There just isn’t any substitute for proper metal leaf size. It behaves predictably, unlike everything else I tried.
Just to be perfectly transparent, not every chapbook is gonna have gold leaf. I had to do quite a few of them before I got the proper size delivered, but I did finally get my hands on a paint marker that lays down a very respectable and realistic gold with a gorgeous sheen. It’s not gold leaf, but it’s the next best thing, and it looks good. Lots of chapbooks will have that.
And I’ve changed my mind about an angel I had in the margins of one poem because I’d reduced what started as a much larger sketch, and so I ended up with a stupidly detailed angel with all these intricate folds in the robes and it was too much, trying to squeeze all those lines into that tiny space. So a few of you will get an angel edition, but most of you are getting something much weirder with a lot less clothing đ
And if you haven’t ordered a copy of my illustrated chapbook yet, what are you waiting for?!
This is a very painless way to support an artist, and I feel pretty confident in saying you aren’t gonna get a little book of poetry full of hand-pulled prints and hand-colored miniatures for this price anywhere else (because anybody else would know better, and I just have to learn this stuff the hard way đ)
I feel like Brother Ecgbert from like the 1380s is just laughing at me from across the centuries, but what can I say. I don’t have sheep or oak gall ink or gold leaf size made from suckling pigs. I have fountain pens and gel pens and absolutely no training.
So take it down a notch before you give yourself an embolism, Ecgbert. I think we both can agree it’s best if you just avoid medieval medicine as much as possible.
Thanks to those of you who’ve already ordered chapbooks, I was able to buy some cardstock – already got it and have been working on the covers. The good paper for the insides arrives tomorrow.
Want your own copy of my chapbook, complete with shiny embellishments, a menagerie of linocut animals, and a little bit of iambic pentameter? Get one at ko-fi.com/karmadgma
Order your copy now at my ko-fi page and follow me there for updates on my next book project.
A whole bunch of people have said at various points over the years that they’d buy a book I wrote. Well, I’ve decided 2024 is the year I get stuff out there, even if I have to publish it myself. And that’s what this is – a self-published chapbook of my poetry.
Since I’m printing it myself, I can have fun with the format and art – these have hand-sewn binding, and the covers are inked and pulled from the linocut one at a time. Somewhere in here, the sonnet meets the poetry slam and the medieval manuscript meets tattoo flash art.
Buy one now. So I can buy quality paper to print more. So I can buy some time to write new stuff. So I can pay my power bill. đ
As an aside, Asher Moses Nathan’s son was able to inherit his father’s property due to special legislation that was sponsored by Senator Judah P. Benjamin, according to the New Orleans Tribune.
As another aside, Nathan’s children and their mother lived in the historic Sun Oak cottage in Faubourg Marigny on Burgundy Street, which Nathan bought and remodeled for them in 1836.
I couldn’t find a public domain or CC licensed version of the painting with a quick search, but I’ll embed the Instagram post of a photographer who took a photo of it while on assignment:
This is, according to my mother, in Mae’s handwriting.
I have no recollection of anybody drinking this during my childhood. There was always stuff for cocktails in Mae’s pantry, though I’m not sure if Mae drank even socially. But as kids we always got dosed with a medicine made of warm whiskey, honey, and lemon when we were at Mae’s and we were sick.
Maybe this recipe is an old Depression-era artifact.
Anyway, it calls for 3 pounds raisins, 3 pounds sugar, 1/2 yeast (half of what, I can’t tell you), 2 oranges, and 6 quarts of water that has been boiled and then cooled.
The instructions are to mash the raisins, then add sugar and oranges. Let this mixture set for six weeks. Then take off and bottle.
“Take off” what I also can’t tell you. I presume that at some point, you are to add the mashed raisins etc. to that cooled water and put the whole thing up in some kind of container, although the recipe as given skips those specifics.
Obviously I haven’t tried this, and I’ve never made any kind of beverage at home that needed fermenting, so I am ignorant about how those specifics might go. But if you know, please share!
We have a whole bunch of chickens, and usually when chickens are going to hatch baby chicks, they do that in the springtime when it’s warm. But for some reason, this crazy hen got it into her head that she was gonna hatch chicks in the fall.
And a chick just hatched today! I wish you could see it. It’s very small and fuzzy and really cute and curious about the world. Baby chicks like to stay very warm when they’ve just hatched, and so they spend a lot of time sitting under their mama’s wing in the pine shavings and feathers that the mama made the nest out of. But this chick chirps *all the time* and it’s so loud that I can hear it even though the sound is muffled by the mama’s feathers and the pine shavings. And it pokes its head out to see what’s going on all the time. You can see it peeking out here.
