Weekend ReKap

I know I'm supposed to blog the letter K today, but my thoughts on the word I've chosen for that particular letter might run long, so I'm flipping the alphabet on it's head. 

Letter L today, letter K tomorrow. 

It's my blog and I'm the boss of me. 

You'll find my A to Z Blog Challenge entry for the letter L somewhere in this post. I can't say exactly where because it's a blog as you go kind of day.

Linking this post with Holly (Pink Lady) and Sarah (Sunshine and Books) for their regularly scheduled Hello Monday party. Here we go-

Friday morning I spent a few hours with my daughter1 at her house. The kids played quietly upstairs and I conned her into straightening my hair. My girls know how much I love for them to do this for me and she took her time and I think actually enjoyed it a little. We were able to chat about all manner of things while she worked and it was such a nice relaxed morning. Very spa like. 

Friday afternoon I played mah jong at a neighbor's house with about ten other women and that's always fun. I got home about five and hubs and I went for sushi which was delish. 

We came home and watched the Artemis coverage. I was almost hyperventilating waiting on those divers to get them out of that capsule. That felt more stressful than ten days in space to me. All that bobbing 🤢

Did you follow the space story last week? I thought it was exciting and I loved the astronauts boldly pointing to Jesus...'there are no atheists in foxholes and there are none on rockets either'. 

Saturday morning I was up early, got my car loaded, and was on the road by 7:15  to make the drive over the mountain to the Asheville area. I was meeting up with some bloggers for the day, only one of whom I'd met in person before. 

They were staying in a little air bnb and there was supposed to be five bloggers there, but Jenn ended up not feeling well Friday morning so she didn't make the trip. Boo. I met Marilyn in Chattanooga back in September and she mentioned they might come my direction this year. Once the location was decided she messaged asking if I'd like to drive over and join them on Saturday, which was an easy yes. 

Have you met any bloggers in person? I've met about a dozen now and all of these meet ups have been so nice. Everyone was exactly who they seemed to be on their blog and that's reassuring. This weekend it was Marilyn (Memphis Bridges), Joanne (Slices of Life), Maria (Memorable Moments and Modest Missives), and Tanya (The Other Side of the Road). 

All of these bloggers participate in the Wednesday Hodgepodge and it was so much fun to meet in real life. The day was full of talking, and really what more would you expect from a group of people who love words? 

I arrived about 8:30 with a quiche and a coffee cake and we all had breakfast together. The morning flew and it was almost 1 PM before we looked at the clock and decided we needed to get out of the house. We drove just a few minutes down the road, or rather up the road and around and around as the route to the overlook was winding and steep. 

Gotta take in the view when you're surrounded by the Blue Ridge.  

We snapped some pictures, then took a short walk on a path through the woods and then everyone was hot and needed ice cream. 

We went to a spot called Celtic Creamery and the ice cream was really good. The original Celtic Creamery is in Ireland but they have a few shops here in America too, all in North Carolina. After ice cream we walked down main street and wandered in to a couple of shops, including Mast General which is always a fun stop. 

We headed back to the house about 5 and I said my goodbyes and headed for home. Such a great day! 

Hubs had a busy day too, beginning with a sporting clay contest, lunch with friends, and then the grand boys baseball game. Pretty sure he managed a nap right after. I was home by 6:30 and we had an easy dinner of pizza and salad and called it an early night. 

Sunday morning we went to church, then took daughter1 and little miss out to brunch. My son-in-law and the boys went straight from church to the Clemson baseball game so they didn't join us. Hubs and I spent the afternoon watching The Masters which was exciting this year. Going in person one day is still on my bucket list, so maybe someday. 

And now for tomorrow's today's letter in the April A-Z Blog Challenge...

