Christmas Week at Camp: July 2024
26 July 2024 | 3:41 pm

In future years, when I wonder why I wasn't writing as much, let me remember that I was doing a lot of baking, from yesterday's lemon blueberry tea cake




to today's Christmas cookies for camp counselors:


I made a lot of cookies, which means lots of rolling out, lots of decorating.  It was both fun and exhausting.



It's Christmas week at camp, and it's one of our weeks to deliver camper mail.  This week, we have a lot more mail, so it's another task that is fun while we're doing it, but it leaves me worn out at the end of the day (and at the end of this week).


But I'm happy to be able to be of use in this way.  When we moved here, I hoped I would have these kinds of opportunities.


Rainy Day Baking
25 July 2024 | 1:20 pm

It is a rainy Thursday here in the mountains, and I'm not complaining.  I've always said that if it's going to be extremely humid, I'd rather the humidity fall out of the air as rain than stay in the air and make life miserable.

The rain makes me want to bake, and I might.  After all, I need to deliver a batch of Christmas cookies for counselors tomorrow.  But I'm really wanting to bake a batch of lemon yogurt muffins.  Since I no longer have a muffin pan, I might make it in a loaf pan.  And since I have blueberries, I might add those too.

In two weeks, I report for the pre-Fall semester meetings at Spartanburg Methodist College, so part of me thinks, let me bake while I have time, while it's rainy, while I have the ingredients.  Any time I'm commuting to work, and it's raining, I find myself yearning to be at home baking and drinking hot tea.

Insert a baking interlude here.

I took my own  advice and now there is a lemon blueberry loaf in the oven.  Lovely!

As always, part of my brain says that I should be out walking.  If I don't get my walk in the morning, I'm much less likely to go.  But another part of my brain knows that starting in 2 weeks, I will have so  few mornings like this one.   I will put more water on to boil for more tea, while I wait for the lemon blueberry loaf to be done.

Seasons Colliding
24 July 2024 | 11:31 am

It's been one of those strange weeks where all the seasons collide.  I went to a farmers' market on Saturday and returned with summer seasonal treats: peaches, tomatoes, and corn on the cob from the Mills River farm.  They all turned out to be winners.  Monday I made a peach cobbler (actually more like a pie really, lattice crust and all).

Yesterday I saw candy corn and autumn mix in the stores for the first time--I bought those because I felt such a surge of longing.  Fall is surely on the way, and I see a yellow or red leaf here and there.  I'm trying to stay present in this summer season.

This week has been rainy, an interseason of sorts.  The nights are cool-ish, moist, but we've slept with the window opened anyway.  Some nights, it's been perfect.  Other nights, I've woken up, damp-haired, wishing for dehumidified air.

This week is Christmas in July week at Lutheridge, the camp that contains the residential section where I live.  This week and next, I'm delivering camper mail.  Yesterday my friend brought us fun headbands--at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, we called these "deelyboppers."  



One of my favorite memories of this summer will be driving through camp in the golf cart of a neighbor with Christmas music blaring.

Yesterday I returned the golf cart and walked the short distance back to my house.  Thundered rumbled, and a bit of rain fell, and I breathed in deeply of the smell of hot asphalt and steaming rain.  Delightful!

This morning, I made this tweet, which delighted me in a different way:  "Here for #5amwritersclub, here to write about the joys of peach cobbler for breakfast, the peach cobbler that was in the icebox, but no one was saving it for breakfast but me. (I am no William Carlos Williams, nor was meant to be, but I do love literary allusions!)."



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