My Life, Unpolished

Memorial Day

I’ve always struggled a little bit to put the word “happy” in front of “Memorial Day”. And I think this is why… it’s not what I would consider a celebration. The word “memorial” is mostly used in reference to a death of a loved one- a commemoration of a life that was lived and that we, in their death, now honor. In this case, Memorial Day, feels somewhat somber to me. Fourth of July? Yeah, that’s a celebration, because we stuck it to the Brits and gained our independence. Which is great for so many reasons, but most recently, because we can watch the entire Harry, Meghan, Charles and Camilla thing play out and breathe a sigh of relief that we’re not tied to that shit show. (Apologies to my English and Scottish family members).

When I was in high school, our band instructor, Mr. Hogan, requested that all of us show up for the Memorial Day parade to march as a band. It was usually in the upper 80’s and 90’s, our heavy uniforms were stifling and it wasn’t uncommon for one or two of the band members to pass out while we stood in the cemetery during speeches given by Veterans and pastors. I credit Mr. Hogan a great deal for the respectful and reverent expectations that he had of us in that parade. As we neared the cemetery, we stopped playing the patriotic music that we played through town; instead, it was just the drum line who played a quiet cadence and escorted us through the cemetery gates and onto the grounds, near one of the veteran’s grave sites where speeches would be heard. To close the ceremony, someone from the band played “Taps”. The National Anthem and Taps are two musical pieces that can guarantee some tear shed on my part, regardless of where I am- high school football games, baseball stadiums, band concerts. Those pieces stir up emotions that are hard to explain to most people and the Memorial Day parade was no exception. It’s not what I would label a “happy” parade.

During our most recent wars after 9/11, I remember standing on the side of Henderson Street in Galesburg, watching the car that carried a young man from Knoxville who didn’t make it home from the war. His name was Caleb Lufkin. I knew that a procession was going through town after his body was being returned to the area. If I remember correctly, he was flown into the Moline airport and escorted to Knoxville, through Galesburg, so people could pay their respects as the casket passed through town. I pulled over in a parking lot and got my two boys out of the car, then ages six and three, and we stood and watched that heartbreaking processional. I remember little Sam asking me “Mama, why you tryin’?” (Sam was so tiny and sweet and couldn’t pronounce any sound that came from the throat, so hard Gs, Ks and Cs were out of range. In itself, it was often more than I could handle and would melt my heart). So hearing those words were almost too much at that moment because how do I explain to a three-year-old that I was crying for this soldier’s mother and the pain she must have felt- the hopelessness, the anger, the ache that can never be resolved that comes with the acceptance of the fact that she will never see him again, watch him get married, love on his grandchildren.

For those of us with family members overseas, fighting that same war, who constantly prayed that we would never have to sit in the car that followed that casket, there was pain for that too. My heart broke for his family and friends that would never see him again and while there is a great deal of pride in those of us who have family members who have served, there is also a deep ache, entrenched in the souls of many family and friends whose loved ones didn’t come home.

I worked with someone in Galesburg who lost her father in Vietnam. She went to Washington D.C. and walked along the the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to find his name. A couple of years ago, the traveling replica of that wall was brought to my hometown through the hard work and tireless efforts of some very dedicated people in the town where I grew up. On a smaller scale, I walked along that wall, also with the purpose of finding his name- Robert Joseph Davis. I didn’t know him. But I know his daughter and I wish she could have grown up with him and had the experience of being a daddy’s girl.

What amazes me the most about these families is that they never play the victim. They never give us the impression that any of this is about them. They simply mourn in their own ways, in their own time and when asked, they talk about their loved ones with pride and love. They never discuss the price.

Memorial Day is a day to honor those who have died in the name of love of country. So I wish for all of you a safe weekend, but please take a moment to remember those who didn’t make it home and won’t be there for the cookouts and the bonfires this weekend. Before you fire up the grill, say a little prayer for their families who know all too well exactly what this day means.

Restaurant Review Part 2

Yesterday, I posted an entry about our little road trip to Sweet Pea’s Bar & Grill in Geneseo, Illinois. Road tripping is our thing. We’ll go anywhere. Sometimes we keep it simple and drive along the Mighty Mississippi and decompress from the day. Sometimes we take longer drives and talk about our work days, our boys, our life goals. And other times, we might venture up into Wisconsin and find places to explore and eat in restaurants that look inviting. Scott the Hubs and I are not complicated. We enjoy our time together and it’s really that simple. We find lots of things interesting along the way of our travels- grottos and holy places, state parks, scenic outlooks. It’s not for everyone but that’s how we roll. That kind of travel will always trump a trip to the beach or another country for both of us. The upside to that kind of travel is that we live a very cheap life, and we often find endless riches along the way.

Cheesy. I know. And speaking of cheesy…

On Saturday, we did some road tripping around Illinois and Iowa, and eventually ended up at Timmerman’s Supper Club in East Dubuque. Now, before I go any further, can we just talk about the word “supper”? That word conjures up a whole mess of homesick feelings of my mom, my grandma, and my old house in Aledo. “Supper” was the last meal of the day. Not dinner. Dinner was reserved for what most people call “lunch” and here’s why. My grandma moved here from Scotland when she married my Papa Sam. She was forced to quickly acclimate herself to farm life, as Papa Sam was a farmer in Mercer County, Illinois. On the farm, for “dinner”, which was the mid-day meal, Grandma would catch a chicken, chop its head off, defeather it and fry it for Papa, his farmhands and her family. She mashed potatoes and made home-made gravy. She baked pies. That was the biggest meal of the day. And on Sundays, when I was a kid, we almost always had Sunday Dinner at Grandma’s and we knew what we were having by the way Grandma smelled when she came to church.

Supper, however, was what we ate in the evening. As the farm life faded and my mom grew up and married, started working and had us kids, supper went from a lighter meal to the meal my mom made for us when she came home from work, with the exception of Sunday after church. My mom was a wonderful cook, just like her mom. Our lunches became light and supper became the heavy meal, and it was always amazing.

Fast forward to my adulthood…now that I’m older and many significant and much-loved parts of my childhood are no longer existent, life consists of small triggers that bring back floods of memories- things like the sound of bagpipes, the smell of a freshly-plowed field and of course, words like “supper”. I hear that word and I get an ache deep down in my soul and I want to be a kid again, because at some point, when I entered adulthood, somehow that all changed and “dinner” and “lunch” replaced the words I used all my younger life. So when I see “Supper Club”, I don’t hesitate and I’m tying a napkin around my neck.

When Scott announced that he was taking me to East Dubuque to Timmerman’s Supper Club, I was locked and loaded. This trip would be our first time there and the drive was lovely and relaxing. We didn’t have a reservation but since we were getting there later, we took our chances. Timmerman’s was a busy place, serving kids from 3 different area proms and there was a bit of a wait. Instead of leaving and finding another place, we simply bellied up to the bar at 7 PM and were seated without a reservation by 7:45. Again, we’re empty- nesters now; we have nothing at home waiting for us, so seat me at 10, I don’t care. Besides, Mary at the bar was super- friendly and I instantly made friends with some other women sitting next to us at the bar, so time flew.

One of the first things you’ll notice about Timmerman’s is that it sits high on the bluff, just after you cross the Mississippi into Illinois from Iowa. The views from the restaurant and bar are spectacular, even if you’re not seated by a window. Mary told us the huge building across the river in Iowa is a “nunnery” and that when they shine a hugely bright light from the building, it means one of the nuns has died. I fully expect Scott to do the same thing from our roof in Bettendorf when I… you know.

