West Virginia where my sister Ann's family is from. So I went on to roast an eggplant, saute' spinach, and throw out two small chunks of ruined watermelon I found in the back of the middle shelf...you know, the one that the top shelf always obscures.
Anyway, it seemed a good morning to do that kitchen stuff, since, after a little rain yesterday, the air has cooled to a pleasant light breeze. I'm sitting on the porch now, the oven empty, the pans washed up, watching the nearly noon sun filter through the thick screen of trees surrounding my house...the whole neighborhood, actually...and some tiny marigold volunteers inching up on my drive.
Cooking seems to release me when I'm feeling put off...blocked, you could say...from everything else. It's been a whole month since I've posted here. It's not that I've had nothing to write about...this month has been ripe with events...but somehow I couldn't break through. Just as I had given up yesterday's plodding attempt, Susan, ever watchful (in her caring way), sent me a message wondering if all were well. Starting over today, I'm much more open.
This wedding will be a reunion for us. Weddings and funerals are what get us out there. Most of our family is staying at the Bicentennial Inn in the small college town where my sister reared her family. We've inhabited it before; I doubt it's changed much, so we feel the pull of past adventure. Among the things to pack are 36 gold-dotted welcome bags for guests, which my sisters and I have put ourselves cooperatively in charge of, and other than the last minute addition of local mini-sausage rolls (don't ask...it's West Virginia), they are ready for transport. Each of us has baked something, too...another family tradition.
This will be my second trip out of state this month, a hot June, rife with humidity and little rain where it counts (this last is becoming a two-year complaint, I know, but I feel that dryness in my bones as well as on this hard-packed garden).
Earlier in June, I turned right onto the interstate, going south that time, and, after a few hours, took a left onto US 17 to see my friends Pam and Paul in Wilmington. As it had for many of us, the past years have prevented visits, though usually our birthdays are incentives. I'd met Pam the year I taught, by fortuitous accident, at Meredith College; she and Paul were living in Raleigh then, their three girls mostly gone, though the youngest was floating perilously about in Greenville, if I remember correctly.
It didn't take us long to become lunch-friends, and then, as both of us moved on, to corresponding friends. Pam is a great correspondent. She writes real letters, and even with the advent of email continues to send long missives through both post and cyberspace. Her description of their daily lives, the state of things in town and beyond, is always spot-on and often witty. It makes me glad to have someone who can expect the same life stories from me without falling in boredom.
When I visit, though, I can also see how talented both Pam and Paul are...the first a master of ikibana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, and the second whose pots glaze every room in their neat home. They are modest about both, but I see through that to the eyes and hands that craft such beauty.
They are wonderful hosts, too...it's easy to be with them in their comfortable space. There is always a good lunch or dinner, out or in, and nearly always a trip to the Cameron Art Museum. It made an auspicious beginning to what was to be a long trip to northern Florida to visit another friend, equally talented and witty and comfortable, though our history as friends is quite different. More about Marty later.
The next morning, Pam, Paul and I headed out early to our separate destinations...they to the gym and I back onto 17 to Murrells Inlet, where Brookgreen Gardens, my favorite of all those I have been to (even...gasp!...the Luxembourg). The sculpture garden, once part of Anna Hyatt Huntington's residence, is a treasure of peaceful beauty...acres of set pieces around which her and others' sculpture live and breathe.
I spent a good three hours roaming there, and in between had a resting lunch at their outdoor cafe.
Sated with flowery art, I drove across 17 to Huntington State Park, where the sculptress's Moorish rambling house, Atalaya, still stands, wide open to the sand below and water views and visitors. Like her gardens, Ann Huntington's house is a testimony to the expansiveness of creative mind and life. I love my house, but a house open to weather and tides, designed with work and company in mind...that would be utopia.
I'd made arrangements to spend the night at an AirB and B nearby, the Blue Pearl Inn. In all such site-based places I have stayed, I've only been let down once (in Spain, dark and dank and unclean) and inconvenienced once (in Wales, impeding clutter). Hosts from Provence to Havana were charming, helpful, accommodating, comfort-savy people, each in their own cultural ways. And this one was not to be excepted.
Brook, who actually designed the house to be home, bed and breakfast, and salon with his partner Jon, who furnished it with collections of curiosities, were not only welcoming but great conversationalists. They found me on their front porch around cocktail time and in no time we were deep in story mode.
By the time I'd had dinner, on the deck at Costa, I was ready for the sleep-enfolding Green Room and the good book from the sitting room outside my door. Ah.