L is for Lily of the Valley 

My theme for this year's challenge is The Things We Keep: An A-Z of Ordinary Objects, and today I'm stepping outside my house and into my yard with these-

Lily of the Valley 

These started life in hubs grandma's garden in Bellville Illinois more than 60 years ago. Hubs parents then took some from that house to their home in Kentucky, then later to their home in Tennessee and then to another home in Tennessee and then a few years later hubs brought some of those to our home in South Carolina. 

I love the history, the family connection and the sweetness of these tiny blooms. We'll divide ours at some point and give to our girls to grow in their gardens and hopefully keep the love blooming for generations to come. 

Hodgepodge Questions-Volume 649

Here are the questions to this week's Hodgepodge. Hop back here on Wednesday (April 15) to share your answers. See you there! 

1. Big week in the US of A...do you do your own taxes? What's something you've found 'taxing' lately? 

2. When it comes to travel are you a last minute packer or a lay it all out a week in advance type? Do you struggle to pack light? Share a packing tip that has worked for you. 

3. April is National Grilled Cheese Month. Hmmm...who knew it got its own month? Do you like a grilled cheese sandwich? What ingredient do you add to take yours to the next level? 

4. There's a well known quote that says-

'A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for." John A. Shedd  

Is constant growth necessary or do you think it's more important to prioritize stability and peace in your life? 

5. Let's wrap this up with a fun spring this or that-

• daffodils or tulips
• lemonade or iced tea
• gardening or hiking
• ladybugs or butterflies 
• umbrella or raincoat
• floral patterns or polka dots

6. Insert your own random thought here. 

Just Write

 I don't normally blog on the weekends, but it's April so Saturday blogging it is...

Day 10-J is for Journals 

Did you keep a diary when you were a child? What about now? Do you journal? Have a blog? 

I use my blog as a form of journaling, although I think all bloggers would agree not everything in your life is meant to be shared in a public forum. Hard as it is to believe there are many things going on in my life and in my head that don't make it on to the blog. 

I do love this space though, and I love blogging. I love the connections I've made with people through my blog, the things I've learned, and the encouragement I've received. But I also have a journal. 

Actually I have a whole stack of journals dating back to my earliest days of motherhood. I grabbed three off the pile and snapped a photo but there's more where they came from.  

I don't write in a journal every day, and sometimes it's just a sentence or two, something I read that stayed with me, notes on a sermon or bible study I'm doing, maybe venting about something that I need to vent about but don't want to actually vent in person, and a lot of swirling thoughts and observations about life are all recorded on these pages. 

There's a quote (attributed I think to Flannery O'Connor)  that says something along the lines of, 'I don't know what I think until I read what I write', and that feels very true for me. Journaling helps me make sense of things that don't always make sense. I especially love reading back years later on what I've written, and seeing how something played out, or if I still feel the same way now as I did then. 

I keep my journals, but do I keep them forever? I can't imagine throwing one away, but do I want my girls reading them someday? I'm honestly not sure. Would I want to read my mother's journals? I'd definitely be curious, but there's something about the idea that feels like invading her privacy on a pretty grand scale too. 

So what say you? Would you pass them on to your children's children or burn them in the backyard firepit? 

Getting The Wrinkles Out

 We're officially one third of the way through the alphabet with today's letter. Carry on A-Zers...

Day 9-I is for Iron 

Do you have an iron? Do you use it? This might seem like a funny question because doesn't everyone iron? 

No. No they do not. 

Recently there was a question relating to ironing in my weekly Hodgepodge link up and I was surprised at how many people said they never iron, that they haven't ironed anything in years. They just use a wrinkle release or buy clothing made of fabric that doesn't require ironing and I was left scratching my head. 

My daughter2 informed me recently that she actually has two irons. She needed to iron something one day and couldn't find hers so thought maybe she'd gotten rid of it in a move (obviously she wasn't ironing often) so she was forced to buy another. Then she found the one she thought was gone and now has two. Not sure she irons enough to warrant having two irons, but we visit and we iron so we're glad she owns one. Not everybody does. 

