Birthday Reflections, Valentine’s Day Style. My mother likes to reflect that I was born on Valentine’s Day during an historic ice storm. She doesn’t remember a whole lot about the biggest event in my life, since the local doctor put women to sleep to deliver babies back then. My father drove 22 miles over slippery roads to deposit my sister at his parent’s and by the time he got back, slipping and sliding all the way, I was already in the world. That was about 39 years ago.
Cut to 2015, and Facebook, where we receive our first cheerful salutations. One of the first I read, at 6:30AM, “Shouldn’t you be sleeping in and having breakfast in bed?” And I thought, to have the meal I would like to eat served in bed, I will have to get up and make that myself. (I’m a little particular, and now more so, having given up modern wheat. Ask me about ancient wheat.)
Of course, I was already up, so that’s what I did! Organic farm eggs scrambled with my favorite, delicate little mushroom caps, with a half of one of my fresh-picked Serrano peppers, two slices of bacon, free of nitrates, nitrites, hormones, antibiotics, not fed GMO corn, and not grown in a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation), and one monstrous *ancient wheat drop biscuit laden with raw butter and homemade, wild-picked chokecherry jelly. (Click here for my biscuit recipe.)
The best thing about birthday presents, as my online, jelly-making, garden pal, Bob, said, is a surprise gift, something you are not expecting. After I hastened through the five half pint jars he had sent in the fall (aren’t garden friends some of the most generous and sharing people??), he had said that was all there would be till August, so a few days ago I received a surprise birthday present of this memorable jelly.
And I got the best flowers, albeit indirectly, when online garden friend and garden writer Renea Winchester offered to send daffodil bulbs from Georgia (I always called them Buttercups in Tennessee), as she was clearing some beds. I jumped at the chance of having my favorite flowers from home growing in my Los Angeles garden, so I received those yesterday and promptly potted them up. In this 80° heat wave we are experiencing, I couldn’t risk putting them in the ground in the sun, not with the promise of flowers so apparent.
I have a long list of things to accomplish today, so let me wish each of you a Happy Valentine’s Day and get to it. If this is also your birthday, please let me know! Thanks so much for reading, and if you enjoy receiving blog posts from Late Bloomer, please subscribe and share with a friend. Let’s get the whole world in on the small-scale farming movement (even if you only have a balcony to grow on), and take back control over our food. – Kaye
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Renea Winchester is an award-winning author of “In The Garden With Billy: Lessons about Life, Love & Tomatoes” and other heartwarming books.