The service was wonderful. I’m going to admit something right here, right now, in front of all of you that many of my very close friends and immediate family already knows… I love to be waited on. In fact, I like people to actually anticipate what I want before I ask. My friend, Julia, is phenomenal when it comes to this quirky thing I have. When she used to help me with my staging/cleaning/painting business, I would often think things like, ‘I need a phillips screwdriver’ or ‘I need a smaller paintbrush’ and before I could make my way down the scaffolding, Jules would be there, right behind me, handing me exactly what I needed. Now, with that said, I’m not an ass, I swear. I don’t get upset when people don’t anticipate my every need. But when it happens, and people can read my mind, I’m over the moon with gratitude. My point is, this is the kind of restaurant where you can expect that kind of service. Friendly waitstaff, a maître d’ that remembers your name and what you look like and then quietly finds you at the bar to announce your table is ready, smiles from all the people working there and a never-empty glass of water. Heaven on earth.

We each had the 6 oz. filet and Scott the Hubs ordered his topped with blue cheese, which made me slightly jealous after we received our food because that blue cheese was friggin choice. For reals. The filet was magnificent- perfectly tender and a real, true medium doneness. (I mean, really, is there a better food than steak? I can tell you, when I pass a field of cows, I actually thank them all, out loud, for being steak.) The soup and salad were good and Scott the Hubs had a potato so fluffy, I thought he might smuggle it home and lay his pretty head on it at bedtime. I opted for steamed broccoli in place of the starch and since there was plenty of real butter on the table, I enjoyed every bite of it. What kind of nut job eats steamed broccoli without butter, salt & pepper? Not me. I slathered that bright green pile of vegetable goodness and had no shame whatsoever in having to wipe the butter off my chin.

Now, before you go an look up their website and the menu, let me prepare you…the prices are a little high, but I’m willing to pay more for great service and an excellent meal and that’s what we got at Timmerman’s. We don’t eat out like that very often-usually we’re small, local restaurant frequent flyers but since we hadn’t seen each other much lately, we decided to treat ourselves. So if you’ve got an upcoming celebration or just never go anywhere and want to splurge a little, this is your gig.

Perfect Saturday. We had great conversation, we met nice people, we ate fabulous, blog-worthy food and we had a peaceful, quiet trip together (well, until Scott the Hubs almost hit a racoon with the car on the way home and screamed really loudly). Enjoy a road trip to East Dubuque and then tell me all about it. Happy travels, readers!

Ugh, Damn Writer’s Block. So Here’s a Restaurant Review!

When I first started this blog, I wrote down a list of stories and thoughts to blog about. I went online and created a few entries, and then…crickets. I know. It’s so bizarre how every time I open up my laptop to my blog’s dashboard and attempt to write something, my brain decides to shut down. Completely. Nothing.

It’s like Meg Ryan, playing Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail- “What happens to me…my mind goes blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I should have said.” She stops and thinks. She stares at her computer screen and then she thinks some more and says, “even now, days later, I can’t figure it out.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, has been my blog-writing experience. And honestly, every time someone stops me in public and says, “I miss your blog” or “I miss your writing” or “when is the next post coming out,” I’m not lying when I say I die a little inside. Because I miss it too.

So, I decided today to share two restaurant reviews. It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to write about food and since I am in love with food and I enjoy going out far more than cooking, I thought maybe this would be something I can tell you about.

Now, since some of you don’t appreciate a long post, I’m going to do two separate entries for two different restaurants we went to yesterday. Yes, Scott the Hubs and I went out twice. Y’all are going to think I’m spoiled, but wait, lemme ‘splain before you get all judgy. Yesterday was the first time in a long time that Scott the Hubs and I got to spend any time together and since he knows I will always choose eating out over cooking, he took me out twice. I had a real estate appointment in the morning and while I was gone, he got all crazy and mowed the yard, trimmed with the weed whacker and edged along the driveway. When I came home and announced I was hungry, which I do, quite blatantly three times a day, he asked me where I wanted to go. I follow a Quad Cities Food Lovers group on Facebook and had heard about a little bar and grill in Geneseo, Illinois, called “Sweet Pea’s”. He grabbed his keys and off we went to the lovely town of Geneseo.

Geneseo is about one of the most adorbs towns I have ever driven through. It’s clean and it has some lovely local businesses, but my favorite part about the town is the homes. There are so many beautiful homes in Geneseo and I want to see the inside of most of them. Some of them look like gingerbread houses. Some are just enormous with character all around and inviting wrap-around porches. Some are mid-century ranch homes or bungalows but almost all of them are perfectly plotted on well-maintained and manicured yards. I imagine the inside of most of them is stunning- built-in cabinets, leaded glass windows, old tiled bathrooms floors, ornate lighting fixtures without an LED bulb in sight. If you live in Geneseo and you want to show me your home, I’ll bring dinner.

(Ok, right after I typed that, my mind quickly conjured up a Dateline episode. I’m sure all the people in Geneseo are nice but I’m not going to risk being murdered and buried in a backyard just to see some stunning oak trim inside a home. So scratch that. Send me photos.)

Sweet Pea’s Bar and Grill is in a little strip mall and has plenty of seating and a bar area. When we walked in, it wasn’t packed per se, but the waitstaff was hopping. The manager approached us and said they were really short-staffed and asked if we minded waiting a few minutes for her to clear off the tables. I don’t mind. I’m an empty nester- no one is at home waiting for me. I literally have ALL DAY, so don’t sweat it. It was only minutes until we were seated and then immediately were greeted by our waitress who was on top of it the entire time. I was actually really impressed. If this is them short-staffed, what’s it like when they have everyone show up for work?

I ordered a beer-battered chicken breast sandwich without the bun. Because really, if you’re going to beer-batter my chicken, the bun is only going to ruin it for me. I ordered it “loaded”, which meant it came smothered with mushrooms and onions and swiss cheese. Then I ordered their raspberry chipotle sauce on the side. I also requested the potato salad, at the waitress’ recommendation. I don’t normally eat potato salad, but “ranch” was in front of the words, “potato salad” so no-brainer. Scott the Hubs ordered a Cuban sandwich.

To say the food was good would only be the year’s biggest understatement. The chicken was juicy and the raspberry chipotle sauce… in my dreams last night, I ordered a vat of it and swam laps. The potato salad was outstanding and I only ate half of it because, well, you know, carbs. But Scott the Hubs finished off his and then mine as well.

Seriously, great meal and wonderful service, so git on over to Geneseo and git you some Sweet Pea’s.

That was the first half of my day. We took our time getting back home on the two-lane highways, marvelling at the blooming trees and the spring sites on the drive. Then Sam, our Iowa State sophomore, who always has a great story, laced with humor called us and we talked to him for a little while to get the skinny on school doings. This is Scott the Hubs and I. It takes very little to make us happy and I don’t mind telling you we are probably the most simple people to please on the planet.

For the second restaurant review, stay tuned. I’ll throw that one at the wall tomorrow and see if it sticks.

Until then, happy eating, friends!

The Last of the Applesauce

I was cleaning out my freezer last week because I just bought a half steer and a half hog and now I have to find a place to put all of it. I kinda hope this steer doesn’t weigh more than 50 pounds because it’s gonna be a tight squeeze. I came across the applesauce I made last year, by myself, without my mom’s help. It was really good, although not nearly as good as hers. I remember after she died, Dad and I cleaned out the freezer in their garage and he sent me home with lots of things she had made and then froze. Apple crisp, applesauce, soup, main dishes… One night about a 6 months after she died, (and here’s where you’re going to want to use your best Peter Brady imitation of Humphrey Bogart- Google it if you have no idea) I made pork chops for dinner and I pulled out her last two applesauce containers and served them with the meal.

I cried while I ate it.

