You should stop whatever you’re doing right now and go read this amazing piece called “What My Son’s Disabilities Taught Me About Having It All.” I really love what she has to say about how realizing that we have “enough” is the greater key to happiness than “having it all.”
This is kind of a tangent, but one thing that really struck me about the post besides the much-needed reminder that I do in fact have more than “enough,” is the author’s annoyance at everyone constantly telling her they “don’t know how [she] does it” with the “it” being get through her life with a severely disabled son. I don’t share her challenges, but I also get this a lot. People tell me they don’t know how I do it, with the “it” being twins, or a daughter with spina bifida, or my own near death experience and health issues. She writes, “Other friends declare, ‘I couldn’t do what you do.’ If I am to conform to their expectations, I’m not sure what I am supposed to do.” I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing, or what people think I really am doing, either.
How do I “do it?” Well, for starters, I don’t always “do it” well or with any amount of grace. I get frustrated, and angry, and overwhelmed. We “do it” because we have no choice, because we love our kids, because we want to survive, because we have a lot of help, because I have a great partner, because there is no other option, because there’s a lot of beauty in it, because it could be much worse, because, because, because…
I guess the bottom line is, for every person who says something like “I don’t know how you do it” to someone, there is that someone thinking, “Well, what other option is there?” A lot of the time, it feels like a nice way to say, “I’m so glad your life isn’t mine.”
We all have challenges. We get through them. We all have our blessings, and we need to be grateful for them. I’m thankful to Marie Myung-Ok Lee for reminding me to do just that. Particularly as I write this after a challenging day that led to me having to set down my screaming baby to go take a breather in my bedroom. And I am thankful that in that moment, I had a husband to take over, to transfer her to her bed when she almost immediately fell asleep, and to clean up the kitchen and give me a hug when I returned from yoga breathing and listening to the sound of our ceiling fan.
I’m told that as a small child, I used to stand by my parents’ bed saying HAPPY MORNING until someone woke up. Sure, it was the crack of dawn, but who can be mad at someone who is just so HAPPY that they insist someone wake up and share that joy with them?
My girls have inherited the morning happies, and I am so very glad.
Pre-babies, I often enjoyed quiet lazy mornings with Tinycat, who, much like toddler Ernie Bufflo, would meow by my bed until I grabbed some coffee and joined him in the living room (lazy mornings are the perks of a grad student schedule). He didn’t need me to play with him or feed him, he just wanted me to BE with him in the living room, internetting while he lounged in a sunny window. It came to be some of my favorite time of the day, and I wondered what mornings would be like once we added two tiny people to the family.
It turns out, they’re just as lovely. Now, I know this is one of the perks of newborns– they’re sleepy folks. My girls tend to wake up very happy around 6:30 or 7, have a bit to eat, and then spend a few minutes making smiley faces and happy squeals until they are just SO TIRED, at which point it’s time to nap until 10:30 or 11. I am enjoying these morning naps as hard as I can right now. They nap in the living room with me, while I sip coffee with Tinycat and catch up on my internetting, pausing occasionally to gaze at my gorgeous, sleeping girls. I realize that all too soon, my mornings will likely look radically different, so I’m savoring this as long as it lasts.
In fact, I’m pretty much enjoying the whole not-so-newborn phase right now. The girls are waking up only once in the night; they’re still sleepy, snuggly, and portable; and they are starting to be more interactive in terms of reacting to us, smiling at us, and making cute little noises. Sure, sometimes the day to day routine is mind-numbingly boring. Most evenings one or both of them has a VERY angry witching hour(s). And I still get barfed on an awful lot. But overall? Life at 2 months is very very sweet.
Claire naps in her Boppy on the couch.Etta naps in the swing.Tinycat naps in the recliner.
Yesterday we walked with the babies in their stroller to vote at our polling place at a nearby church. The people working the polling place, our neighbors, were all happy to see the babies. They were admired and complimented and pushed around in their stroller while we marked our ballots. One poll worker said, “You brought them to a room full of grandparents!”
We headed home, enjoying the beautiful, sunny, not-too-hot day. Occasionally I could smell the gardenia bushes in people’s yards as we passed. Early summer is one of my favorite times of the year here.
As we walked home, we started to hear sirens. At least five police cars roared past us, and we soon realized they were heading to the street one over from ours. Before long, the street was blocked off, and more and more first-responders arrived.
