Tag: traditions

Texas Bluebonnets & Pie

There’s a pie baking in the oven. Nothing fancy. Not even homemade. It’s a frozen Marie Callender’s Razzleberry pie, a family favorite. Hubster planned on baking an apple pie for Easter Sunday dessert.

Are you set on apple pie or are you open to suggestions? Are you making it or buying it? I sent him a message yesterday while he shopped for today’s lunch. E and his roommate are joining us. I holler at S. to ask to get her opinion.

“Umm, isn’t that more of a fall dessert? I will not eat it. Ask him to do something with berries. Berries are good right now, apples, not so much. But I’ll eat ice cream.”

Coconut cream, he replies.

Okay. Not arguing. She won’t eat that either, but most of us will.

We have lunch and make our way to take pictures in the bluebonnets. Some families are good about taking pictures in them every year. We like the idea of traditions, but sometimes we can’t keep up. Like the one year the rattlesnakes were bad and I didn’t want to chance it. Other years, they weren’t as showy. Then 2020, when bluebonnet pictures were the last thing on people’s minds for fear of getting sick. We skipped them. Not in the mood. Attended Easter service online. One year, the Texas Snowpocalypse ruined them. Followed by another freeze. Then one of those, we’ll get to it, we’ll get to it, but we never got to it.

In the meantime, the kids have grown. E has his own apartment. S. is in high school. It’s been a while. Was it actually ten years? Really? I look at social media posts and I think it’s correct. Wow. Ten years of putting it off.

We had lunch and headed out. It’s the sweet spot of the season. They’re popping and in a week or so they’ll go to seed. There will be some places where they’ll last a little longer, but soon they will make way for other flowers to have their turn. There’s no sense in driving out to find the perfect place when there are plenty nearby. We take our Chihuahua mix, Reeses, and Dipper, our newest addition.

Family pictures are hard enough. Add two dogs, one being five months old, along with zooming cars on the highway, and we remember why it was such a chore. We got a few good shots with many bad ones, but that’s where the fun lives. The outtakes of those bad photos are where memories seared themselves into our souls.

The pie is cooling. If we cut into it too soon, the filling oozes out. We can wait though. The kids took the dogs to a dog park and just returned. My Polaroid camera sits next to my laptop. I have 5 pictures left to take. One came out over-exposed, but E. is keeping it anyway. That’s how pictures turned out back in the day. You’d take what you could get, saving film for important moments, we explain. Special moments. Memory making moments.

Taking time to document days like this, in picture-words, brings life to seemingly mundane days. It’s in the mundane where life happens. In the ordinary where we experience the extraordinary. We take slices out of our lives and savor them. Some days, we slice right in. Others, we need to wait, that’s what makes it good.

I like pie! I hear E. announce as a seven year old. We pick up where we leave off. Go back to the bluebonnets to take pictures. Pick up those moments we somehow allowed to escape us, bringing the pieces back together.

There is pie with ice cream, ready to eat. And a new set of bluebonnet pictures, documenting the changes in between.

All Hallow’s Drink

Halloween B.C., before children, we figured out going on a date scored us a short wait time and a good table. In previous years, we bought candy, but no one showed up.

Twenty one years ago, I had a thirty day old baby boy. We lived in a new neighborhood and with that came expectations of handing out candy to cute little kids dressed in fun costumes. Except this Halloween, my boy cried all day. I had a defrosted bun-less veggie burger for lunch at 5:00 in the afternoon. I didn’t shower and I couldn’t calm this baby down. Then the knocking started. And more crying. Then a phone call from my husband announcing his car wouldn’t start. We ate out again and returned home to a bowl full of candy.

Later, we left candy on the porch with a sign for kids to take two pieces. E has been dressed as a frog, a bowl of spaghetti, a train engineer, a chef, Indiana Jones, Thunder Pickle (his own invented character). S. joined us as a Chiquita banana. Then they both asked for candy as Phineas from Phineas & Ferb with a rockstar, Harry Potter and a police officer, Jek-14 and a low-key ballerina, Minecraft Steve with a black kitty cat, a meme with a unicorn.