Early morning, after a bit of breakfast, I was back on the road to Middleburg, Florida, where Marty had promised I could play with her art/craft group the next morning. From Murrells Inlet, it's a five or six hour trip at best, and it was; storms in Florida had abated by the time I rolled into Marty's yard. It seemed strange to be bypassing Charleston, another town I enjoy strolling, but there was always the way back, I thought. (If only I had known...)
Marty tells everyone that she inherited me as a friend from her mother, Kaye Mayer, whom I knew in Washington, and that's certainly one way of looking at it. She is in many ways her mother's daughter, and in many others her father's, but mostly she is her own. That's what I like about her...she's a reader, a sewer, a traveler, a great hostess, a keeper of family history, a collector of things that make her happy.
Once she retired from her three decades of of teaching high school English, she took up traveling and quilting, the latter proving an excellent COVID-years occupation. Every room, every space in her ranch house is draped, folded, unfolded, stacked and stocked and piled with finished, unfinished, and still-dreamt-of quilts. Color is the blood in her sewing veins. A quilt- and fabric-lover, who nonetheless is far too imprecise to take up the craft myself, I wandered the rooms for two days awed.
That night, though, my admiration had to move to the Quilt Guild meeting. There, the members show-and-tell uncovered more treasures, both fabric and friends. Some of them reconvened at Marty's the next morning to learn the skill of the month...hot-gluing.
Don't laugh...I have never used a hot-glue gun before. Neither, apparently, had a few others, despite our long years of fooling with hand-made arts. Besides figuring out (and failing) to use the glue on the stones I had dreamed of making into small cairns (alas, as they cool they separate from the hardened glue), I most enjoyed watching the others invent all kinds of things from earrings to clothes clips to an intricate mandala, simply using this waxy substance. As one does while creating with a group, talk is the undercurrent of the hours. Exchanging tips, tools, takes and tales, you come to know with whom you work.
I came away only with a few stones glued on boards, but more important the friendship of some very accomplished quilters and crafts-people who will try anything at home and abroad. Marty draws such people into one's circumference.
I'd have stayed another day, to visit the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and a nearby winery which makes its refreshing wares from all sorts of fruit, but bad timing meant I once more set out on the road early morning...COVID had struck closer to home, and I was afraid that if it had passed on to me I'd pass it to Marty.
I had thought about stopping a night along the way, but suddenly I was tired...it had been a long time since I had driven that distance...and the return trip had turned tedious. In Savannah, I had to detour through a long confusion of roundabout turns on a Sunday when all of eastern tourism had descended on River Road. I decided I'd better bypass Charleston and get to another night in Murrells Inlet and maybe Brookgreen Gardens.
By afternoon, the heat on the road was burning the asphalt, and when I spotted, in the non-town of Awendaw, the old fish shack Jake and I liked to stop at, I pulled around into the shady part of Seedaw's parking lot to enjoy whatever they'd cooked up fresh from the water.
But two and a half hours later, AAA still failing, I began to think I'd have to sleep in the car overnight. As I sweated, a man passing south in a royal blue sedan, seeing my dilemma, turned to the rescue. "I'm a mechanic," he said cheerily. "I can patch you up to get you to the next town."
And he did, working in the heat under the front end until the car was movable. "There," he said. "Tomorrow morning get you to a shop in Georgetown, and they'll fix it so you can get home." His name was Sky, and he wouldn't take anything for it, though I pleaded. "No," he insisted, backing away across the road. "I'm a child of God...look where you got stuck." I looked. The square brick sign off the road beside me read Child of God Missionary Baptist Church. He knew a sign when he saw it.
I drove at speed limit all the way to Georgetown, where I threw my sweat-soaked clothes over the towel rack and showered. Then I ate a salad I'd carried with me and watched an old movie until I slept.
I did, and told him I didn't mind a bit. I thought to myself, if I have to stay here watching the philodendron grow and spend another night at the Hampton Inn, it's fine with me...far better than sleeping in the car on the edge of 17N.
But by 9:30 am, he waved me goodbye. "You're good to go. We checked the fluids and tires and everything, so if you don't crash into anything more, you'll get home safe." At the window, I paid the bill, the tiniest one I'd ever seen even for an oil change.
As I drove off, I remembered a time 55 years ago, riding west alone across the country, when the A-frame under my green VW bug came loose and the steering suddenly wouldn't steer. Lady, said the two men who ran across an interstate in the rain to get to me, the angels were sure with you...
Thinking of all that pure human kindness, I couldn't argue with that then or now.
What an enjoyable read ( of course except for your car issues!) And the pictures are wonderful!
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