It turns out two people died one street over yesterday. A robbery ended in death for both a victim and a suspect. A tragedy all around.
This makes me a little uncomfortable, because this is my neighborhood. And this is just another incident, like people getting carjacked at the nearby bar, or people getting shot at the nearby EZ Mart, that makes people say it’s not a safe place to live.
In a conversation recently, we told someone where we live, and he said he wouldn’t live here. He chooses to live in the ‘burbs because “crime hasn’t learned to use the freeway.” Really? I’m pretty sure people still get hurt and robbed and raped and killed even in suburbia. And I’d be statistically more likely to die in a car accident on my way to the ‘burbs than to be shot right here in my city neighborhood. And please don’t suggest I get a gun…I’d be statistically more likely to shoot someone I didn’t intend to than someone I did.
Our pastor Ryan wrote a great post about how we respond to violence in our neighborhoods. In answer to his post, I just have to say, we’re staying. We love our house, and we love our neighborhood.
Sure, occasionally bad things happen here. But I’ve yet to see the news report on all that is good. Like the way people hang out on their porches and stop to chat and invite you over for a cold drink. Or the way a neighbor found our dog when she got out and got hit by a car, and Jon and I were both out of town, so he took care of her. Or the way even a new resident threw a spaghetti party for our whole street. Or the love we’ve been showered with since the babies arrived, in the form of pies and free yard work. Or the eggs we get from the neighbor with chickens. Or the fact that the guy next door loves our dogs so much, he put a gate between our yards so they now have twice the yard to play in.
If you think my neighborhood is a scary place to live, you’re missing out on all that is good here that vastly outweighs what is bad.
Yes, I’m cribbing Lexus’ slogan, because seriously, I don’t know ANYONE who gets cars as Christmas presents (though, Santa, if you’re reading, you know where my driveway is).
Last December was one of the worst months of our lives. I got the flu. Not the “flu” but the actual want to die, 8 days of 102 fever, entire month of sickness, influenza. The kind some people actually die from. (Side note: GET A FLU SHOT.) For weeks, I existed in a sweaty, shivery, coughing, bruised ribs, fluid in my lungs, drugged on codeine haze. Jon was working nights and spending his days dosing me, feeding me, helping me use the bathroom without fainting, and trying to catch some sleep in there too. It’s good to be married to an ER doc when you’re deathly ill, as he took great care of me. He admitted that a few times I looked so bad he thought about taking me to the hospital, but knew they’d pretty much just be doing for me what he was already doing– fluids, NSAIDs, cough meds, Mucinex. In retrospect, I might have needed a chest x-ray, but we survived. (My ribs were sore for a month afterward from all the coughing.)
Little did we know that Jon would be the one to wind up in the ER. One day, when I was finally starting to feel like I might be able to leave the house again, I got a text message from Jon saying that if I was up, he was now a patient in the ER where he had been working, and could I come there, please? He was having a weird heart beat and mentioned it to another doc he was working with, who checked him out, hooked him up to some monitors, and realized he was in atrial fibrillation. Basically, the top chambers of his heart were fluttering around instead of beating in a steady rhythm. Ultimately, it took an overnight stay in the ICU (where I tried desperately not to cough around any of the nurses, because I didn’t want to be kicked out of the unit), where he was the most lucid patient I think those nurses have ever treated, and some hardcore meds to get his heart back into a normal rhythm (they call this “converting” if you want to know some new medical speak). He was mere hours from being shocked with the paddles when the meds finally did their job. We got to look at his heart on the echo, which was pretty cool, to see the heart of the one I love, beating on a screen, but they didn’t establish what caused the a-fib episode. I have a feeling it was the exhaustion of working and taking care of a very sick wife. He hasn’t had an episode since.
Still, as a result, our December last year? While it was one to remember, it was also a pretty sucky one. I’m counting this year as a do-over. I got my flu shot, I’ve been washing my hands like a maniac, and if someone sniffles around me, I’m moving across the room. I’m pregnant, but I’m feeling good. My birthday and hopefully the Baby B gender reveal are coming up on the 16th. I’m looking forward to spending Christmas with my family and New Year’s in Colorado with Jon’s, and we’re determined to be healthy for all of it. Now I just have to figure how to decorate our house in a way that won’t immediately be destroyed by the wild and crazy Tinycat.