It was heavenly. The texture was smooth and it was tart-sweet. I know it had some sugar in it because I had heartburn after, but I didn’t care. As I sat there and ate it, I pictured her in her kitchen, in one of her American flag t-shirts, surrounded by all the pictures of barns on her walls, churning the food mill by hand to separate the warm sauce from the seeds and the peels. I miss those days of canning fruits and vegetables and making pickles and of course, homemade applesauce. There is nothing at the store, I don’t care how much you paid for it, that compares with it. There’s just something about hers that makes it better. Maybe it’s because she made everything with love.

Saying that kind of makes me laugh. Remember that scene in Everybody Loves Raymond when Marie is trying to teach her daughter-in-law, Debra, how to cook meatballs? Debra isn’t known for her cooking skills like Marie, and Debra asks Marie to teach her. Marie takes Debra under her wing and says this…

“To make the perfect meatball, the most important ingredient is the love. Without the love, it’s just a ball of meat.”

Then she sabotages the entire process so that Debra can’t do anything right and Marie can continue to cook for her son, Debra’s husband, Ray. Freud would’ve loved that show.

It’s true, though, right? When you put love into something, the recipients know it- they feel it. What a beautiful way to share ourselves with others- by making them something that exudes the true love that each of us has inside.

My mom cooked and baked all the time. I’ve said this a thousand times over. I honestly don’t know how my mom did it- she taught all day, then she came home and made an extraordinary meal- I don’t mean hot dogs and mac and cheese. I mean she made a three or four course meal for us. And we sat down at the dining room table and ate it together. Every night. Every of the nights. Then she would collapse on the couch out of pure exhaustion and rest for a couple of hours before getting up and grading papers. And if you ever had my mom as an English teacher, you know she put her heart and soul into grading papers. She made us write all the time in her class. And she would grade everything– journals, essay tests, essay quizzes, and every step of the research paper process- notecards, rough outlines, rough drafts, final outlines and final drafts. And by grading, I mean she made corrections and comments on everything. She read it all.

Why?

She was putting love into it. She loved what she did and she genuinely wanted every student to succeed. Students hated her for it- until they got to college and learned quickly that a lot of college is writing papers. Or until they grew up and matured. Then they realized she loved them.

My mom rarely slept. That woman had so much love to give, she didn’t have time for all that resting nonsense. She just wanted to do so much for so many and she always did it with joy in her heart. Can you imagine if we all lived and loved that way? What a tremendous life that would be.

When I look around at all the rudeness, the hypocrisy and the pain and the loneliness in the world right now, I can’t help but think this would’ve broken her heart. She would want to do everything in her power to fix it. And she would’ve succeeded in a small, but big way.

Maybe that’s our homework this week. What can you do to make it better? How can you make life easier for someone? How can you build or mend instead of tearing down? Stop hurting and start helping. Stop clumping people into groups and judging them as a whole and get to know people on an individual level and find something good in them. Start loving people for who they are, regardless of who they vote for, regardless of what side of an issue they’re on, regardless of all of the surface stuff. Start looking into people’s hearts more and have compassion for them. Start talking more and texting less- jeez I can’t say that one enough.

Someone told me last night that for his birthday this year, the card I sent was the only one he received. Wow. This isn’t someone I’m related to or someone I’ve been really close to. He’s someone I knew from my childhood and still connect with from time to time. How sad is that? Have we resorted ourselves to just texting someone on their birthday now? No phone call, no card, no visit. None of those things are expensive or terribly time-consuming. We are a sad, pathetic bunch of people.

Get out there and visit someone who is lonely, pick up the phone so someone on the other end can hear the sincerity in your voice when you tell them you were thinking about them. And most of all, be thankful for all you have. Those people or things we are most thankful for don’t last forever.

I Present to You – a Bowl of Reading Potpourri

I just happened to look at when my last blog post was and it was May 11, 2021. And I know what you’re thinking- ‘what have you been doing for a year that you can’t sit down and write a little something to share with your faithful readers?!’ And the answer would be, “uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” because that’s literally what’s been in my brain every time I sit down to write. Completely blank. A veritable black hole of writer’s block. But now, it’s April 2022 and it’s 4:30 AM and my brain just woke me up and said, “here’s a thought,” and so here I am. If I’m being honest with y’all, I was going to go back to sleep, while that writing idea hung over my head like a cloud, but just as I was about to fall back into a deep slumber, I had a spider thought- you know, like, “I wonder if there’s a spider in the bedroom. Or the bed. Or the bathroom.” So now I’m up and drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it’s what I call a “half and half”- half coffee, half heavy cream. Don’t judge me. It’s delicious.

So, now that I’m here and it’s been a year, not to mention that I gave up Facebook for Lent, I have a few anecdotes for your reading pleasure- a bowl of reading potpourri, if you will. I wish you could hear the snooty voice in which I said that last line out loud.

Phobia Check: Speaking of spiders… I was laying in bed a couple of weeks ago, with the covers pulled up to my chin, enjoying an episode of Dateline before drifting off (to a fitful sleep in between no less than three trips to the bathroom) and right in front of my eyeballs, something crawled across the covers. Now y’all know I have these fake knees. I used to call them “new knees” but they are no longer new, just fake. And I miss the original ones because they were oh, so much better, but then they decided to suck so I had to ditch them. But since I got these fake ones, I don’t move fast. I currently operate at the speed of an 80 year old, so I can honestly say I surprised the hell out of myself in the manner in which I moved when I saw whatever that was crawling right in front of me. I screamed, threw the covers off and jumped out of bed, while simultaneously turning on the light. Then I hopped around because what if I flung it on the floor when I threw off the covers? Can’t go stand on the chair, it might’ve landed over there. I jumped around, uttering non-verbal nonsense while Scott stood there unable to help because he had no idea what was happening. I managed to tell him what happened and then, just as I was about to leave my bedroom and go to sleep, (on the recliner… forever… because I can never go back to our bedroom again) he found it- one of those big, brown stink bugs. He got rid of it for me by abiding by the Deb Rule of “squish with kleenex and flush” and then coaxed me back to bed where I lay for no less than four hours. Without blinking.

Of course, after telling my dad the story later that week, he asked if I actually saw the stink bug. When I said no, he offered the possibility that perhaps Scott said it was a stink bug just so I’d go back to bed. So there’s that now.

I’m so tired.

Husband Shenanigans: If you’ve known Scott and I for a while, you know that he led a very deprived childhood in that he rarely watched certain programming. He never saw one episode of the Muppet Show. Not one. This makes my Statler and Waldorf, Sam the Eagle and the Swedish Chef impressions fruitless and completely unappreciated. But he also rarely watched Looney Tunes, which can be problematic when I make Looney Tunes references in occasional conversation (like when I recommended we name our frog “Kermit”*) and he has no idea who I’m talking about. One thing that has blown my mind right outta my ears though, is that he has no idea who Pepe LePew is. I learned this only a few years ago and for weeks after that, pondered the possibility that our entire marriage is sham. Regardless, we recently had a conversation when I got into the car to go to Mass and it went like this…

Me: Hey, I got ready really fast! We’ll get there early today!

Scott: Yes, you’re Speedy Gonzales.

Me: Whoa! You know who Speedy Gonzales is! Who even are you?!

Scott: Why do you say that?

Me: Because you never recognize my cartoon references. How is it that you know Speedy Gonzales and not Pepe LePew?

Scott: I don’t know. Because I don’t speak Spanish so it’s hard for me to remember that.

Me: Wait. What? Pepe LePew is Spanish?

Scott: Yeah, isn’t he?

Me: No. Pepe LePew was the French skunk. Speedy was a little Mexican mouse. He wore a sombrero.

Scott: Whatever. I can’t remember real people’s names, let alone some Pepe LePoo.

Me: LE PEW

Scott: WHATEVER. I don’t speak French.

Me: Babe, I don’t speak French either, but I know who the hell Pepe LePew is.

