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Mammogram Day! Pick Up the Phone to Schedule Yours!

Yesterday I shared about switching veterinarians to avoid having to drive out of our own county to get shots for our dogs. Mammograms, though, still require a drive. We don’t have a mammography facility in our county.

The Squeeze

So once a year, I drive a half hour one county to our south and plop the girls on the cold machine to be pressed flat like hot paninis in an iron press at 90 and 45 degree angles – top to bottom and side to side -and imaged for a health inspection. And the drive isn’t bad. It’s not all that ironic that I drive across two large hills to get there, and one is so tall that no one on a cell phone can get over it without dropping the call. I park and enter the hospital, where I already have my driver’s license and insurance card in hand for the paperwork. I get my plastic ID bracelet and then go down to Radiation and Imaging, where I check in and change into a flowery cape that opens in the front.

When I’m changed, I step into the next room for the procedure. This is the reason I always switch to decaf coffee two weeks before coming, and the reason I take Evening Primrose – – to lessen the pain of the fibrocystic tissue that is aggravated by caffeine and eased by the primrose capsules.

I always leave wanting pancakes after this procedure, simply because that’s what comes to mind. I think that IHOP should e-hop on board and partner with preventive breast screening marketing by giving women a free pancake breakfast once a year after enduring the double-digit pounds of compression. Surely they could come up with a new pancake to help support breast cancer research. We could scan our hospital bracelets for the free pancakes and sit in silence, sopping them around in the syrup as we recover from the stress of it all, sipping decaf.

Have you had your mammogram this year? If not, it’s time to schedule it!

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Ollie’s Day Out

We’ve recently switched veterinarians to lessen the stress and half-day production of traveling over to the next county and waiting and waiting and waiting our turn. Where we live in rural Georgia, there isn’t much of anything. Our county has a public school, a private school, maybe a dozen churches, a small private airport, 10 or 15 restaurants, a couple of medical facilities, a courthouse, some small businesses along the square and some larger ones farther out, a regional library and a town library, a coffee shop and bookstore, several little free libraries, a small grocery store, a couple of hardware stores, and a handful of convenience stores with gas stations. Oh yeah – – and about a half dozen Dollar Generals. Five small town limits are nestled within the county, and we are spread out in larger land tracts with rolling hills, meadows, dirt roads, and crooked wooden fences.

We drive out of our county to buy clothes, shoes, office supplies, and groceries. And we love Amazon, even for aspirin and shampoo.

That’s why we switched veterinarians. It wasn’t because we suddenly didn’t like the former vet or had some kind of falling out with the other practice. It was because this office has a hometown staff and we see them out together in the county eating at our local barbecue restaurant for lunch sometimes. We wanted to lessen our drive and not have to take a half day off work just to get a heartworm injection.

Also, about six years ago, Dr. Kelly allowed me to bring an adventure book club who’d just finished reading Finding Gobi to his office to go behind the scenes and see what veterinarians do. His office started as a house, then became a restaurant, and now welcomes pets for their healthcare.

Which was Ollie’s outing yesterday. He needed his 6-month heartworm test and ProHeart injection. We walked in to the office and were greeted by Hunter the minute we entered the room: Hey, Ollie, we have you all checked in, buddy!

We walked past the fireplace and the burning candle and took a seat in the room where the large mixed breed dog was not wallowing on his back all over the floor, kicking his feet up in pure joy like he didn’t know what was coming.

And we waited a few minutes, listening to the thunder and rain, looking out the windows, and breathing. Where else could there possibly be a more relaxing veterinary office?

Ollie
Ollie gets momsick
when they take him back for shots 
(like a preschooler)

He started to go
all tail-waggy, excited
then turned in his tracks

We love our new vet
right in our own small hometown
We love low windows!
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A Strawberry Fig Visit

I picked the last of the figs yesterday, half at lunchtime when I was letting the dogs out and half after getting home from a day of work and a haircut. I was determined to make strawberry figs just like my mother always made at the end of each summer, when we’d put on aprons and each take a job of washing, chopping, and stirring in her kitchen.