A quick dinner of chicken nuggets or pigs-in-a-blanket preceded early evening candy hunting. We couldn’t eat early enough before the doorbell alerted us to kids asking for candy as we tried heading out ourselves. The transition from giving to getting was always tricky, but always worked itself out.

As E grew up, his trick-or-treating morphed into a belated birthday party in the garage with friends, complete with pizza and bottled root beer. It also cost taking S. around the neighborhood while I handed out candy and made sure the pizza was ordered, paid, and delivered. The candy bowl now had a companion. E later took over it while I gathered S. and her friends, meeting them at the end of each street, an exasperated “Mom! Why can’t I just go with my friends? Without you?”

E’s garage parties have come to an end. S. has new friends. A few days ago, she also requested a garage party. Then she decided to take over candy duty because, as she explained, “I’m a little too old for trick-or-treating. It’s a little kid thing. I shouldn’t take candy from them.”

By Sunday, she needed a costume.

“What happened to letting little kids have their candy?”

“My theater friends want me to go with them. We’re all going together.”

This afternoon, my husband and I went to happy hour. S. went home with a friend with plans for trick-or-treating later. I sat on the front porch and attempted to git rid of all of the candy. Older kids loved my costume. S. didn’t comment when she saw me later that night.

Halloween happy hour might be our next tradition. Perhaps next year, we’ll also be the full sized candy bar house.

Cafecito with Mom

In December, my mom stayed with me for two weeks to help me as I recovered from surgery. When I say help, it means she made sure I didn’t get up and break doctor’s orders, cooked all of the things with my husband, and cleaned everything that maybe didn’t need cleaning. Every morning, after mini-me got to school, we sat at the kitchen table and had coffee.

Morning coffee chats across the table typically revolved around whether or not we needed extra coffee, updates with my sisters, a good morning from my 20 year old as he headed off to work, toast or breakfast tacos, a chat with my dad who was home alone. In two short weeks, I grew accustomed to cafecito with Mom. We had one more chat before my husband dropped her off at the airport to return home.

Winter break gave me about three extra weeks of down time. When she returned home, we continued our morning cafecito dates via Face Time. I’d hear my phone ping: “Cafecito?”

“Hold on! I just got up. Give me 10 minutes.”

The coffee gets started, I pull my hair into its morning ponytail and retrieve my laptop. The screen is bigger. Coffee steaming, I bring it to the table and start the call. We chat. Dad pops in to say hi before he goes out for his morning run. Mom shakes her head because we know it’s too cold for him to go out, but it’s pointless. Bundled up, he goes anyway.

We continued these cafecito dates every morning until I returned to work in January. I don’t know why we didn’t do this before; Face Time is something we were already using. Getting accustomed to that morning rhythm helped us establish a new way to check in. Now it’s on weekends, sometimes Saturday and Sunday, sometimes on one of the two days.

We chatted again this morning, discussing a pan dulce* flavored coffee I sent her last week. “It would be so much better with a concha, but I’m going gluten-free for Lent.”

“Oh just eat whatever you want and don’t worry about it,” she reassures.

It’s a seasonal flavor, but I’ll stock up on what I can find in the clearance section. No big plans for the weekend, but at least the wind has calmed down where she lives. The Texas panhandle is notorious for windstorms that will kick up the dust nonstop for several consecutive days.

“You remember my friend…?”

“I saw the obituary for…I thought she looked familiar.”

“Hold on, your dad wants to say hi.”

“I don’t know why she doesn’t want me to…” Dad starts.

And so it goes.

Saying goodbye a few times, our conversation doesn’t seem to end. Either one of us will interject something on our way out of the call and we wind up talking for another fifteen minute chunk.

My second cup of coffee is nearly empty, so I know it’s time to get on with life on my side of the screen and let her get on with hers. She has my niece’s birthday party to attend.

“Have a slice of cake for me!”

“Sure will.”

The call ends and I close my computer. I’m looking forward to spring break so we can meet for cafecito every morning.

*Pan dulce is Mexican sweet bread, or pastries, many of us enjoy dunking into our cafecito (coffee).

Saturday, March 4, 2023