* Now I know you’re wondering about our Frog, Kermit, since I brought him up… Scott used to catch frogs when he was a kid so several years ago, I bought him this frog raising kit- a little habitat for raising frogs from tadpoles. He really liked it for a while; we’d send away for tadpoles and then watch them grow. Or die. Meh, whatever. It’s a cruel world. Anyway, our first pet frog was appropriately named “Kermit” by me, for obvious reasons. Apparently, Scott couldn’t remember this because when he was traveling for work, he would call me and ask if I had fed “Albert”. Whaaaaaa? So we re-named him Albert, to make it easier for Scott. He died (Albert. Not Scott). We raised another new frog that SCOTT himself named “Domer” (a Notre Dame reference I recommended so to help him remember). After that, when he was away from home, he would call and remind me to feed “Edgar”. Sigh…

I love that man. So much I love him.

Empty Nesting and Upcoming Confessions: So we’re official empty nesters now. My oldest moved out- he got all manly, became a fireman and just moved out. I mean, what in the actual what?! You raise him, you teach him to be an independent, contributing member of society and then he just, you know, LEAVES, like he no longer needs his mama. Just like that. And the other one… don’t even get me started on him. He went to Iowa State, showed off how smart he is and gets some “ideal internship” with a multi-billion dollar company in Des Moines and apparently doesn’t care about his mama either, because he won’t be home this summer at all. It’s fine. Everything is FINE. I’m embracing the empty-nester thing pretty well, for the most part. I clean and it stays clean. I don’t have to cook for four, I cook for two. But I will admit that the additional free time at home has given me the opportunity to overthink everything I have ever done as a mom and question whether I did ok or not. But I won’t bog you down with all those melancholy and self-destructive thoughts and confessions. I’ll wait until a joyous occasion, say, Mother’s Day, to go into that detail. So…watch for that uplifting post.

Real Estate Update: Ok, truth be told, real estate is probably the reason why I haven’t written anything in a while. Last year was, in a word, chaos. Not bad chaos, necessarily. It was like this… imagine you’re a sweet, soft, furry rabbit. You’re hopping gracefully in a beautiful, green field, full of clover, looking for a rabbit hole to make your home. There’s a few rabbit holes that have piqued your interest and you’re trying to decide which hole you want, but strangely, all the little rabbit hole doors are closed and you can’t get inside to look around. And a pack of pumas show up. And the pumas all have cash. And none of them want inspections.

It was a tough year for buyers because the market made for lots of competition and some buyers lost their minds and wrote crazy offers to get what they wanted. And the sellers? Well, they had to look at all those crazy offers. All I can say is, thank heavens for my cool, calm ability to stay level-headed and navigate all of them through it with ease! Well, that and a steady diet of Tums and Alka-Seltzer and a lot of swearing. All in all, it ended on a really positive note and I proved to myself that I am capable of far more than I ever thought possible. The truth is, my life has a lot of Divine Intervention and last year was no exception. I lead a very grateful and joyful life and I find that in doing so, I get through the toughest of times feeling secure and confident.

Turning 50: August will hold a milestone event in my life. I don’t think it’s going to be a huge problem for me- I seem to be already settling into middle age without a problem. I’ve got the fake knees, I’m impatient, our lawn is near perfect, and lately, I find myself saying things like,

“Hey! It’s 8:45! We could justifiably go to bed now!”

“Turn around and go back home. I forgot my readers. I can’t see my phone.”

“Where are they getting these newscasters now? Are they recruiting at the junior high? None of these news people look like they’re over 12.”

“If we go to dinner now, the music won’t be as loud and I can hear.”

“I’ll have the fries. Wait,” (reconsiders the pending heartburn or a diabetic coma) “I’ll have a side salad, please.”

“Those kids are going to blow out their eardrums playing their music that loud.” (I mean, I’m in bed. It’s 11 PM. Our house is vibrating from the bass in their car. Playing music that loud has to have to medical consequences.)

Bring on the middle age, I guess. Sounds like I’m ready.

Lastly, I’d like to close with a little segment I like to call…

Funny Things I’ve Seen: While at my Mom-In-Law’s house this past weekend, Scott happened to notice two golfers on the course that borders Mom’s backyard and pointed them out to Mom and me. A young woman, probably in her late 30’s, dressed in a tiny skirt and tight tank top to match, managed to hit a ball past the hole and was getting ready to try to putt it in. Scott had been watching them for longer than Mom and I and commented, “she is struggling and this guy is doing his best to be patient.” We watched as she took some practice swings, shifted a few times, backed up from the ball, shifted again and then waited. “Come on. Just hit the ball,” Scott says, as the three of us watch her, anticipating a miss. To our surprise, and obviously hers as well, she managed to tap the ball right into the hole. She raised both arms and the putter into the air in an exhibition of glorious victory and then did a little happy dance. The guy with her seemed to be tolerating her behavior at best and went over to his putt his ball. She dramatically walked towards their cart, while he misses his putt in the background. But the pièce de résistance was her next move as she walked down the little hill to the cart, giving us a perfect view… she raised both arms and did a shoulder and chest shimmy all the way down the hill, putter still in hand, while in the background, he misses the second shot with his putter. Sometimes, I think life hands us these little tidbits of comedy, just to keep us laughing, because you know, life…ugh. Thank you, chest-shimmying female and her less-than-amused, bad-putting guy friend. Good show! Bravo! Or should I say, Brava!

Well, Readers, time to wrap it up. But until the next entry, which I can tell you will be all about God’s greatest invention (the cow, obviously), I wish you all sunshine, joy and whole lotta funny.

Foodie Report- Le Mekong, Moline, Illinois

Hello Readers! Today we’re going to shift gears and do something a little different. If you know me well, you know I love food. I try really hard to cook and eat good, healthy stuff and I’ve been pretty successful but there is absolutely no hiding it. I love to eat. And here’s the thing, I’m a pretty decent cook, but eating out is my jam. I’ve been hard-core cooking for over 22 years now and honestly, I’m over it. I’m ready to just let someone else do the work while I sit at a table with my favorite people and share stories and wait for my food to be served all nice and hot. Yes, eating out is where it’s at.

Much to my disappointment over the last year and a half, this whole Covid thing has been hard on the restaurant industry, especially the mom and pop places that don’t have stores all over the US. I feel like I need to make it my own personal mission to keep all the family-owned places in the Quad City and surrounding areas, alive. Challenge accepted, as eating out is my favorite. Feel free to make a recommendation as I’m always happy to try something new.

Last week, my brother came up from Peoria and we picked up my dad and took him to his favorite restaurant. He was having a good day so we took advantage and got him out for some fresh air and fabulous food.

Dad has been a loyal patron to Le Mekong since the 80s. He and his bestie, Steve, found this lovely Vietnamese gem tucked into a storefront on 5th Street in downtown Moline back in their early teaching days. It’s run by the founder’s son, who took over when his father died some time ago. It’s a local joint- not a huge operation, but this little family get-up packs a punch in service and fine cuisine.

If you’re looking for a new place to check out in the Quad Cities, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the kind of place you can be casual or dress up. The tables are all nicely set with white tablecloths- what is it about a white tablecloth? It just screams classy to me. It’s also the kind of place that if you show up enough, the owner will recognize you and enthusiastically greet you when you walk in the front door. The music is tasteful and it’s not loud, so you can hear each other talk and enjoy the company of the people you came to eat with. The ambiance is sublime. And to me, that plays a big role in whether or not I’m going to enjoy my meal.