Temperatures are finally out of the 90s, and the mornings are beginning their wee hour thermostat adjustment one little tap a week, it seems. When that happens, the figs that aren’t finished off by birds, butterflies, and squirrels – or picked before anything else gets them first – dry up like upside-down miniature deflated balloons hanging on the stems. I was able to reach enough remaining good figs for one last wave of canning for this season.

I found strawberries price-slashed on the clearance cart in our local grocery store and added a couple of two-pound boxes of cane sugar to my buggy.

My husband was off at a meeting, so it was only me and the strong presence of my mother in the kitchen washing, chopping, and stirring up strawberry fig memories together, steam rising and aromas swelling. And tears welling, as I think of all the things since December 29, 2015 that I want to tell her.

You have six great grandchildren now, Mom. Four boys and two girls. Aidan is an avid reader just like you, Sawyer loves science and nature, Saylor has ultra sass and is tougher than any of the boys, River loves to be barefooted in his backyard kayaking through the marsh and running with his three dogs, Beckham never likes wearing any clothes, and Magnolia Mae is only a month old and already a sweet little blossom rooted deep in southern culture, on her way to becoming another strong woman on your branch of the tree. Your three grandchildren are all on their feet, moving onward!

And my brother Ken is in love with his soul mate and she’s good for him, Dad needs you to tell him the answers (and how to let things go), and so do the rest of us. You’d love all three of our dogs that you never met. Your last words to dad – “You take care of these dogs” – assure me that you’d be proud to know that our Boo Radley, Fitz (short for F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Ollie (named for Mary Oliver) basically run the house so much that we call them our four-legged sons.

Thank you for teaching me the ways of your kitchen and giving me a love of strawberry figs that not everyone knows how to appreciate. As the autumn nears and passes and winter arrives, the warmth of toast laden with butter and slathered with strawberry figs will keep you here with me.

And I still need you, Mom.

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Patriot Day Poetry

I was riding along Route 66 through Texas on vacation in June when the text came from my friend Melanie, who teaches in our Humanities pathway in our Ninth Grade Academy:

Actual text. I accidentally hit SEND too soon and had to finish in an unplanned bubble.

Those are the kinds of texts I love the most – when teachers invite me into classrooms to write alongside students. I met with Melanie when I returned, and we designed a plan. Our day was originally scheduled for yesterday, but we had to reschedule for today. We will write 9/11 Jenga block poems, and I will model a Nonet form to show how a poet might use visual shape to symbolize rebuilding and strengthening when all hope seemed lost.

A nonet is a poem with nine lines, containing each numbered line’s number of syllables on its line. It can be written in ascending or descending order – or both, and could even be read bottom to top if a poet decided to write it that way.

I got the idea for this form from Paul Hankins, who glues colorful letters of all different fonts onto different shapes of wooden blocks. He calls it Blockhead poetry when his students take the letters and arrange them into words, then put the words into poems.

I took the quicker way out and began purchasing sets of Jenga blocks and using whole words from magazines to put onto the blocks, and I’ve created sets on various themes such as Bloom! (gardening and growth words for National Poetry Month), poverty and genocide (two of our Humanities themes), and rural Georgia living, with words like pickup truck and dirt road. For today, I’ve created a set of 200 blocks to be used for 9/11 poetry. I’ve used them in all grades from Pre-K through 12, and with adults. Sometimes, we let a group of words inspire poems that take different forms. Sometimes, the words stand alone on lines as poems of their own. One time, we challenged ourselves to write Haiku with blocks alone and no added words.

I drafted a poem yesterday to show how students might select blocks as inspiration words. Here is my draft:

I spoke with Melanie yesterday. She was concerned that she hadn’t spent enough time building background knowledge on 9/11 to prepare for this writing but didn’t want to leave the task in the hands of a sub for such a sensitive topic. I think she made the right choice. I’m thinking that this may even have been a better approach – – because students will have seen the remembrance tributes yesterday and engaged in conversations with others. Perhaps in our initial disappointment that we’d had to reschedule the writing day, this blessing of time may have allowed students to gain greater awareness of the events in ways that laid a more meaningful foundation for us to begin.