One thing about being pregnant with TWINS?! is that everyone has lots of questions. Most of them are actually kind of rude! But I figure people aren’t generally trying to be rude, but just don’t realize how rude they’re being. Surely no one would ask me prying questions about my sex life and lady parts in the full knowledge of just how rude that is, right?? (Wait, don’t answer that.)
Here are a few of the questions we’ve been getting a lot:
Are they natural?
Well, I’m pretty sure they aren’t synthetic… is that what you mean? Of course it isn’t. The person really wants to know if I had some sort of fertility treatment, which is kind of private, right? The answer is no, these are just freak of nature twins, but the question still feels a little weird.
Do twins run in your family?
Ah, everyone is an amateur geneticist, but most of them only have part of the story right! The answer to this one is also no, not unless going back a few generations counts, and the scientific truth is that twins outside of your immediate family do not “count” toward making you more likely to have twins. Also, only the mother’s family counts, because the only kind of twins that happen genetically are fraternal– which only occur when the mother releases more than one egg that gets fertilized and implanted. It has nothing to do with the father or his family. Identical twins happen when a single fertilized egg splits into two or more embryos somewhere along the way– this just happens, and the genetics of the parents have nothing to do with it.
Are they identical?
We don’t know yet, and without a genetic test it’s possible that we’ll never know. For now, I can tell you that the twins appear to be di-di, meaning they’re in two separate sacs. This could mean that they are fraternal, or it could mean that they are identical but split within 3 days or so of conception. If we find out they’re two separate genders, we’ll know for sure before birth that they’re fraternal. Otherwise, the placenta(s) could tell us, or they could look markedly different, or we could get genetic testing done.
Are you going to have more kids?
Seriously?? I haven’t even had these yet. How bout we wait and see how it goes first?
Being pregnant has given me the warm fuzzies for my husband. I feel closer to him because I know we’re basically jumping off a cliff together, and because I know that we’re making something beautiful together, and because there’s no one else in the world I’d be willing to take this kind of adventure with. But I’m also feeling the love because he’s taking excellent care of me.
I shouldn’t be surprised– he’s always taken great care of me. When we were dating, we were in a car accident one Thanksgiving. I was driving us to my grandparents’ house on a wet road and hydroplaned while trying to grab my ringing cell phone (don’t phone and drive, kids!). The car spun into a ditch, and the airbag did a doozy on me. It turns out, thanks to mild scoliosis and an extra mutant vertebra that’s shaped like a wedge, I had a perfect spot for a compression fracture of my spine, and to this day am a quarter inch shorter on my left side as a result. After the accident, when deciding whether I would go back to college or go home with my parents or stay with him, he was adamant that he would take care of me. And he did– he fed me my pills on schedule, let me sleep in a recliner, and kept me supplied with my favorite ice cream until I felt well enough to go back to school.
A year into our marriage, we moved to Charleston, SC, where he was doing his residency in pediatrics. I had a hard time with the move, far away from everyone I knew and loved, in a strange new place, working a job I didn’t really like much, and for the first few months I was pretty much a mess. One day, I attempted to go for a bike ride with our dog Bessie, and she pulled me off and I scraped up my knee really bad. Bleeding and hysterical, I called Jon. I’m sure it sounded awful on the phone, because he biked all the way home from the hospital, bandaged up my knee, which was really not as bad as my hysterics made it sound, held me, hugged me, kissed me, and then biked back to work. He never said anything about how crazy I’d acted about that skinned knee. He knew it was just an emotional catalyst that broke the dam that had held back my sadness and depression about the move, and he loved me through it. Eventually we made friends and settled in, and when it came time for us to leave Charleston, I was sad then too.
Last winter, I got the flu. People who tell me they think they have the flu, I have one response for them: “Do you feel like you’re dying? Do you think maybe death would be preferable to the way you feel right now? OK, maybe then you have the flu.” It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a fever of 102 for 8 days straight. I coughed so much and so hard that I bruised my ribs and was sore for a month afterward. All told, I was sick the entire month of December. Jon was working lots of shifts in the ER, and, in between, when he should have been sleeping, kept me dosed on meds, made sure I was fed, and prevented our house from falling apart. He held me as I coughed and cried and promised me I’d feel better one day, even though in the middle of that illness, I didn’t really believe him.
