Tag: Savoring Saturdays

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Savoring Saturday

I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for several reasons.

An Indigo Bunting performs acrobatic moves in a tree
  • I’m cooking dinner for a friend who is now cancer-free after radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, and I’ll get to see her today for the first time since early June.
  • I’ll finally finish a quilt for my new granddaughter and get to see the true “rag quilt” look of the final product.
  • I’ll get to read from the next book in Sarah Donovan’s book club, even though the hammock is out of the question on what is supposed to be the hottest weekend of the summer here.
  • The weeds that are completely out of control will get handled by someone else.
  • There’ll be some time for birding before it gets hot outside, when the birds are most active.
  • There’ll be some time for writing chapters in two books I’m working on with my writing group.
  • Some pressure washing might happen.

And the other thing that might happen is a trip to an underground bookstore where they sell these candles that use the scents of things in the books they’re named after, like Alice in Wonderland with the unbirthday cake fragrance, and Anne of Green Gables with some lemon and jasmine. A co-worker told me about this place, maybe an hour from here, where she started Christmas shopping last weekend because of all the unique gifts she’d found when her husband took her there as part of her birthday celebration.

For now, I’m settled into my writing chair, enjoying the early morning silence of the house. I’ve taken the boys out for their morning relief romp, and they all came back in and settled back to sleep right away. I can hear a Carolina Wren singing at the top of its lungs through the kitchen window, and the faintest light looks like pinholes through the tree leaves against the eastern side of the Johnson Funny Farm.

Five minutes from now, at a quarter to seven, I’ll be outdoors with a steaming cup of coffee, starting a bird count to mark the species I hear and see.

And I won’t be rushed to get showered and dressed today. I’ll savor my coffee and my own private bird concert on the front porch way out here in our remote corner under the Loblolly pines of rural Georgia and give a thousand thanks for the blessings of another sunrise to enjoy the spectacular splendor of the woods.

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Savoring Saturdays

Saturdays in 2023 are still savory. We begin the day with coffee and a bite to eat somewhere before spending the day together. We are blessed that our jobs allow us to have some common weekend time to get out and enjoy life, and we don’t take that for granted!

Smitty’s in Woodbury, Georgia was our choice on Saturday. Our friend Bob Oxford owns this restaurant, and his brother Mike helps out on weekends. Their mother, “Miss Jewel” Oxford, was the oldest living member of Concord Baptist Church, where we attended years ago. Her fried pies were delicious, and Bob still makes those pies from time to time, taught by the best! When I served on a pastor search committee with Bob, he’d bring those pies to the meetings, and they went lickety-split!

I enjoy rereading some of my rural life go-to books occasionally as we wait on our breakfast to arrive. Yesterday’s choice was Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge by Gladys Taber and Barbara Webster. Their exchange of letters from the 1950s between their homes in Pennsylvania and Connecticut describes country living at its finest. I like to feel part of that, particularly when my biscuit is made from scratch that very morning, and with each bite I think of the simple joys of rural life not afforded in big cities.

We also made a rare discovery: Georgia peaches! Most of Georgia’s peach crop was lost this year, so coming by Georgia peaches has been close to impossible – – until yesterday! We stopped at a produce stand in Woodbury and found them. I bought two large baskets to slice and eat with our yogurt this coming week. It’s breakfast today, before tuning in to You Tube to hear Dad preach at St. Simons Island First Baptist Church. Our son and his family, home waiting on Baby #5 to make her appearance, will be watching, too!

Our time yesterday was spent driving and birdwatching. My husband is a former deputy in the county where we live, and as a current elected official, he also enjoys time to get out and ride the roads to check conditions and washouts on the dirt roads. We both love this quiet time for different reasons, but it works all the same. He reminisces about the experiences he’s had here throughout his life, and I watch and listen for birds.

Way back in the day, Flat Shoals was filled with hundreds of people on weekends (“mostly drunk,” my husband added, thinking back on the times he had to respond to calls out in this area). It was a popular place to bring a cooler and an inner tube or raft and find a spot in the rock shallows on the shoals to stay cool all weekend. Today, you might see a few fishermen angling to stock their freezers for the next fish fry.

We were there for the birds.

