VALENTINE BRUNCH

A few scenes from our Valentine Brunch yesterday---Sweetpea set the table, and you can tell she had a free hand with the décor.   Somehow, about ten Princesses arrived with her in a pink bucket, and she scattered them around like place-cards.   Hers is the place with the goblet and Belle, and Ganner’s spot next to her has both Pocahontas and Mulan, for having so much in common to talk about---the outdoorsmanship and hunting and building that wall, and all.

All the rest is just us gathering for a good breakfast and talking non-stop.   Isn’t it wonderful how you can become exponentially more witty and smart in the company of certain people, and the puns and jokes and rated-G entendres were certainly flying yesterday.

We did enjoy it all for perhaps three hours until  that pesky snow storm sent our lovies home much too soon. We had just finished that lovely brunch up at Caro's half of the house, with all sorts of fruit and pastries and supreme scrambled eggs and bacon and grits, a sublime potato dish and nibbles from everybody's candy boxes, as well as unwrapping countless goodies and sweets and fun things from our treasure-bags, when the snow started in for REAL, going sidewise across the windows.  We'd just been watching the starlings and cardinals diving headfirst into the enormous Weather Bush (great big old evergreen shrub, round as a a tall green igloo, and apparently quite the haven amongst all the naked trees and bushes around the yard), and there seemed to be quite a kerfuffle of them in there, like an inside-out Christmas tree, raucous and shivery.

Looking out the windows was like a boozeless cruise in 10-Forward, with gigantic white cornflakes warping past our view.

We'd been talking and sipping and nibbling chocolate, talking our heads off and debating just a TASTE of those gorgeous pink rose-decorated cupcakes and maybe one more of the enormous strawberries---just laughing like loons and enjoying the fast and furious wit and fun. And then the wet blanket---FROZEN wet blanket, covering us like a beautiful cloud, and causing a reluctant-but-necessary exit in order to get home "before it really sets in," as it was projected for another five or six hours of the heavy stuff.

Caro called these “manky cupcakes,” after a Harry Potter reference to food, for they were demure and charming when she boxed them at work, and then they seemed to have shrugged off their petticoats en masse, on their way home, like naughty girls out from beneath Mama's eye, and ready to Charleston.

Everybody’s favorite---warm bacon-wrapped dates.  It’s a wonder there were any left for the picture, for we all snitched a few right off the cookie sheet.

So they texted "safe home," with quite an assortment of goodies and leftovers for their supper, as we stacked some dishes, wiped a counter, settled in with our NOOKS and Netflix Longmire, for the enclosing afternoon.   Cozy, zany, colourful FAMILY day, blizzardy cold outside, and rich as truffles within.