Now he’s dealing with me, hopped up on a double dose of twin hormones, admittedly acting insane a lot of the time, the kind of pregnant person they make jokes about. While he did jokingly reassure me that my insanity isn’t a new development for him to deal with, he has made me feel so cared for. He encourages me to nap when I’m tired, he picks up the slack that I’m leaving in all the things to be done around the house, he bought me Miralax and reminds me to take it (and he’s not grossed out by talking about gross pregnancy symptoms like constipation!), and he helps me find things I’m willing to eat. He gets me wet washcloths and anti-nausea medicine and holds my hand as I sit next to the toilet and cry, because even throwing up makes me cry these days.
In other words, he’s doing what he’s always done: taking amazing care of me. Just like I know he will take amazing care of our babies. And maybe I’m hormonal and mushy and this whole post is making you want to barf (hey! welcome to the club!), but telling the story of this latest adventure would be incomplete without a little insight into the awesome partner I have along the way. This whole thing would be entirely too terrifying without him.
10 bonus points to the person who knows where the title of this post comes from. This is a long story, but I hope it will bless you as much as it has me.
As I mentioned yesterday, my husband somehow left his iPhone in San Jose, Costa Rica, on the last day of our visit there. This last day, I must say, can barely be considered a day. We arose around 3:30 in the morning. Possibly the only thing that got me out of bed that early was that our awesome AirBnB host had promised coffee and breakfast would still be ready, even before the actual crack of dawn, and so I dragged myself out of bed, did my last bit of packing, and enjoyed fresh bananas with granola, and home baked bread, and some of the most delicious coffee in the world. We were in a bit of a rush to eat breakfast, get a taxi, get to a bus stop, and take that bus to the airport in order to arrive by 4:30 am for a very early flight. With steps 1 and 2 completed, we were in the taxi almost to the bus stop when Jon noticed he didn’t have his phone with him. I remind you at this point that it was insanely early in the morning, and we may not have been thinking clearly. He checked his backpack and his pockets, and didn’t find the phone. We figured he had left it by the computer he was using at the casa right before we left, and pondered if we could go back for it, but realized we couldn’t if we wanted to make our flight. We decided we would have to email our hosts when we got back to the States and see if they could send it back to us.
As we rode the bus to the airport, we saw many pilgrims walking along the sides of the road to a city in Costa Rica called Cartago. An estimated 2 million people all over the country were walking, many for days, to reach this city in order to show thanks to God for their blessings, and, for many, to ask for healing. Our friends in San Jose had told us of a man in the papers who had already received the miracle of being healed of his blindness during this year’s pilgrimage. Seeing them walk along the road, carrying only small backpacks, in the wee hours of the morning was a great blessing. I’m not sure I can really explain why, but their devotion and dedication and sacrifice touched my heart, and as we roared past each little group in our great big bus, I said a little prayer that God would bless them for their faith. God certainly blessed me with their faith.
We made it onto our plane and eventually arrived home in Arkansas. Here is where I also pause to mention that it is difficult to secure a ride home from the airport without a phone, especially now that airports, realizing that most everyone has a cell phone, have eliminated pay phones. And, in the event that one does manage to find an actual payphone in actual working order, who still has any phone numbers memorized that he or she could call? Not us! A taxi home was the way we had to go, as we were weary and absolutely could not face the prospect of yet another bus.
We finally arrived home, and Jon emailed our hosts explaining the lost phone situation. We then headed to church, happy to connect with our friends there after a week away. That night, Ryan preached on what is commonly known as the Golden Rule, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We discussed how that verse marks a transition, where Jesus turns from speaking about our relationship with God (“ask, seek, knock”), to our relationship with each other, a relationship that should be characterized by us doing what is good and loving to others, even when, and perhaps most especially when, it is no guarantee that this goodness and love will be returned. We do not participate in goodness and love in order to receive it, but because when we participate in goodness and love, we participate in the very character of God, a character perhaps best illustrated in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in which God is radically UNfair, bestowing love and goodness even when it is least deserved.
The next morning, Jon received an email from our hosts Darrylle and Juan Carlos telling their side of the story of the lost iPhone. I asked for their permission to share this story:
As soon as we received your message we searched the house and found no sign of your iphone. We were so sad for you as we knew that if you’d lost it in the street or in the taxi or bus that there would be only a chance in a million that we could find it. We called the number to see if we could hear it ringing somewhere in the house or if someone would answer. After many rings a woman answered and when Juan Carlos spoke with her she asked if the phone was his. He told her that it was and she said that we could pick it up. She lives high up in the mountains near Turrialba about 2 hours southeast of San Jose.