But the food. Oh my. The food. My husband joined us for dinner and we all tried something different. We started out with some egg rolls and my dad ordered sides of the plum sauce. I highly recommend that combo. Plum sauce has a deep, rich, sweet flavor that sweet and sour sauce can’t touch. No comparison. Scott and I also tried a plate of crab rangoon as well. The rolls and rangoon were crispy and wonderful and my mouth is literally watering while I write this and describe our meal. For dinner, my brother had the Grilled Saigon Beef, Scott had the Ambassador Beef, Dad had the Ginger Salmon and I had the Basil Chicken. The presentation was beautiful. Colorful, simple, elegant. Every entree was full of fresh and crunchy veggies, the meat was tender and juicy and the flavor combos left my brother asking the owner for a straw to suck up the sauce on the plate. According to Dad, the Lemongrass Pork was a favorite for my mom. She and my dad spent many a date night in this place and I now understand why.

So if you’re looking for a great place to dine on the fly or you’re all gussied up, headed to a show and want to eat out first, give this place a shot. It’s reasonably priced, so you can enjoy some appetizers and a drink along with your entree. The owner is friendly and welcoming and he’ll talk to you about the menu and make suggestions for entrees as well as wines and beer. I’m not much of a drinker so I asked him for a pot of tea. It was so flavorful, I drank the entire pot by myself. You won’t be disappointed in your experience and you’ll be supporting a great local restaurant that beats the heck out of any chain. Aren’t those exactly the kind of places we want to be able to choose from in our community?

Dogwoods, Spring and Mother’s Day

Happy Spring, Readers! It’s been another busy week and on Wednesday, I crossed the Mighty Mississippi into Moline, Illinois to deliver an earnest money check to a listing agent and I had a moment- a mom moment. But wait- first of all, I need to address this real estate market. What in the actual what is happening out there?! This market is beyond intense right now and Realtors are so incredibly busy, here I am writing a blog entry at 4:30 AM because, well… that’s my free time now. I’m pretty sure that when I pulled out of my driveway earlier last week, I met myself coming home. I feel like Hermione Granger with her time-travel necklace. Except that Hermione always looked put together and I am the opposite- I’ve got sweat dripping from my forehead, my hair looks like something a bird built to sleep in and there’s a dryer sheet hanging out from the leg of my jeans. I am doing my best to master being in two places at once, but I am failing miserably. There are so many buyers out there and so few houses to sell. If you’re thinking about selling, for the love of all things holy, what are you waiting for?! Put an end to this madness! Help us get back to a normal life!

Anyway, Moline… I was navigating my way through the streets of John Deere’s birthplace, which might I add is a lovely little metropolis. The homes in Moline are really beautiful- lots of old stuff with character and charm. Anyway- geez- I’m all over the place today-

I was zipping along 12th Street and my eye caught a glimpse of a blooming Dogwood tree and I did a double-take. The Dogwood isn’t a huge tree, just a medium-sized ornamental with seemingly paper-like petals. They’re bright and beautiful and right now, they are in full bloom. What I love about a Dogwood is that it stays all bloomy for a long time- like a month- which seems unusual to me for spring. Spring is like a one-night stand. It bursts in all hot and beautiful and then by the next morning it’s gone and you don’t get to see it for another year. So yeah, a month of blooming is pretty impressive. It was sunny out that day too, so this Dogwood appeared to have this holy-like glow to it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard angels singing in the background as I passed it. (It’s also possible that could be the constant ringing I hear in my ears- a new thing my old and decrepit body has decided I should experience and I am just loving it.) Back to the tree- it distracted me momentarily and what immediately followed was something I have experienced for some time now- an ever-so-slight groan that comes from the depths of my Mom Soul. It wasn’t always just a subtle thing- it used to be a full on urge that came on from my gut- the kind of urge you feel as a mom when you wish you were having a baby. That has faded over time because that concept doesn’t have the same appeal to me that it did twenty years ago when I was young and had energy. Right now, in my life stage, I’m closer to having a grandbaby than a baby. But we’re not going to discuss that right now and wake the baby gods. We’re going to shut up about that and talk about something else.

Although three years apart, both of my boys were born in mid to late April. The nursery in our old 1916 Galesburg home overlooked our neighbor’s yard, where a white Dogwood tree bloomed feverishly every spring. While changing diapers throughout the day and night, that tree would always catch my eye. It was actually bright enough that it stood out against the darkness during those 2 AM feedings. So spring was baby time at our house. I’d rock those boys on the porch swing and take in the season around me- the new flowers, the new birds, the smell of everything popping its head above earth from a long winter… Those are the things that I remember when I see one of those trees and Wednesday, it hit hard and I felt all baby-needy.

All of this fresh spring air and Dogwoods got me thinking about how I was as a new mom back then. At the time I was working outside the home, so I’d spend forty hours a week doing one job and then go home in the evenings and on weekends to do, what I felt was, my more-important job. That was always a huge struggle for me. I took my domestic responsibilities very seriously- I made three and four-course meals for dinner every night like my mom always did. While other moms were making mac and cheese and hot dogs for dinner, I was perusing magazines and cookbooks for fun! new! recipes! I cleaned every week. I did laundry until 1 AM. I’d make sure all the socks matched and were folded nicely. The baby socks. Yes, the tiny baby socks. I mean, why in the actual hell was I even washing them?! Baby feet don’t get stinky or sweaty. They don’t wear work boots all day and come home all gamey. Seriously. What was I thinking?! Then, after I had completed my circle of madness, I’d go to bed for a few hours, get up and start all over. You know the routine. I’m not the only mom that ever did it. I was thinking about how perfect I always wanted everything to be and quite honestly, looking back, I think about how ridiculous that was.

I remember my mom-in-law telling me at the time that I needed to learn to let some things go. I thought that was funny at the time because her home was always so perfectly clean and beautiful and she had six kids, so surely she understood where I was coming from in my quest to be perfect. Years later, I brought that up to Scott one day and he laughed and said, “Mom’s house wasn’t perfect until all us kids moved out!” That information was incredibly insightful to me at the time, and would’ve been useful from day one so I’m not sure why everyone kept that from me. But it was a game-changer and it was then that I realized Mom McGrath was right- I needed to chill.

I wish she was standing here in my living room right now, because I have actual proof that I am the most chill mom that ever lived. This place is a disaster- there is stuff everywhere in places it doesn’t belong. And I feel like I’m growing attached to the layer of dust on everything- it feels like some kind of contest- how LONG can I actually go without dusting the surfaces in my home and how HIGH can a layer of dust get? Not sure, but tune in next month to see where we’re at.

Mom McGrath! I made it! I no longer care!

The point is, I eventually did learn to chill. And when I did, I enjoyed more moments and took in more memories. And as I was driving that day, it made me want to reach out to all those moms out there- new moms, moms going through the “terrible twos”, moms with littles that are facing a myriad of challenges, moms with teens… Girl, soak it all in. It’s a struggle now and that struggle is oh, so real. You’re feeling pulled in a thousand different directions, your expectations for yourself are way too high, you’re trying to to do it all and be it all to everyone around you. Stop. Reign that shit in. Learn to say “no, not right now, maybe someday” and keep life simple. Bring your expectations of yourself to a level that is humanly possible. You’ll find moments to get it done. Because I’m telling you, one minute you’re rocking them on the porch swing, taking in all the newness of that baby and the next minute, you’re driving down a road and there’s an oncoming firetruck and that baby you were rocking just a minute ago is driving it and has a moustache and muscles.

I’m planning my second baby’s high school graduation party. It’s mind-blowing to me and I find myself just focusing on what I need to do and plowing forward, without emotion, just to win this battle. Because it is– it’s a battle against time- you’re grabbing handfuls of sand and it’s just sifting through your fingers and you can try to tighten your grip it and stop it but it just keeps seeping through the cracks and there’s nothing you can do about it. The most ironic part of it all is the fact that while I’m fighting to slow it all down, that graduating senior is pushing it to go faster so he can get to school and get started on being a grown up.

Wisdom- it’s apparently only for old people.