Its mama’s name is Gwen, short for Guenevere. We don’t have a name for the chick yet. What do you think we ought to name it? Maybe you’ll get to come see it one day soon.
For y’all younger cousins/grandkids/etc., Nanny Laclos is Dio and Julia’s marraine (godmother). This recipe came to Grandma via Nanny’s daughter Janice Hebert, according to the note on the recipe card.
12 frozen puff pastry shells
1 1/2 sticks butter
1 tablespoon tomato sauce
1/3 cup chopped celery
1/4 cup chopped bell pepper
2/3 cup chopped onion
1 pound cleaned crawfish tails
1/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon red pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
dash of fine black pepper
1 1/2 heaping tablespoons corn starch
1 1/3 cups water
1/4 cup chopped parsley
2 cups grated processed cheese
1/4 cups crushed sliced almonds
2 tablespoons parsley
Preheat oven to 350. Bake pastry shells per directions. Set aside.
Cook all veg in butter. Add seasonings. Cook 15 minutes.
Make corn starch paste in water and add to crawfish. Cook until thick.
Add cup parsley. Mix well and remove from heat.
Fill puffs. Top with cheese and crushed almonds. Return to oven a few minutes. Top with parsley and serve while hot.
RIP, my good boy. You were the best rooster we ever had and you should have lived a lot longer.
J
Joe was not, in fact, a dickhead at all. He was a great rooster. Before my daughter struck out on her own, she helped us name the members of the flock we’d inherited from the former residents. There was Mangy Carl, Tank, Hawkeye, Dickhead Joe – colorful names inspired by her colorful imagination but not necessarily by any particular personality trait of the chickens themselves.
He was the last of the original flock. I think it must have been dogs that got him, probably the same ones that were on the property a few months ago and killed the last of the original hens, Dolly. We also lost Hi-Top and Pepper this year, and whatever got Joe also got his son Pretty Boy (we aren’t as creative as my daughter when it comes to chicken names). It’s been a really rough year for chickens.
People who live in the country and let their dogs roam around at will *suck.* I can’t walk my dog on the road on a leash because nobody will confine their dogs behind fences, and my dog weighs 70+ pounds, has very long teeth, and doesn’t let go once she gets a grip. If there were a fight, I couldn’t break it up by myself. And apparently I can’t let my chickens scratch around in the woods 50 feet from my front door, either, not without risking corpses. Those dogs are gonna get shot one day – not by me, but by somebody, and those dogs are just being dogs. They deserve better people. I deserve better neighbors. Joe deserved a longer life.
He saved all his girls, though. He was a good boy. I miss him horribly.
This is a picture of five generations. This is your ma’am, me, my father Glenn, his mother Katherine (all the kids called her KK), and KK’s mother Katherine (all the kids called her Kat). This was at Kat’s house in Florida, where we all visited her for her birthday that year at my Uncle Mike’s urging – five generations, he said. Gotta get those pictures while you can.
And he was right – not everybody is lucky enough to know any of their great-grandparents, never mind more than one of them. And I always think that is really sad, so that’s one of the reasons I try so hard to write all the stories down and keep track of things in our family. I want you and the little cousins in our family to be able to read about this stuff even if we can’t have family dinners like we used to, even if you don’t ever get to come to my house some weekend and help me pick blackberries and feed the chickens and look at these old pictures and hear these stories.
So Kat was my great grandmother. Now I never did get to know my great grandfather Neal, her husband, because he died way before I was born. But this is what he looked like.
Kat was an absolute riot and I loved her very much. Because she lived pretty far away in Florida, we didn’t get to see her as often as we got to see our other great grandparents, but she would come to Alabama to visit at holidays and we visited her sometimes when I was little and then when I was a teenager, too.
She liked to play golf and have dinner with her friends and have a gin and tonic cocktail at five o’clock. Your ma’am might not want me telling you this story until you’re older, but since all bets are off in crazy plague world where I haven’t even gotten to sing you happy birthday, I’m just gonna tell you the stories as they come up and we’ll just see how it all goes down in family history.
So KK had a brother named Monty, and we were all at Monty and his wife Euber’s house around Christmas one day. Kat was there visiting from Florida, and KK was there too. Kat made herself a gin and tonic cocktail, and KK said, “Now Mother, do you really think you should have that?” (She didn’t say it out loud, but you could tell she was thinking, “You’re 84 years old and maybe that’s too old to be drinking cocktails.” She liked to worry about Kat.)