She also told me when she got it out to iron something her children were mesmerized. Apparently they had never laid eyes on this particular appliance. 

My hubs would not last a week without an iron. He likes things crisp. Not nearly as much as he did when we were first married, or in all those years he wore a suit and tie to work, but even in retirement he still isn't one to wear a wrinkled shirt. My mother always loved telling the story of being at our house one time when hubs was still working, still wearing real shirts (none of that casual Friday nonsense) and she watched my husband take a freshly starched shirt out of the plastic bag the cleaners had put it in, and iron it just a little bit more. True story. 

So what does this have to do with my theme? Well obviously I own an iron and obviously it's something I'm going to keep, but also it's a tough letter and when I started thinking about what to choose this word came to mind. There's something satisfying about running a hot iron over a crease running down the front of a shirt and seeing it disappear. 

I remember my mama setting up her ironing board in our den. She'd put it as low as it would go and set a chair behind it and have a stack of clothes to iron beside her. She'd also have her spray starch and distilled water and she might watch a little tv while she ironed. I honestly don't remember my mother watching tv when I was growing up except when she was tackling this chore. 

Maybe she appreciated sitting down for an hour? 

My dad was in the Marine Corps and my mom ironed his uniforms to perfection. She ironed a lot of tablecloths too and took such care in doing the job. Ironing a tablecloth is tedious. I send my tablecloths to the cleaners, and it's rare for me to iron a huge stack of anything in a single sitting. We're an iron as you go household so if I'm planning to wear something that needs to be ironed I do it then. 

Thinking about my mama sitting behind her ironing board is a picture of homemaking I don't think we see a lot these days. I suppose when I picture my mama ironing I think of it as one of the very many ways she showed love to her family. 

And that's a memory worth keeping. 

Tugging At The Heartstrings

We're moving right along in the April A-Z blog challenge and I bet if you read here regularly you already know what my letter H post will be about...

Day 8-H is for Hedgehogs

Last year in the A-Z I learned a new word-familects. I wrote about it here (The A-Z Yadda Yadda Yadda), but in a nutshell the word familects means one family's way of speaking. It can be anything from expressions to nicknames to stories told. 

Today's word falls firmly under the heading of familects.

It started with a relatively small, wildly funny (to my family) incident and as these things sometimes do it's taken on a life of its own as the years fly by.

When we lived in the UK we had a pretty pond in our back garden patio. One day I stepped outside and noticed what I thought was a big leaf floating on the pond. I innocently stuck my hand in to grab it only to discover it was a hedgehog. 

Let the shrieking commence. 

My girls came running thinking something terrible had ocurred (it had! I grabbed a dead hedgehog I thought was a leaf!! with my bare hands!!)  and much hysterical laughter and hijinks ensued as they tried to recapture the hedgehog who was once again floating in the pond. I'd flung it away from me in a fast and furious manner and as luck would have it that little hedgehog landed right back in the pond. 

So anyway, here we are some twenty years later and my girls still cannot resist buying me things they see with hedgehogs on them or sending me hedgehog memes and I still cannot resist buying them things I see with hedgehogs, and they know every single Christmas there will for sure be some sort of hedgehog related gift in their stocking or under the tree. 

Case in point-

A maternity nightgown with a momma and baby hedgehog walking across the front. 

While the back and forth gifting is mostly a mother-daughter thing, every now and then hubs jumps in with something fun, like these sweet little kissing hedgehog salt and pepper shakers. 

We can't let it go. Nor do we want to. 

Now, here's where familects come in. Unless you're my daughter or my husband I don't want you to buy me hedgehog tchotchkes. Because those would just be tchotchkes. 

But a hedgehog gift or card or meme from one of my girls? Well that means something more. It means they remember the koi pond with the beautiful iris, and the house we all loved for so many reasons, but especially the garden where so very much grew, including, and most of all, us.  I like to think that when a hedgehog catches their eye, whether on a greeting card or a cookie tin or whatever it may be, they're carried back to that garden for a moment. 