Happy Mother’s Day, Moms out there! Stop being so hard on yourselves! Give hugs, make hot dogs and don’t worry about matching all the socks. Someday, when the kids are off on their own, we’ll have plenty of time to clean.

New Year, a Dead Deer and Happiness

When I was a kid, New Year’s Eve was one of my favorite celebrations. All of my mom’s immediate family lived in the same town as us and we got together often to celebrate holidays, birthdays and sometimes, for no reason at all. She would make this incredible spread of the most delicious appetizers and everyone would come over and actually stay until after midnight. Sometimes we split into teams and played Trivial Pursuit and I would marvel at how smart my uncles and my mom were and how they just knew stuff. Other times, my dad and uncles would play Risk in the sunroom, my mom, grandma and aunts would talk and play cards in the dining room and my cousins and I would all hang out and play Uno until it was time to toast the New Year and sing Auld Lang Syne, in a circle, holding hands. Of course, Dick Clark was always in the background of all the loud laughter, teasing and board game trash talk. It was beautiful and fun and festive because the tree and all the Christmas lights were still glowing and we had a family that loved to laugh and spend time together. After midnight, all the adults would leave and us kids would have a big slumber party in the living room, watching the same movies every year. For the most part, I did this until I was pregnant for the first time- I was 27.

I may have missed a couple of those celebrations, but not many. I don’t remember what I did instead, except for one year in particular. I was in my early 20’s and my brother, Sam and I were in Mexico with our grandparents. That was a great New Year’s Eve because he drank too much champagne and ended up on the dance floor with this little Mexican man from the Mariachi band. I so wish I had a picture of that. I would happily pay to have that image plastered all over the city buses where he lives. Billboards? Yes, please! Paint a mural on the old downtown buildings? Sure!

Yes, old New Year’s Eves were such fun!

But now I am tired.

I was laying in bed this morning, thinking about what my hopes were for the next 12 months, setting minimal goals, so as to not set myself up for disappointment, when the thought of New Year’s Day 2019 came to mind… I was letting our dogs out the back door and noticed something laying on the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, between our yard and the neighbors’. It was a deer. It had probably been hit on the street behind our house and dragged its broken, mangled body to our sidewalk, where it collapsed and died. So… happy New Year to us!

That day it didn’t make me chuckle- it made me kind of sad, just because I like animals and I hate to see them suffer. (Although not so much that I feel like I should be a vegetarian. In fact, when I drive along a pasture of cows, my mind wanders to a juicy Porterhouse, grilled so flawlessly that the fat just melts in my mouth.) But here’s this poor deer, who was hit by a car and managed to stagger away from the road to just plop down and expire without so much as morphine or a family member there to console him. It just made me feel woeful, even though the boys were happy to run out and investigate and study it.

Boys are gross.

I called the City of Bettendorf on January 2nd, when the offices opened, and explained that I had this carcass out on the sidewalk and could someone please come and remove it. After proving that the deer was actually on City property and not my personal property (and thank heavens, because even though it’s a cute furry deer, what the hell am I supposed to do with its dead self?), they agreed to come and pick it up. I’m not sure what I thought would happen next. Was I under the unreasonable impression that two men from the local funeral home, wearing the appropriate dark gray or black, would show up with white gloves and carefully and gently place the deer in a coffin and provide it with the proper, respectful services my illogical thoughts felt it deserved? Is that really what I had in mind when I called the City? Because if it was, it was a pretty inaccurate representation of what actually happened.

What actually happened was slightly painful to watch and I’m pretty sure Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny style would’ve been out there having words with the city guys who, by the way, were wearing fluorescent yellow vests and not black suits.

“Imagine you’re a deya. You’re prancin along, you wanna to get to the otha side of the street and BAM! A f*&%ing cah slams into your sweet, innocent, hahmless, leaf-eating, doe-eyed body! Ya leg is broken and ya insides are now on ya outside, so you crawl closuh to the neighbuhhood houses to die quietly on the sidewalk. Now I axe ya. Would ya want some fluorescent yelluh-wearin schmuck to come along and drag ya down the sidewalk and throw ya in a gahbage truck?”

But that’s exactly what happened. I heard a noise later in the morning and saw an actual garbage truck in my cul-de-sac. ‘Huh,’ I thought, innocently, ‘it’s not garbage day.’ And then the realization hit me like a two by four to the forehead. “Noooooooooo. They’re taking the deer away in a garbage truck?” I said out loud to myself, as I stared in disbelief out the window at the scene that was unfolding before me. I watched the two guys walk down the sidewalk and put the deer on a tarp. Then they dragged the tarp to the truck, which had backed up to the curb. I watched each of them grab two hooves a piece and then I quickly turned my head and squeezed my eyes shut because I knew exactly what was coming-

THUD.

I could actually picture it in my head. They probably swung it back and forth a few times, shouting, “ONE! TWO! THREE!” and then they laughed while they watched its four- well three whole legs and one, broken, mangled leg- flail through the air and into the back of the truck. Then they probably laughed and high-fived each other.

Animals.

Back in 2019 that made me a little sad. But laying here in bed, on the first day of 2021, I found myself chuckling. Maybe that’s because 2020 was such a downer, that I now possess a more demented and warped sense of humor than I had before and find a lot of things funny that I probably shouldn’t. I recently laughed out loud in a setting of several people at something that no one else found funny. You know that saying, “laugh, and the world laughs with you”?

Yeah. That’s crap.

At first I was slightly embarrassed because everyone turned and looked at me, but then I decided ‘this is who I am now’. I laugh at weird and often inappropriate shit. And I gave everyone a shrug and laughed again.

So that is my wish for all of you this new year… that you find humor in lots of places, even if no one laughs with you. Watch the funny shows, listen to the funny guys on the radio, spend your time with the people in your life that make you laugh and don’t look at you weird when you do, don’t be embarrassed if you snort a little and don’t be afraid to make others chuckle. Laughter makes us beautiful and there’s too much great stuff in the world to ignore it.

Happy, New Year, Readers.

Happy, happy New Year.

Lucky Girl

This weekend, I said the final goodbye to my childhood home. Let’s recap, shall we? In the last year and a half, I have said goodbye to my grandfather, my mom, my grandma and now, my family home and its contents. In November, we moved my dad to a retirement home close to my house so I can see him daily and help him as he ages. I went through all the treasures my mom and dad had collected over the course of their 52 years together and I distributed some of them to people I thought would appreciate them. The remaining items my dad, my brother and I didn’t want were tagged and displayed and put up for sale. I found us some buyers for the home and we closed today; but over the weekend, Scott and I made the journey back to the house so I could say goodbye to yet another part of my life that I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to yet.

When my dad left the Army, we moved out of North Carolina and briefly to a suburb of Chicago, where my dad attempted to work for my grandfather in his flower shop on the South Side. (Remember that line from “Field of Dreams”, where Ray Kinsella is talking about wife Annie’s parents and says “After graduation, we moved to the Midwest and stayed with her family as long as we could… almost a full afternoon.” Yeah, that kind of sums up our experience as well.) After the suburbs, we made the move to Mercer County, Illinois where we lived in a house surrounded by cornfields until we moved to the town of Aledo. I remember the day we moved- I unpacked my belongings in my new room and then ran outside, jumped on my bike and found all my neighborhood friends and family and cruised past the houses along our street. For a kid moving from the country, with only a couple of people to play with, one of which was my little brother, in-town living was paradise. The house was huge, had a myriad of hiding places and nooks and crannies and it had an enormous open attic.

But my bedroom…Eventually the walls were covered in pictures of best friends and posters of my favorite bands. Stuffed animals and pompoms lined the shelves. And I had this enormous purple and pink braided oval rug over the beautiful hardwood. I cried over boyfriends, talked with my friends on the phone for hours, shared my bed with our pet boxers, fought with my parents, and was rejected on the phone by the only boy I ever asked to a dance after which I cried myself to sleep- all in that room.

