Catching Happiness » The Enchanted Earth

the winners’ circle

Aug 172010

We have winners!

A random number generator selected comments numbers 44 and 28. That means congratulations are in order for Donna & Raul.

I will contact you both soon via e-mail to request your snail-mail addresses.

Once again, thank you all for visiting and commenting on my blogaversary post. The celebration was just beautiful, and so encouraging and joyful for me. Who could ever deserve such an outpouring of support and such wonderful blog-friends? It’s humbling — and wonderful.

Beautyberry bush, one of the winners in the wildlife garden, for sure.

Even though I could not give you each a packet of my custom stationery, I believe you are all deserving of a gift from me — for your support and friendship, for your kind comments and suggestions, and for just being you. The best I could do is right over there in the sidebar. Clicking the square marked “Soul Food” will take you there, with my sincere appreciation.

And now, while we’re discussing winnings and gifts, I will officially accept The Beautiful Blogger Award, given to me way back in late spring by the lovely Kathy Johnson over at Catching Happiness. I’m so touched by this award — especially because of what Kathy said when she presented it.

You’re too kind, Kathy.

(But I loved every word!)

The rules for acceptance of this award are twofold. First, I need to tell you 10 random facts you probably don’t already know about moi.

Hmmm… this gets harder the longer I blog. Still, here goes:

1. I have a Magic 8 ball in my house, and I sometimes consult it, for fun. F. wanted to cut it open to see what was inside, but settled for finding the detailed report of the guy who already did that, and posted it all on the internet.

2. My cats’ full proper names are Leo Chapo and Bootemius Flip-Flip Wickham-Watson. (No joke.)

3. I make an incredible carrot cake, from a recipe passed on to me years ago by my first boss out of college, who just happened to be a sweet, gracious hostess and a magnificent Southern cook in addition to her considerable professional credentials. The final result is three layers high and requires a double batch of buttercream icing with walnuts. Even people who are “meh” about carrot cake fall into raptures at first bite.

4. I wrote my first story at age 6. (It was a tragedy.) I announced to the world at large that I planned to be a writer when I was 9. My magnum opus at that point was an 11-page ghost story which got points taken off for being too long, violating the parameters of the assignment, being turned in late, sprawling into the margins, and not having an ending yet.

Not much changes, I guess.

5. The way the gardening gene turned on at age 18: I fell in love with roses, and promptly wiped out my pitiful college-student savings account purchasing 40 (yes, you read that right) hybrid tea, antique, and David Austen English roses which I planted in my parents’ yard in the course of one spring weekend. Obsession is probably the word you’re looking for here.

(For fellow rosarians, the Austen roses are still going strong, almost two decades later, with minimal intervention by my parents.)

6. I speak two languages.

In fact, a few years ago, I would have confidently told you I’d achieved near-native fluency in French. Opportunities to speak French are rather thin on the ground here, however, so I was thinking I’d have to seriously downgrade my skill designation pretty soon. But then I ran into a Haitian family at my optometrist’s office, desperate to be understood, and after interpreting for them and the receptionist and the doctor, felt like I might not have lost my chops yet.

Shortly thereafter, I ran into a bewildered Frenchman at a gas station in metro Atlanta. After I’d cleared up the confusion at the pump, we chatted a bit, and he and his girlfriend expressed shock that I was not, in fact, French. I was relieved. Now that I am attempting to learn F.’s native language, I am in awe of the capacity for memorization and mimicry that I had in my teens and early 20s, and the possibility of true fluency in a third language appears more and more like a mirage.

7. I daydream of learning to sew. Oh, and learning to knit so that I can make socks. Even though I don’t really like wearing socks. Somehow I’m convinced that if I, myself, make them out of super soft baby alpaca yarn, I will change my mind. Also, it would be really cool to make nice socks for loved ones who do appreciate nice socks, like F., and my sister, and my mom.

8. I spent a weekend homeless in Paris at age 16. It was amazing and scary and awesome and brutal and hilarious, and if I ever write a memoir, that experience will be in there.

9. Part of me is convinced that nowhere on Earth is as beautiful as North Georgia. But I’m also intensely curious about the Pacific Northwest and would like to experience more of this region where I was born and lived the first two months of my life. And I also want to one day return to the Louisiana Bayou and to the American Southwest, two places where the land had an incredible mystical pull for me. Québec (in summer) and the French countryside were pretty awesome, too. [Note: Québec in winter made me want to curl up into a little ball and die.]

Maybe I just have the capacity to love lots of places — as long as the temperatures there are not 40 below zero with your breath freezing an ice patch on the scarf that covers half your face. That’s just asking too much of a Southern girl.

10. I have a real soft spot for a particular weed: Queen Anne’s Lace, or Daucus carota, wild carrot.

It’s a nostalgia thing. We go way back.

And now I get to pass this award on to four blogs whose authors I consider beautiful. Honestly, this part of the process is very difficult for me because I consider so many bloggers to be beautiful souls, and I am continually amazed by the creativity and beauty that I find in the blog-o-sphere.

Nonetheless, these four stand out for me as superb examples of beauty, inspiration, and wonder. Their authors are generous souls who have created places of peace, love, and joy that I look forward to visiting every time.

