LIME PICKLES AND CANDIED WATERMELON RIND

 

We've had a fabulous celebratory time this LONG already weekend---Friday with a six-year-old neighbor who LOVES pink and pretties like we do---she and her Mama came for cookie decorating for a couple of hours.   Then Sweetpea and her Mama were for Easter Lunch yesterday, with wonderful tales of their St. Patrick's Week trip to Ireland.   Her high school band was invited to St. Patrick's Day parade, and they had a wonderful week.   They had also made a tour around Europe last June, performing concerts in five countries.  Her Ganner would be SO proud---he brought home so many musical instruments while she was younger, and she settled on playing Clarinets, but also plays Sax as well.   

Today was just us of the house, slow and comfortable, choosing lunch from several days' yummy leftovers, a whole afternoon with just pre-views and trailers of the "new" Jane Austen series---it was almost like watching the whole movie---we KNOW how it ends, Heart/Heart.   Our favorite Author---we speak often in Austenese, with quotes from all the books populating our conversation in our Southern Drawls.  We exchanged our Easter bags---always new Spring-flavored shopping bags to each other, and mine had divine Silicone kitchen items---ladles and spatulas for every use, candy and Peeps and a Moon Pie and best of the best---she'd searched and found the jars of Candied Watermelon Rind I used to save up 79 cents to buy for myself at Safeway every two weeks when they were all babies.   It came in a narrow jar like olives always came in---just room for about seven inch-big chunks in a lovely green syrup.  They sold the candied Cantaloupe, as well, with golden syrup.      And she'd Amazoned two pints of LIME PICKLES, so very like the ones I learned to make from her Grandmother, my first Mother-in-Law.   Such sweet remembrance, and so thoughtful a gift.

 Then just at a beautiful sunset, the two small neighbor children were invited over again for a few moments to receive their bags of fun things and candy.   

The livestock has been fed (Seven cats, three possums and five raccoons that I know of---we should have bought stock in Friskies and Nutrena five years ago),---they get their dinner out the back door, on an immense cafeteria tray twice the regular length.   The dishes are awaiting Monday, and Leah has retired with a Miss Marple. 

I've had a Spa Hour and it's Hubble Time, so good night and a Happy Week to you all!  

PS.  I reminisce and speak of my Mammaw so often here, I feel everybody should know about her by now.   Mammaw of the Roses, the family history told in stories, the dozen white Persian cats with one blue eye and one green, who "lived by the clock and the calendar and time for the mail to be up."   She had a correspondence with Park and Burpee seed companies which equaled her letters to and from family, didn't get an indoor bathroom until1958,  raised two children in a shotgun house without electricity til "TVA came in 1938," and had a little grave of her first daughter out where she plowed and planted her garden.  I doubt that she traveled more than seventy miles in her life (to Memphis when Grandpa was in the hospital).  She had a black silk dress with a rhinestone pin in her closet that she'd ordered from Sears Roebuck to be buried in, and she wore it once the time Mother and Daddy took her to Memphis and she danced with Lawrence Welk.  

She also had The Louvin Brothers play and sing in her front yard when they were traveling from show to show with her Brother-in-Law's band.   I was about eight, and she and I served them noon dinner on the way to their next date, and she got to play along on her mandolin to Tennessee Waltz.

Today would be her 131st Birthday!