The house was built in the early 1900’s. It has a regal front porch with large white pillars that were often wrapped in real pine garland at Christmas with tiny white, twinkling lights and bright red bows. If my mom had time, every window had a white candle and there were so many windows, that honestly, I can’t believe she didn’t burn the place to the ground by blowing the fuse box to hell. But the outside at Christmas was nothing compared to the inside. Inside was a magical display of holiday decor- she collected the Department 56 lighted houses and she made room for every single one of them. She took such care in putting them out on all of her surfaces. She had trees and bridges and people and little accessories to go with them. It was a sight to behold, even as an adult. Walking through the house and looking at the Christmas villages and farms she created, made you feel like a child, caught up in the wonder of the season. She hung garlands and she displayed her collections of deer and Old World Santas. The house always smelled of cinnamon or cider and the tiny lights from all the decorations literally made the house glow like a campfire.

But the piece de resistance was the tree. Because the ceilings in that house are so high, my mom had a knack for picking out a Christmas tree that would make the California Redwoods jealous. Every year, that tree got a little bigger and every year, she would walk in the front door after it had been put up by my dad and his friends and her little hands would cover her mouth and she would gasp and then giggle at the monstrosity of the pine she had meticulously chosen. That’s another whole blog entry.

The kitchen in our home got a real workout- that woman not only cooked a three or more course meal for us every night, which we diligently ate at the dining room table, she made breads and pies for fundraisers and events. She made cookies and brownies for grandkids. She made meals for countless people, in times of need, to make their lives easier. She tried new recipes and old ones. She made up recipes. That kitchen was loved and then gutted and redesigned and then loved some more.

The floors creaked, the windows with their ropes and weights gave way and were replaced by new vinyl ones, the garage door that had to be manually opened and shut was replaced by a new one with an opener. Central air was installed, long after my brother and I suffered from heat stroke every summer and moved away. The shed that I dented with some wild baseball pitches and that Dad eventually crushed taking down a tree (now that’s a funny story) was replaced with a one he built himself. The walls were painted, the floors were carpeted and then the walls were repainted and the floors recarpeted again. Didn’t matter. Not once, in all the changes, did that home lose its charm or the love that was shared in those walls. I grew fonder of it the older I got. And now, if I thought it made sense, I would move back there in a heartbeat and maintain it in all its glory.

When the idea that I would soon need to sell our home was made clear, the thoughts started to creep in that I would need to be able to list it on the MLS, following all the guidelines set for us Realtors. I would have to be professional. I would have to take the personality out of it. I would have to be the seller I tell my sellers to be when they are selling their homes- objective. Turns out, the buyers I was working with at the time loved it and saved me having to go through the trouble of listing it. Which is good- because I honestly wasn’t sure how to describe my childhood home and be objective about it. I sat down one night and wrote the following description and then laughed at myself, as it has a significant number of infractions that would surely catch the attention of the board and land me a whole mess of fines…

“You’ll fall in love with the sparkling chandelier, the elegant staircase and the fireplace in this beautiful, character-filled but tastefully updated home, the very minute you walk through the front door. The large, open rooms will entice you to buy the world’s largest Christmas tree and entertain your family and friends with heavenly, culinary concoctions and fine wine. The enormous backyard could be home to endless family wiffleball games and hours of serene and peaceful gardening. The sunroom can be the place where you keep your plants, your piano or your never-ending collection of books. Set up a big comfy chair in there and read for hours. The updated kitchen with its tall and useful cabinets and solid surface counters will be the center of your existence, where you whip up countless dinners, roll out pie crusts and can tomatoes. While you wash the dishes, you can gaze out the windows at the double lot with colorful gardens full of perennials, the birds and of course, the squirrels attempting to steal from your feeders. You can whip your towel over your shoulder and step out onto the lovely back porch and yell at the little varmints, threatening to shoot them, even though you never will. From the back porch, you can walk down the steps and pick tomatoes and other vegetables from one of the four raised garden beds just off the patio. The patio itself is large enough for family games of basketball and HORSE, Fourth of July BBQs and homemade ice cream-making and best of all, for hosting wedding brunches. Back inside, you’ll love the creaks in the back staircase as you head upstairs to view the bedrooms. The master, with its transom window, has large, solid doors that divide the two-room suite or fold back to keep the space open. The two walk-in closets will provide plenty of space for not only all the clothes you bought during the many years of shopping trips with your daughter, but also to hide all your Christmas gifts. All of the rooms have solid wood doors, perfect for door-slamming teenagers, and the elegance of the upstairs chandelier is carried throughout the hallway in grand wall sconces. The walk-up attic could be beautifully finished or could simply house all the Christmas decorations you put out every year, as well as every known copy of National Geographic, Family Circle and Gourmet Magazine, making yours the only home in Mercer County that is more stocked with reading material than the local library. Your children will enjoy going through 70 years worth of cards, scrapbooks and pictures you packed into boxes and stacked in the vast space that reaches temperatures upwards of 1000 degrees in the summer. Lastly, the room above the garage, surrounded by windows, will be the perfect place to set up your home office so you can grade your students’ papers until the wee hours of the morning while you consume pot after pot of coffee. Prepare yourself. You’re about to write an offer.”

I’m telling you…I would go straight to Realtor Jail if I put that on the MLS, but damn, that’s a hard house to let go of, let alone sell yourself.

So on Friday, Christmas Day, I went back to Aledo and walked through every room- picturing my mom, my dad, my brother and I doing something in each one. Then I sat on the bottom step of the staircase and wept.

I wept for the loss of my mom, the loss of my childhood, the end of Christmas mornings where I ran down the stairs with my little brother with wonder and excitement, the end of homecomings where I walked through that front door and my mom always greeted me with hugs and her beautiful smile, and the loss of a place that symbolized safety and security and comfort. I stared out at the rooms in front of me, picturing all the activity that had taken place there for 38 years.

After a while, I stood up and thanked the house for all the great memories it gave our family. I quietly closed the front door, locked it and got in the car. As we drove away, I pictured my mom and dad standing on the front porch, waving to us until they could no longer see our car, just as they did every time we left the house for years.

When we got back to Iowa, I walked through our house and marvelled at my mom’s Christmas houses, which are beautifully displayed at our own home. I walked into our kitchen and looked at her cutting boards, which I had hung on the walls and I looked in my drawers at the orange Tupperware measuring cups and the wooden utensils she used when she cooked. I pulled the flour sifter out of the cabinet and turned the handle a couple of times, just to hear that scraping sound it made when she baked something that needed sifted flour. I guess home isn’t just a frame and plaster and paint and carpet. It’s a place we hold deep down, in the very depths of our insides. It’s safe there-no one can alter it or make it disappear. It’s the longing we feel to be with the people we’ve lost and the comfort in knowing we’ll see them again. It’s the customs and the habits and the traditions we grew up with and the new ones we create with our own families. You can sell the home, but it never really leaves you.

I sat down at the table and in my mind, I wrapped up all I was feeling and all the memories I had at that moment and the tears I had been crying and I put it all into a lovely little box with some pretty ribbon and I placed it in the corner of my mind for those days I feel sorry for myself. After all, the gift of all those memories, the fact that I actually have them and lived them, should be more than enough to satisfy the saddest of hearts. What a lucky girl I am.

Chip and Joanna Don’t Have to Call the Shots, You Know.

Home… I hear that word and I swear, my blood pressure instantly drops to a much calmer and doctor-approving level. I love being home. There. I said it. Maybe you asked me out to do something and I said I couldn’t because I was busy. I lied. I like being home. While many people in the country are being forced to work from home, I am not one of those people. My office is fully open and functioning as usual (kinda). But sometimes, I work from home because I’ve made my workroom so incredibly personal, it’s one of my favorite spaces. And isn’t that the whole point of home? Making it comfortable? Making it your most favorite place to be?