I can’t wait to see what the students write, but more importantly, I can’t wait to write alongside them and watch their wheels turn as they make their block word choices. There’s something magical about writing, even in the midst of a topic of despair and pain.

That’s when the hope shines through.

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A Day of Canning

My sister-in-law canning blueberries in a water bath

Sunday morning began early. Like 5 a.m. early.

Two kitchens on the Johnson Funny Farm were tackling a mission to prepare two foods each and swap some goods, like an old-fashioned cookie swap – – only different. We started with fruits ~ vegetables will come later.

Bethany’s blueberries

My sister-in-law and I both canned cinnamon spiced apples and she canned apple butter using apples we’d purchased at Jaemor Farms in Alto, Georgia on her birthday outing on Saturday after our stroll through Gibbs Gardens. She also canned blueberries. I canned peach marmalade using peaches also purchased at Jaemor Farms and also canned fig marmalade. I would have ordinarily used peaches from Gregg Farms, our local orchard two miles from our home, but over 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop was lost this year due to weather, and Gregg’s lost every one of their peaches.

The figs, though, were grown forty feet from our house on a tree I planted in 2009, purchased for $3.00 on a clearance rack at Home Depot. We have loved on this tree for a decade and a half. Some years we’ve made fig preserves, but other years we’ve let the black swallowtails and monarchs feast on the fermenting figs without the threat of our picking. One year, a good friend came to pick some for a prized fig cake she was baking from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and she brought us one of her cakes as well. The memories of figs are alive and well from this tree and from the trees of my mother and grandmothers as we made strawberry figs together with my children for so many years.

And Jesus himself liked figs. (21st Chapter of Matthew)

Citrus puree for preservation of marmalade

So our day of canning started with peeling, slicing, chopping, blending, and dicing that led to boiling, stirring, simmering, scooping, sealing, cooling, and labeling.

We made a jar run to purchase some jars with sealing lids and rings, pectin, and other ingredients.
My sister-in-law Bethany’s apple butter

My peach marmalade
Fig marmalade


Canning was a great way to relax and fill our homes with the aromas of the love language of cooking, but I’m still trying my best to make the math work. I remained in the black on the figs I grew if I didn’t factor in the cost of the jars and lids (repeated jar uses would lessen that cost each time). With the cost of the peaches, I went into the red compared to what was on the shelf at Jaemor, already canned. Ounce for ounce, I paid more to do the canning – and I didn’t count the time or the electricity, or the extra air conditioning in the already hot kitchen. I would need to grow my own peaches or buy the bruised or overripe fruits and can them that day to make the cost analysis work compared to what I could buy already in jars canned by a professional who is far more skilled than I am. But I realize it is all about the fun and the preservation of foods for those winter storms when we need to hunker down and stay home by the fire and recall the warmth of summer fruits and memories in the kitchen to soothe our souls.

(I still think free-range chickens are the best investment for self-sustaining farm, if we could keep the hawks away).

If you have an amazing recipe for canning – or tips to keep it more affordable – please share in the comments below. I’d love some great instant pot and crock pot canning recipes. I don’t think I’m a good candidate for a pressure cooker. I might really do some damage with that.

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Celebrating a Birthday at Gibbs Gardens and Jaemor Farms

Yesterday was my sister-in-law’s birthday, so we loaded up the family and drive to Ball Ground, Georgia for a lovely day at Gibbs Gardens. The fall festivals all over North Georgia are just beginning in their early season, so we saw splendid late summer blooms as we strolled through the grounds and admired the first peeks of pumpkins along the roads.

We even saw a water snake enjoying a nap on the grassy bank of the creek that runs through the gardens!

After lunch, we headed to Jaemor Farms for some apples and peaches. Today, we will be making apple butter, spiced apples, and peach marmalade, so we drove to the best place in Georgia to get those fresh ingredients! Seeing the pumpkins lined up and ready to decorate front porches and front yards spiked my pumpkin spice fever for the cooler weather.