I logged seven new species in the county yesterday along the waterways here at Flat Shoals. Through birdwatching and long Saturday drives followed by coffee together in the morning, I find that I get through the stress of the work week better when I know I have the weekends just around the next corner.

While others are packing our local air-conditioned movie theater to see Barbie, we have a front-row seat to the birds!

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Slice of Life Challenge – March 26- Savoring Saturdays

In January, members of my family and I became intentional about savoring Saturdays with coffee and things we enjoy. We’ve developed a whole new affinity for coffee shop culture – the aromas, all the coffee blend options, the food offerings, the buzz of conversation, the lingering togetherness and our own coversations percolating on the day’s possibilities.

I’ve recently downloaded the Roadtrippers app and saw right away that it was worth the upgrade from the free version to Roadtrippers Plus. Now I can locate coffee shops on the road trips we plan and add them as waypoints to our destination for any of the day trips we plan. So when we set out for St. Simons Island, Georgia on a recent weekend, I filtered the app to show me all the coffee shops along our chosen route.

Queen Bee Coffee in Forsyth, Georgia off I-75 seemed like just what we would enjoy. It was right on our way, and it opened about the time we’d be at its place on the map. We parallel parked on the street and went inside. The sign on the steps assured us we were in the right place. We chuckled, veering a hard left.

Inside, we chose a couch with a coffee table. We sunk into the comfort of both cup and couch and noticed the place – the way it appealed to all five senses and awakened us to this new place!

Yesterday, we spent the day in Winder, Georgia and had coffee at La Gabrielle, a little cafe with a European vibe. I fell in love with the light fixtures! My husband said they reminded him of the television show Bewitched.

I checked my Roadside America app to see if there was anything of significance nearby, and found that either the shortest or the second shortest road in the United States (shortest in Georgia for sure) with a traffic light was a mile and a half from our coffee shop. So we checked it out. It’s basically a named street in the middle of other streets, and one and a half cars can fit on it at once. John Bowen Way.

Been there, done that.

And that’s the way we love spending Saturdays – whether we are on the road, at a campsite, at home, or out of town on business, we enjoy coffee to start the day and something to pique our interest afterward. Even if it’s a short little road right in the middle of everywhere.

Savoring Saturdays has quickly become a self-care habit, woven into the tapestry of our weekends.

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Slice of Life Challenge – March 25 – Savoring Saturdays in Pine Mountain, Georgia at F.D. Roosevelt State Park

We savored last Saturday, March 18, in Pine Mountain, Georgia on F. D. Roosevelt State Park Campground. Here’s a slice of our day, in pictures.

There’s something amazing about this door. It feels like a time warp. I think it weighs 500 pounds.
Rock buildings in the mountains on a cold morning give me a feeling of belonging.
Here we are!
We were looking for a coffee shop and found history.
Simply a delicious breakfast. The muscadine muffin was off the chain.
The windows overlooked the valley below. Gorgeous spot to start the day.
We took the boys on a short walk down the trail.
They enjoyed all the new smells and looking over ledges.
y’all.
Boo Radley found a slice of sunshine after his long walk.
Ollie sunk down into the comfort of the bed for a nap. We love camping!
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Slice of Life Challenge – March 3 – The Art of Charcuterie

I started savoring Saturdays in January, making sure that weekends offer something relaxing and fun – coffee, books, short day trips, reading, writing, and creating. So when my husband and I were having coffee in Senoia, Georgia (filming location of The Walking Dead) and I walked by a charcuterie board artist hard at work on a catered board, a post came rushing back to mind. Earlier in the week, I’d seen this:

This is a story idea, I thought. I ambled over and asked the food artist a few questions – namely if she could give me some pointers about creating a charcuterie board and whether I could make some photos of her work.

The first charcuterie board I’d ever actually eaten had been a disposable one from an outdoor camping and survival store in downtown Blue Ridge, Georgia when my husband and I were staying at the top of a mountain that took a 4-wheel drive to navigate. It was too much effort to go back out for dinner, so we took home a simple board, pre-made, with some cheeses, meats, and crackers on it. Nothing fancy like chocolate, nothing colorful or fresh and sweet like fruit, nothing exciting like nuts and pickles. We were not impressed. But it had been good for binge-watching Virgin River and not starving at cloud-level elevation.