Mesmerising Moments: because the world is full of wonder

Necessary Room: Enter with a happy heart…

Unfolding Your Path to Joy: optimistic inspirational resources for a joy-filled life

Vie Boheme: Art and Photography from the Gaia Path

You will not regret a visit to any of these gems of the internet. Each one is definitely a winner in my book.

Thanks for hanging out in the winners’ circle today.

Namasté, y’all.

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rainy day sunshine & ten tidbits

Awards 34 Responses »

Apr 252010

The rain is coming down gangbusters, as my Dad would say, and a really interesting award-acceptance post over at my friend Heidi’s blog has inspired me to get off my butt and finally accept some of my own. I would have done so earlier, honest, except that I’m a real first-class procrastinator whenever I feel the slightest emotional turbulence, and although I was honored to be granted these accolades by my fellow bloggers, I’m frankly a little embarrassed, too.

First, a big thank you to Kathy of Catching Happiness, who presented The Enchanted Earth with the Sunshine Award almost a month ago now. This award is bestowed by recipients upon three blogs that the author finds to be both creative and positive, and I am pleased to be able to pass it along to the following blogs which definitely qualify:

Then Clare over at the wonderful Curbstone Valley Farm blog presented me with the Honest Scrap Award. This award seems to be primarily a networking and community-building tool, a way for me to link you to some of my favorite blogs, and also a chance to tell you ten honest scraps of information about me that you wouldn’t otherwise know from the contents of this blog and our interactions here.

I tried to do the latter in list form, as I’ve always seen it done in conjunction with this award, but felt the resulting post was too disjointed for my taste. So instead I’m doing it my way, and you get a short essay that holds at least ten tidbits about me and my past.

Here goes:

When I was a child, my worldview was influenced by regular contact with the extreme edges of my society’s socio-economic spectrum. My maternal grandparents were very poor and lived in a falling-down, century-old farmhouse on the remnants of what had been a working farm for most of their lives, and my paternal grandmother lived in a three-story home with all the trappings of wealth and education and privilege in one of the poshest areas of Atlanta, very near the Governor’s mansion.

A visit to the one might entail hoeing the corn rows, picking blackberries down by the creek, making bouquets of Queen Anne’s Lace, and fishing for your dinner while keeping an eye out for copperheads that lived in the pine needles on the edge of the reservoir — plus learning to skin, gut, and fillet the catch afterward. If it was an overnight visit, I often woke up to the horror of an early-morning visit to a freezing toilet (Granddaddy refused to pay for the newfangled electricity to heat it), followed by the sheer delight of a plateful of my grandmother’s delicious homemade waffles. While there, we were allowed a level of freedom almost unheard of in the suburbs at the time: hours and hours of uninterrupted wanderings on the land and in the forest.

Dinner was a lively affair, served family style, with huge helpings of every soul-food one could imagine: cornbread, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, Vidalia onion casserole, pulled pork smoked in the deep barbecue pit, and sometimes my favorite peach cobbler. In the summer, everyone trooped out to the porch to sit in the breeze as night came on, and often I went with Granddaddy out to the lower field to select the perfect ripe watermelon (or two) for dessert. He’d split it open with a machete that sat out on the porch for just this purpose, and I’d sprinkle my piece with salt from the tin saltshaker that also stayed in a cubbyhole on the porch for precisely those moments.

My cousins and I would then engage in seed-spitting contests, followed by chasing the first lightning bugs to appear in the twilight. When I got tired, I’d sit on the steps, and my father would help me to locate the constellations or spot Venus twinkling on the horizon.

On the other hand, a visit to my father’s own childhood home began with feeling intimidated by the huge entryway, where a magnificent old chandelier dangled over the long staircase. My grandmother’s house felt a bit like a museum, decorated in the French Provincial style and stuffed to the gills with antiques and art, and even an indoor forest scene complete with live plants, faux streambed, and a bird of prey, a fine and slightly mesmerizing example of the taxidermist’s art. Other decor included prominent display of the family’s coat of arms (with three red roses), naked statuary seemingly designed to elicit naughty giggles from the grandchildren, and an enormous mural of a wisteria; vaguely sinister, this painting by Grandmother, herself, took over all of one wall and was determinedly sending a small advance party of twining tendrils on to tackle the next.

My favorite places at Grandmother’s house were the library (still amazing although it had suffered a fire and lost many precious volumes in the ’60s), her terraced formal garden out back, so vertical it had thyme-draped stairways instead of paths, and the massive old hammock strung between two sycamores, where anywhere from two to four cousins could easily fit and while away the afternoon chit-chatting or staring up at the blue sky in gently-swinging silence.

Children weren’t often allowed in the dining room for dinner, but when we were it was a true test of one’s skill at manners. The family motto is “Manners maketh men,” and it was taken to heart, and in the most formal sense. These manners were more than just the standard Southern injunctions to say “please” and “thank you” and address elders as “Ma’am” and “Sir.” I’m talking about things like when a female stands, all the males in the room must follow suit. I was, naturally, delighted with the opportunity to make my male cousins spring up like jack-in-the-boxes and used my special womanly power as much as I dared.

And that’s all the honest truth, or at least as close as fickle memory can be said to come to the truth, anyway.

Now let’s spread some link love! These are the seven blogs I nominate for the Honest Scrap award in turn. Please do take a moment to visit some of these excellent blogs, by authors whose posts I regularly read and enjoy, and about whom I’d love to learn ten “honest scraps” of their lives.

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