So many of us are always trying to define our own spaces and put a personal stamp on the places we live. I always laugh a little when Sherwin Williams comes out with the “color of the year” because the color of the year is never in any room of my house. And yet, I love my colors. Shades of yellow and gold- they make me happy and they make me feel cozy warm. Since I started in real estate four years ago, I have seen nothing but gray. Coming home to yellow makes me feel like the sun came out after the rain.

Back before I became a Realtor, I helped people choose colors and design their spaces. Often they would ask me “what’s in?” I would tell them what the latest trends were, but I would always follow it up with, “unless you’re planning to sell soon, you can make your own design and there really are no rules- not if it’s yours and it makes you happy.” I’ve never really understood home trends. But that’s just me. I prefer to surround myself with things that bring back great memories of the people and places I love. I don’t worry too much about what others think of my place. I invite them over to spend time with us, not to gawk at my latest purchases. Sometimes I look at designer home magazines and I think, “but how do they live? Where is the laundry basket? Where is the dog hair and the toast crumbs on the counter and in the butter? And where are the children, wrestling on the floor, knocking over that $700 lamp?”

My biggest annoyance over the last several years, though, is perhaps the “Farmhouse” trend. Not because I take issue with farmhouses, but because I think the description of what they think a farmhouse looks like is so ridiculous. And you know the style gurus in New York that created this have probably never spent a day in a farmhouse.

I saw an article a couple of weeks ago that someone posted from Realtor.com that was written by Jennifer Kelly Geddes. It said the famous Chip and Joanna Gaines Modern Farmhouse look has finally taken a backseat to a new one. Who do I personally thank for that?! I thought that trend would never leave. On a sad note, it was replaced by the new “Industrial Farmhouse” decor trend. First, who names these trends? And who on earth is deciding what a trend is? And what the hell is Industrial Farmhouse? Want to know what makes up the Industrial Farmhouse look according to Jennifer? Dark mixed metals and my favorite, “live-edge wooden pieces (a style where the edges aren’t straight, but show the shape that the tree would naturally take)”. Sigh.

Now don’t go getting your Wranglers all in a bunch if you have applied the various farmhouse trends to your own home. That’s great! It’s your home! You. Do. You. I just want to set the record straight on all this “farmhouse” nonsense.

Now, I’m not trying to pass myself off as a genuine farm kid. I was surrounded by corn, but we didn’t own the farm we lived on. I did, however, grow up around enough farms to know that they weren’t decked out in white cabinets and stainless steel and mixed metals. And that “live edge wooden” stuff you speak of? Well, that’s the kind of wood you run your hand along in a barn or a fence and get a palm full of splinters.

No, the inside of an actual and legitimate farmhouse is quite different. Depending on the farm, it certainly doesn’t smell like Bath and Body Works’ latest candle scent. Nope, it smells like the animals on the farm. And in my oh so very humble opinion, that smell isn’t always bad. It isn’t always good either. My favorite animal smell in the whole world is horses. Even horse manure has a very comforting scent to me. I know that sounds a little off, but there are some people out there who will wholeheartedly agree. I can tolerate the smell of cow manure, but I draw the line at hogs. I dated a hog farmer once. It didn’t last long. And it only lasted as long as it did because I used him so I could ride the horses on his farm. That’s right. Don’t judge me.

When you walk in the back door of a farmhouse, you better get your behind in quicker than not, because that creaky screen door is going to spring shut and smack you in the ass when you bend over to take off your boots. And you take off your boots because there is a myriad of farm residue on the bottom of them. There will be a place to hang the Carhartts because it gets really cold doing chores in the winter, but there aren’t hooks with wreaths and a bench with a decorative pillow and a throw. There is, however, a rug on the floor made of old rags that was stitched together by the Lutheran Church ladies after they tirelessly cut all those old rags up into pieces. They did it in a group around the table in the church basement, telling funny stories and drinking really good Lutheran coffee. No self-respecting farmhouse has a rug from Pier 1 inside the back door.

Side-note. While I was in Theisen’s Farm Store last week, I actually saw a rack of rag rugs for $2.99 each. Might want to snag some of those in case “Real Farmhouse” ever makes a comeback, because I can promise you, Chip and Joanna are going to mark up the hell out of those things when they sell them at Magnolia.

Also…there’s a reason why the room inside a back door is called a mudroom. It has mud.

The woman running that farmhouse… she is not wearing designer jeans tucked into her cowboy boots. She might be wearing the boots but they’ll be under the legs of the jeans she bought at Farm King. The other boot of choice is the rubber boot. Farms require a lot of shoveling because there’s bull shit on a farm, although perhaps not more than you’ll find in an article about home design trends. There’s a lot of chores to be done and often those chores get started and some are finished long before most Americans are out of bed.

The farmhouse kitchen defines its own decor. That vase with sprigs of cotton decorating the kitchen counter in the urban or modern or whatever farmhouse get-up is new this week, is replaced in the real farmhouse with medicine for the animals and the syringes to administer it. There are freshly gathered eggs on the counter and the towels are mismatched and sometimes have knitted edges and buttons so you can hang them on cabinet handles. You can get those at any church bizarre. And when you see the little old lady who makes them, you’re gonna want to pick up a dozen because she is so old, you worry she might not make it back next year. She’s adorable though. And she’s really sweet. And I’m positive she makes an incredible zucchini bread from the fresh zucchini she grew in her garden. Keep walking along her booth and there it is- the bread. She also made pumpkin and banana and she sells it for $2 a mini-loaf.

There’s pile of clothing in the corner of the kitchen that needs mending- buttons that have busted off, the crotch ripped out of a pair of jeans, a flannel with a notch of fiber missing because of the barbed-wire fence. The pile isn’t tucked away in a some swanky grass-woven basket from HomeGoods. It’s in the corner, sitting on a chair, that doesn’t match the other chairs and has some paint peeling off it.

One of my favorite farmhouses always had the smell of smoke- like a campfire. That’s because the living room had a wood-burning stove and everyone gathered around it in the evening to stay warm. Then when it was time for bed, everyone, including myself sometimes, went upstairs where it was freezing cold, bundled up and climbed into bed under a stack of homemade quilts. I loved that house. But I also really loved the people that lived there…not just their horses.

I never liked going to the basement or the cellar in any farmhouse because they’re icky. Our house in the country had neither a basement nor a cellar, which was a real disappointment when we had a very close encounter with a tornado. Basements back then weren’t finished for living- they were used for storage and there is nothing more impressive than shelves full of canned items from the garden. It’s really a beautiful sight to behold- so colorful-peaches, tomatoes, carrots, apples and even meat. My mom always canned green beans, wax beans, peas and pickled beets. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Well there it is. A very brief peek into the real farmhouse. Not Modern Farmhouse. Not Industrial Farmhouse. But Real Farmhouse. It’s not a new trend and Chip and Joanna certainly didn’t invent it. Can you imagine being one of those people that had their house designed by the one and only couple that redesigned every home in Waco, Texas to look alike? Now those poor homeowners will replace all their white accents with mixed metals and their wood furniture with stuff that gives them splinters and looks like an actual tree. The moral of the story is, just because Chip and Joanna call it a farmhouse, doesn’t mean it’s a farmhouse and trends and colors of the year are as worthless as hen shit on a pump handle. But that’s ok. Go ahead and buy the things you love. Buy them from Pier 1 or buy them from the Lutheran Ladies at the next church basement sale. Doesn’t matter what or where you buy, as long as you’re buying it because you love it and not because someone told you it was in style. Don’t be afraid to make your home yours. In the end, all that counts is that home is the place where you love to be the most, with the people you love the most.

And that, my friends, will never go out of style.

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