Charcuterie board artist at work in Senoia, Georgia

This particular food designer, though, showed me the art of charcuterie creation with her XO and heart cookie cutters that she was using for the cheeses, and offered me a rule of thumb or two:

“Use three meats and three cheeses – play with combinations of food, and be creative with savory and sweet foods ranging from pickles and olives to chocolates. Your board should offer a hard cheese and a soft cheese. Use cutouts on the soft cheese and pipe in some preserves. Be festive with the cookie cutters and food colors to customize your board for the occasion.”

I decided to create a board for the Super Bowl, so I found a tray and shopped for the foods. What I discovered is that you can make these boards in under an hour, and they can be as healthy or as unhealthy as you want to make them. I shopped at a Dollar General that has a fresh food section, and the cost was about $40-45 – the price of what it costs for the two of us to go out for a nice meal.

I rolled ham and cheese and secured the bites with toothpicks.

I put on an apron to try to look the part and began chopping meats and dicing cheese and arranging the foods on the tray in designated areas. I started feeling a little bit like a food artist myself!

I arranged fruits next to meats and cheeses and kept the pickles, olives, and chocolates in their own containers on the tray. Soon, my board had a look of completeness to it, and while I’m no good at making little roses out of hard salami slices like the expert, I’m confident enough to create a charcuterie board for the next social gathering where I have to sign up to bring food.

My finished charcuterie board

So I realized that the daily 1,000 story walk is true! I’d walked past a story idea, stopped to ask questions, and learned something new!

Ta-daaaaa!

Humbleswede inspired my post today when he shared First,  if I know I’m in need of an idea, I spend the day with my antennae up.  Thanks, my fellow writers, for all the sparks of ideas!

Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers
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Savoring Saturdays – 1828 Coffee Company Breakfast and Hanging Out at Home

Boo Radley, napping on the back of my chair

Since January, we’ve made an intentional plan to savor our Saturdays by starting with coffee and dialing back the pace of life. Boo Radley and his brothers helped us do that today. All three dogs were in different chairs, in different sleeping positions, strewn across the furniture like cozy throw blankets on this cloudy, cold afternoon – inspiring us to kick back and take it easy.

We started the day at 1828 Coffee Company with a cinnamon roll, a slice of breakfast casserole, cheese grits, lemon biscotti, coffee, and lavender latte. What a feast! What a treasure! The gifts of time, togetherness, and relaxation without pressing deadlines are on my list of gratitudes for today.

And life is far too short not to be counting.

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Savoring Saturdays: 1828 Coffee Company on the Zebulon Square

Think of the world which you carry within yourself…pay attention to what arises within you.  – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

We recently spent another Saturday savoring the morning hours with coffee and conversation in Zebulon, Georgia on our town square. We love the atmosphere of our small town coffee shop, restored from a historic building to the place we love and enjoy today by Dr. Dan Dunnahoo. You can read his story here. Dunnahoo, a retired Pike County art teacher known affectionately as “Dr. Dan” by locals, named the coffee shop 1828 Coffee Company because it was built in 1828 by Samuel Mitchell and still has the same wood floors that creaked under folks’ boots all those years ago, every plank restored and returned to its original position in the floor.

You can step back in time and order a cup of Zebulon Pike or any of their unique blends of coffee or tea and a cinnamon roll, then sit back and wonder about the history of this place and your own indelible time stamp on it, the dust of your own shoes settling somewhere beneath your feet between a crevice in the wood on the very dust brought in by those who used it as a trading post when it was first built. You can also wonder about those who later became proud first-ever owners of automobiles within its walls when it was a car dealership, and all the romance that bloomed here when it was an ice cream shop and young men brought their sweethearts here to share a date night treat – many of whom no doubt brought their own children back years later when it was a restaurant or an office.

Today, you can find a book in one of three Little Free Libraries here in this coffee house, hear live entertainment, or listen to students reciting poetry or performing a dramatic reading. Dr. Dan and his son-in-law Bryan open their doors to welcome a variety of events that shape the culture of this small town.

Next time you’re traveling through Zebulon, Georgia, be sure to stop in and say hello. Order coffee upstairs, admire the art, and then stroll downstairs where you can play a board game or sit outdoors on the brick patio and enjoy the sights of the town. If you happen to see a middle-aged woman huddled in a corner savoring coffee, reading, or writing, come introduce yourself – – it may be me!