Category: My Country Life

  • Tomorrow is going to be a day of transition, of goodbyes and new beginnings. I'm traveling to Houston and bringing my mother back here to live in a nursing home minutes from my house. Except for occasional weekends in her house – my childhood home – she has been living in a nursing home near…

  • My socks may not match, but my feet are always warm. ~Maureen McCullough   The drought took its toll on many of the oak trees in the Hollow. But Tom found the good in that this past weekend by cutting up the dead ones into woodburning stove sized pieces. Our woodpile had dwindled so much…

  •           After several days of gray skies and temperatures below freezing, the sun finally made an appearance yesterday afternoon. And the clouds even stayed away long enough for me to say hello to a half moon and a sky full of stars that dripped all the way to the tree tops.…

  •             …and I'm glad of it! We've needed the rain! Ponds are filling up and I'm already envisioning the fields of wildflowers we'll have in the spring. The rain brought other gifts, too. I've been trying to capture a tiny reflection in a raindrop for a long, long, long time.…

  •   1. Max can still run. Considering all the times over the past couple of years I thought the "early lameness" diagnosis was coming true, watching him disappear into the woods with Belle after a deer makes my heart soar!   2. After a year of posting an old piano on Craig's List, I finally…

  •   I'm still behind on emails and blog reading and writing my children's story, which means I still haven't figured out how to squeeze more time out of a day, but… …from the back porch I can see the hollow changing colors; and hear the music of our little waterfall joined by a chorus of…

  •   1. Do yellow wildflowers lining roadsides count as "Autumn Color"? (I love them whether they do or not!)   2. This morning at an orientation at the Austin Board of Realtors, I won two door prizes in a row, first a bottle of wine and then a canvas bag that tells the world I'm…

  •   It wasn't a dramatic sunset, just soft faded blues and pinks, that grew deeper and darker as the sun slipped out of sight. I could have gone to the movies with friends tonight. Instead, I opted to stay home and take care of some crabby gray-haired to-do's and head off a few youngsters that…

  • Long ago I dreamed of having the job I have now…only I didn't know what it was at the time. Does that make sense? As with any entrepreneurial endeavor, it's agonizingly slow getting started, but I'm confident in my abilities and that I'm on the right track. That's sweet! all by itself. (But if you,…

  • When it rains, you grow. ~ On a local church sign   I woke to the sound of rain Sunday morning. Such a sweet sound when you live near a lake that now resembles a creek after months…well, years…of too much sunshine and too little precipitation. Tonight the frogs living near our pond are singing…