We jumped in the car and headed toward the area. The road to Cartago was packed with pilgrims walking in the rain and it was amazing to experience their dedication and determination. By the time we got to her area it was dark and raining. After seeking information from people along the road and calling her on numerous occasions, we finally found her standing in front of a small shanty along a little road way off the main highway deep into the countryside. She is a single mother working nights in San Jose and takes this long two hour trip daily. She had found the phone in the back of the taxi about 5 a.m., at first thought of giving it to the driver, but then had second thoughts. She said she knew if she gave it to him he would make no effort to find its owner. Throughout the day she told several people she had found the phone and received several offers to buy it. Of course, she could have used the money, but decided that she would keep it for several days and if the owner didn’t appear that she would then sell it.
When we met her along side the road, she just walked up to the car window and handed us the phone and didn’t ask for anything. Unfortunately, we’d left the house in a hurry so I only had ¢10,000 ($20), so I gave it to her but she seemed happier to have found the owner than to have received the money. It was a blessing to be in the presence of this sweet, happy, honest and caring woman. Juan Carlos and I had spent time together yesterday morning, as part of our daily spiritual practice, discussing how if we keep our minds in synch with thoughts of goodness, if we hold the intention to bestow rather than to receive, if we focus on our true Self rather than our illusionary ego, that miracles will appear. As we reached the main road to return to San Jose we simultaneously expressed our realization that we had just experienced a miracle and our minds filled with light and joy. Everybody gained, there was no loss and each and every one of us received a blessing of love. Thank you so much for providing the opportunity to experience God in our lives. It was amazing.
Amazing indeed. Jon and I both choked up as we read the email and realized what a miracle this was. Sure, it’s just a returned iPhone. Why would God care about such a thing when there are literally blind people walking to Cartago in need of sight? Because this story is not about the iPhone, but about the goodness at the heart of people everywhere. I personally believe this goodness is the image of God. It’s the goodness that inspires someone to get up insanely early to send a traveler off with a good breakfast. It’s the goodness that inspires people to walk for days and days in order to say thanks and perhaps beg for a miracle. It’s the goodness that inspires people to drive for 4 hours for someone else’s phone. And it’s the goodness that inspires a woman living in poverty to do someone a great kindness, even when doing the opposite would help her provide for her children. It’s the goodness that lies at the heart of the God of the universe, a goodness that lives inside each one of us, if we choose to honor and nurture the image in which we are created.
I needed a reminder of this goodness. When we arrived in Atlanta, it was a rude welcome home to the States. The customs agent who checked my passport said something very ethoncentric about people who speak other languages. The man in front of me in the security line acted absolutely beastly to everyone he encountered. And my personality is such that I often tend to dwell on those people who don’t nurture their inner goodness, rather than those who do. And yet, here in front of me, here in my life, I have been given a miraculous reminder of the nature of God and the true nature of all God created and declared good. And I am so truly thankful.
Yesterday afternoon, I drove down to my parents’ house to spend some quality time tooling around Lake Hamilton on their super 1970s party barge and trying out my Lil’est Sis’s new tube. The boat, picture this if you will, is known as the Disco Barge. It is avocado green and there are some cracks in the fiberglass canopy. It has no seats, and we sit on the worn astroturfed deck in lawn chairs. However, it has a certain something many boats lack. That something is a disco ball. It doesn’t go very fast, but it goes fast enough, and we cruise around the lake, sipping wine out of mason jars, marveling at the large houses, and, these days, occasionally being tugged behind the boat in a very large tube. It’s great fun. As we cruised around the lake, we pointed out our favorite houses, we laughed at the house with the giant, water-spouting marlin statue on its lakefront, which has been for sale for over a year (apparently the marlin isn’t a selling point?), and we even noticed a giant cloud that looked rather like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
Later that evening, as I headed out for my hourlong drive home, that thunderboomer was straight ahead. Lightning crackled across its surface like electric fissures, and flashes from deep within lit portions of the cloud. The round yellow face of a full moon shone from just behind the edge of the massive cloud. I rolled my windows down and the air was thick and humid, but refreshing at ten degrees cooler than it had been earlier in the evening, and it hummed with the sounds of cicadas and tree frogs. I let my hand float outside the window, enjoying the resistance created by my possibly too-fast speed on a dark and windy road. I cranked up some Mumford and Sons, because such a night calls for banjos and belting it out. I sang “rain down, rain down on me” as lightning flashed directly ahead.