Teenagers...sisters...a mother who loved them so much they knew they could laugh at her ridiculousness and that she'd laugh with them. We didn't have camera phones back then, so there's no photo of the happening. It's all just a memory now, but I hope the same wave of tender affection I feel for my daughters when I think about that day washes over them too.  

I hope they know their momma will love all the hedgehog stuff they wanna give her, not because she loves hedgehogs, but because she loves the memory of teenagers in the house, life in a British garden, and growing up girls.

G It's The Hodgepodge

Welcome to another week in the Wednesday Hodgepodge, and if you're keeping up, it's also week two in the April A-Z Blog Challenge. Today's post is brought to you by the letter G and you'll find my thoughts for the A-Z in the random thought space aka question #6. 

1. Egg on your face, putting all your eggs in one basket, a good egg, walk on eggshells, nest egg, or a tough egg to crack...which eggy idiom currently applies to your life in some way? Explain

None particularly feel like they relate to my life at the moment so let's go with 'a good egg'. 

My hubs is a good egg. 

2. April 7th is National Beer Day...are you a beer drinker? If so do you have a favorite? Beer battered fish, beer bread, beer can chicken, beer brats...which one sounds good to you? Have you made any of these? 

I've never been a beer drinker but I do like all the recipes mentioned that call for beer. I don't think I've ever made beer battered fish but have certainly eaten it many times. Hubs is in charge of brats here and he makes them using beer because our Wisconsin friends tell us that's the secret to a perfectly cooked brat. 

3. Do you have siblings? What's the best thing about being your sibling? If you don't have siblings, what would you say are the pros and cons of being an only child? 

I do have siblings, two sisters and a brother and I'm grateful my parents had a bunch of kids. I guess four counts as a bunch? Well I'm sure it felt like a bunch to them. 

The best thing about being my sibling? 

Dear sibs...You're my lifelong besties, my confidantes, my memory keepers and I hope you consider me the same. I always root for your success, and you can count on me to love and pray for you forever and ever amen. 

4. How do you feel about floral scents in products? Do you have a favorite?

I'm not a big fan of floral scents unless we're talking actual flowers. I particularly find anything labeled rose scented to be way too much. I do like the scent of lavender so that one might be an exception to my no floral rule, but so often floral scented products are too heavily scented for my taste. I prefer citrus and I suppose lemon trees bloom so maybe that is technically a floral.  

5. What's one thing in your home that begins with the letter G that you would say is a keeper, something you'll hold on to? Tell us why. 

I've used my random thought today to answer this question. One does what one must when trying to blog through the alphabet and also host a weekly link up.  

6. Insert your own random thought here. 

I'm still at this A-Z Blog challenge thing (for details go here-) and today we've reached the letter G. 

Day 7-G is for a Grandchild's Countdown Calendar 

Today I'm talking about this sweet little countdown calendar my daughter1 made for us when she was pregnant with our first grandbaby, known here as The Mancub. 

He turns nine this summer but I hold on to it still. 

The months before he was born I kept this little calendar on my kitchen window sill and couldn't wait to flip the blocks as the weeks and months were counted down. 

Once he was here I kept the set on a shelf in my closet, until two years later when grandson number 2 was on the way. 7000 miles and an ocean between us, but still back to the windowsill it went. 

Not quite three years passed before grandson number three joined the party...

And then a few short months later our first granddaughter...

 And then another quick year went by and we were celebrating the arrival of granddaughter number two. 

You should know I'm in two different states, four different cities, and one foreign country in these pictures. We get around-ha! This little calendar has spent a lot of time on my windowsill in the past nine years, and now grandbaby number 5 is two years old. 

So do I keep it? 

Of course. I mean I don't know if there will be more grandbabies here, but I know this little calendar is a sweet reminder of some of the happiest days and years of our lives. 