Tune in tomorrow for the Kitchen Canning Episodes of the women of the Johnson Funny Farm in rural Georgia. We can’t wait to make a mess in our kitchens today! We’ll be jockeying back and forth from her farmhouse to mine as apple butter simmers in one and peach marmalade sweetens the air in the other.

But the most preserves we’ll make are the memories.

Here is the bloom calendar for the year from Gibbs Gardens. You can also see the bloom report on their website.

I’m closing today with a few pictures from our stroll through the gardens – – including an uphill walk to see the Manor House. Our moutainous climb to see this beautiful home and see the view from the top reminded us that we should have brought ibuprofen for the sore muscles and aches after such a lofty achievement.

The Manor House at Gibbs Gardens
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Making Fig Marmalade

I recently asked Dad to text me some of the recipes for foods I remember making with my mother when I was younger. He sent me several snapshots of recipes, and even a photo of a lock of my childhood hair that my mother had tucked away in the recipe box in a blue envelope.

After work on Thursday, I swung by our local grocery store on the way home from work to pick up some jars for canning. I’ve been meaning to make some fig preserves before the figs are all dried up. Right now, the blue swallowtails are feasting on the fermented figs like it’s some kind of heavenly all-you-can-eat buffet, and I needed to pick the last of the fig harvest for this year for some recipes. I settled on Fig Marmalade.

I picked the figs from my towering fig tree that I purchased for $3.00 from a scratch-and-dent clearance cart on the side of the plant section in Home Depot over a decade ago.

I sterilized some jelly jars and lids by boiling them while I chopped the figs, simmered the lemons, grated the orange rind, and squeezed the juice.

For this recipe, I used pure cane sugar instead of regular granulated sugar. I boiled it, then simmered on low for about an hour and a half until it got thick (the recipe says 30 minutes, but I wanted mine thicker). Then, I scooped it into canning jars with seals on the lids and labeled the tops.

Since we usually have breakfast for supper a couple of times a week, we consume a lot of jelly with our toast. I’ve also used it to put on brie with crackers. I used one of my mother’s old measuring cups that we’d used together as I made the marmalade (it has a chip in one place that feels a lot like an age wrinkle), so it has her hand in it, too. This will surely bring back all the memories and feels of my childhood fig marmalade.

Toast, anyone?

Jars of fig marmalade – September 2023
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Our Great Horned Owl Visits

Last night was another fabulous night observing one of our resident Great Horned Owls on the Johnson Funny Farm here in rural middle Georgia. Usually the pair arrives together, but last night it was one lone owl putting on a show. I have been slipping out to the front porch around 7:45 each evening, armed with my camera, binoculars, and eBird app on my phone. I sit on one of the loveseats on the porch, as still and quiet as I can be. The owls fly in from the west side of the farm and hang out right at the top of the driveway in the clearing. They swoop from ground to tree, then down from tree to ground, looking for prey.

This morning, I’m sharing these photos I took last night. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Be sure to zoom in on the one with the flag – the yellow eyes are mesmerizing!

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At the Reservoir

at the reservoir
where they'd pulled her lifeless son
from the cold water

where searchers combed woods
and ate 21 pizzas
from noon to midnight

she'd had a request:
Please. No questions. We need peace,
non-tearfully asked

He was autistic,
she whispered to the reporters.
He thought he could swim. 

Where were you? they asked. 
Please. No questions. We need peace.
Something was missing:

That wail that escapes
from the dark depths of a soul
from one who'd held hope.
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Give Me Prairie Dogs

I didn't want to leave our hotel - 
prairie dogs were entertaining
me to no end, their antics
suspicious, unaware
of our eyes on them
skittering, then
standing still,
taking
ground

How
could a
famous row
of graffiti'ed
buried Cadillacs
come close to competing
with Amarillo Sunrise
prairie dogs in their merriment
of this Tru hotel fenced-in playground?