Sometimes church is wherever you are. Sometimes it’s oh so sweet to be able to go from the home of my youth to the home of my own.
Over the holiday weekend, we had some friends over for a cookout. Their nearly three year old was the first fully-mobile (infant visitors don’t really count) child-sized person to visit our house, ever, and the pediatrician husband, ever cautious, made sure our TV, formerly perched precariously right at toddler height, was securely mounted to the wall before our small guest arrived. He was as delightfully behaved as any of our guests, and perhaps the kindest of any guest we’ve ever had when it comes to the treatment of our only children who happen to be two large dogs. He was patient with the fact that they kept trying to lick food off his face. He even threw a ball for them for longer than I ever have. At one point, noticing an unscooped pile of dog poo in the yard, he asked, “Who pooped there?” Because really, it might have been any of us.
And then, as he munched on a cookie for dessert, he asked me “Do you have any toys?” All I found was a stuffed monkey, which he deemed THE TICKLE MONKEY. It was still sitting on an ottoman when he and his parents left, and I let the dogs into the house. They rounded the corner, saw the furry intruder (who usually lives in a closet), and immediately started barking as if the TICKLE MONKEY were trying to kill us all and steal our tasty snacks.
Fast forward to a couple of days later. I agreed to babysit a friend‘s four year old because she was in a pinch (I’m very selective about my babysitting gigs, rather like an exclusive club). She’s often talking about how her son just wears her out with questions, and until today, I really had no idea what she means. It was like a police interrogation. The cutest police interrogation ever. He quizzed me about the names of vehicles from “Cars,” and about the backstories of obscure characters from Scooby Doo episodes I’ve never seen, about who my best friends are, and my thoughts on the motivations of the 5 little monkeys jumping on the bed. One more hour of that and I probably would have broken, just laid down on the floor and told him I’d tell him all my deepest darkest secrets, just to get five minutes without a question.
I sent my friend a text that read “I finally know what you mean about the questions.” She replied that she read my text to the women she was in a meeting with, and they all cried with laughter. I imagine this is similar to the reasons people with children laugh at me when I say I usually get 10 hours of sleep per night and require a lot of sleep to function properly.
Because my charge was asleep when I arrived, and he woke up to find me there instead of his mommy, he got the idea that I had spent the night.
“Did you sleep here?”
“No, I slept at my house, and I came here before you woke up and your mommy left for work.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“At my house.”
“Does your dad live there?”
“No, he lives at his house.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, uh, he’s very much alive, and I’m going to go see him tomorrow. I live in my own house with my husband.”
“Do you play there?”
“Um….I guess so?”
Clearly I need more toys and a lot more playing in my life. The pre-school set thinks I’m totally lame. I just hope said toys don’t scare the bejesus out of the dogs.
They say that if you don’t like the weather in Arkansas, wait 5 minutes and it will change. I’m reasonably sure they say this other places too, but we like to pretend we have a lock on weirdly oscillating weather patterns. The reality check, as my mountain man husband likes to remind me, is that places like Denver can have record-setting 84 degree days followed by whiteout snowstorms that cancel Rockies baseball games (true story).
These days it seems Arkansas has decided to skip straight to summer. In the evenings, you can already hear the chorus of cicadas buzzing in the trees (my husband calls them “skeedeedees,” an onomatopoeic word he coined to capture the way they sound, and I love that coinage). As I stood out in the street talking to a neighbor the other night, a mosquito bit my leg. ALREADY. And today, when I was driving down the road, I could see those hazy mirages that form on exceptionally hot asphalt. I glanced at my thermometer and it was 90 degrees.
And while I will absolutely complain about the heat and the humidity and the havoc both wreak on my hair, the truth is, I love me some Southern summer. My Colorado in-laws may melt in this kind of weather, but I’m like my region’s native flowers: gardenias, magnolias, and jasmine. Sure, I may not smell as nice as they do when it’s sweltering out, but this is my kind of climate. If you want to see me wilt, send me where it’s cold. If you want to see me thrive, plant me in some Southern soil. Just look around– Southern ladies are blooming all over in brightly colored skirts and sundresses.
Side note: Yes, I know, I sort of dropped off in the middle of the Beatitudes series. It will be back this week, I promise.
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 