It's back in my closet for now, and who knows? Maybe one day I'll gift it back to my daughter when she's preparing to welcome a grandbaby of her own. Wouldn't that be fun?! 

Antiques Homeshow

 Chugging right along in the A-Z Blog Challenge...

Day 6-F is for Furniture

A lot of people when they retire, and particularly when they move from something like the suburbs out to the lake, sell all of their furniture along with their house and just buy new. If you've had somewhat traditional furniture with lots of dark wood it's understandable to want to make a change, find furnishings that are lighter, airier, more minimalist with less mass. 

When we moved to the lake, or rather as we prepared to move, we put everything we owned in storage and lived in a rental apartment with rental furniture for the whole year we were building. We weren't sure exactly what our new finished space would look like so we held on to a lot and figured we'd deal with it on this end. 

We knew we wanted a king sized mattress as opposed to our then queen, so the plan was we'd put our bedroom furniture into one of the guest rooms and buy new for our room. Which we did and we love it, but it's lighter in tone than most of what we own. 

We love wood and we love dark rich wood tones especially. Gray toned everything was really popular when we were building, but we knew that wasn't us. In fact when we were choosing the color stain for our trim and staircase we both pointed to the exact same sample our decorator was holding up at the exact same time. She said, 'well you definitely know what you like'. 

We have a few antiques, purchased when we lived in the UK, and we weren't ready to part with them to make room for something new. So we embraced the wood, and we kept the things that made us happy. 

Like this-

A monk's bench we purchased on a fun day shopping with friends in a little town called Hungerford in Berkshire UK. It was a great day out, despite the hysterical call we got from our daughter1 (a university student on the other side of the pond) as we were on our way home where she finally managed to say she'd had a car accident.  

Waiting to hear how bad it was took about ten years off my life, but no one was injured and we had a little chat afterwards about how that needs to be the first thing out of her mouth as opposed to the last. 

Memories are a funny thing and when I look at this bench I'm reminded of village life, of how much I loved getting in the car or hopping on a train and browsing a new to us town, and also those college years where we lived an ocean away from our girls and we all grew up in ways that would serve us well in the decade that followed. 

We sit photographs on the Monk's Bench now, photos of that same daughter's wedding that happened six years later. It's tucked along a wall beside our sliders and we framed botanical prints to hang above it so it works. 

We had our girl's portraits painted on the very first 'out of the UK trip' we took when we first moved to England. 

They're not antiques, but they are more than 20 years old and still hang in our bedroom today. While the girls in these portraits are now grown married women we look at these paintings and remember that special first trip ...

...the funny hotel room with the questionable television and Thanksgiving dinner eaten on the Eurostar, fish!,  which felt so, so wrong to my kids, but who wouldn't trade the moment now for the best roast turkey in America. 

This clock-

Bought in a little shop in a village very near our home that we frequented often. We happen to have the exact right space for it in this house and I can't imagine letting it go. 

And hubs has this tantalus which I remember the seller telling us was something the Americans were buying up, but we'd been looking for one the whole time we lived there and this one is so pretty. 

It sits on a commode in my dining room. Also purchased on our trip to Hungerford and hubs turned it into a drinks cabinet which is something I love about antiques. Finding new ways to make the old pieces fit into our more modern living spaces. 

We still have the first big furniture purchase we made as a married couple, our dining room set. I know one day it won't fit in our living space, and maybe someday one of my girls will want it or maybe not. We could reno it and make it less formal but for now it makes me happy. 

We've parted with some things through the years, usually by giving to someone who needs whatever it is we don't. I dislike the hassle of selling stuff and in general would rather donate than deal with a sale. 

As I'm writing these posts and thinking about what I hold on to I realize the why is really pretty simple. The things I keep are anchors to the moments and milestones in my life. They're markers in the story of me. 

Linking today's A-Z post with Joanne for Talking About It Tuesdays