And Kat said, “Katherine, I’m 84 years old. I guess I can have whatever I please.” (Kat didn’t like to be worried about.)
And that was Kat – she did what she wanted and she lived life on her own terms, and what she wanted was to live on her own in Florida, to play golf every day with her friends, to visit her family at holidays, and to drink that gin and tonic cocktail every day at five o’clock. And for KK to mind her own business đ
Oh, and in case it isn’t immediately apparent from the picture, I’m sorry, Lily, but you’re probably gonna need glasses before you’re out of 4th grade!
I doubt you’ve gotten to know my father, your great-grandfather Glenn at all, either, since the world is still all crazy. Used to be most of the family would meet up at my grandma’s house for dinner every single Sunday afternoon. We saw each other all the time, at least if we lived in the same city. And even if we didn’t, we saw each other at least once a year – maybe at Thanksgiving or at Christmas, or maybe even at a special birthday party for some really cute little baby or another.
But this past year, we didn’t get to see each other at Thanksgiving or at Christmas, and that’s just the weirdest thing ever for our family. And then I heard you had your first birthday party, but I guess it was just your mom and dad and your other grandparents, ’cause I didn’t get to see you or make you a cake, and neither did your great-grammy Margaret who makes cakes 50 times better than mine. Well, I hope somebody made you a cake that didn’t come out of a box or from the grocery store and I hope you got some cool presents. And I hope you get to meet the other side of your family soon.
Your ma’am’s grandfather, my father, has played guitar most of his life, and just about all of us played some instrument or another at least sometimes growing up. I did, and so did your ma’am, though I have a feeling she hasn’t touched her violin for a couple of years now. So we grew up around lots and lots of music, and we know lots and lots of songs, and we sing lots of them to cute little babies whenever we get to see them.
So if the world was being normal right now, you’d have already heard lots of these songs a bunch of times by now. I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard any of them, though. I’m having a hard time picturing your mom singing them to you. But who knows, maybe she did.
When I was little, one of the songs my father used to play a lot was a song called “Froggy Went a-Courting.” It was one of my favorites, and just in case I never get to know you and you never get to hear your great grandfather play it, either, I wanted to make sure you still knew about it.
Sometimes you will find the story of the frog who courted Miss Mousie in picture books. Here’s one example:
I believe that must be Miss Mousie with the bow on her butt, her Uncle Rat in the dapper pinstripe pants, and that leaves Mr. Froggie standing, hand on his heart, nearly overwhelmed with what must be something like the vapors and having unaccountably left his tophat upside down in the middle of the floor.
He’s a much snazzier fellow, though, than this next guy, don’t you think? This one is far lumpier and is a decidedly unattractive shade of yellow. He looks as if he might have a sock full of mushy peas shoved into his waistband, and I’m seeing at least a parking ticket, if not a moving violation, in his near future. You will not convince me that he is duly licensed to operate that salamander.
Anyway, the version I heard growing up was very close to this. This is Doc Watson singing and playing “Froggy Went a-Courting,” and this is just one of a bunch of Doc Watson songs we grew up with. He’s something of a family hero. I’m surprised we never named a dog after him.
Now your ma’am is likely to object on principle on account of her hating acoustic guitar music, so she says. (She thinks she’s being rebellious, I suspect. I went through a phase like that too. It passed.) Here’s why you can’t let her get away with that:
This is your mother at about your age, helping her grandaddy play the guitar.
And here she is crashed out on the sofa, all worn out …*from dancing.*
I hope I get to see you soon and I hope you get to hear your great grandfather play you some songs on his guitar.
This is a really simple but really good fruit cobbler recipe. If you have fresh blueberries from the garden or farmer’s market, it shows them off without hiding them under a bunch of glurge. If you have fruit that’s kind of beat-up looking but still fine to eat, this highlights the flavor and nobody will know about the bruises. Nothing but some canned mixed fruit that nobody is going to eat? This recipe is brilliant with it and it will get eaten. In fact, the only fruit I have met that this recipe couldn’t “fix” was canned mango. I had to give that to the chickens, and the chickens didn’t actually seem too impressed. But when I’ve made it with *anything* else, everybody I’ve served it to has devoured it.
As given in Dio’s scrapbook:
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 stick butter
Preheat oven to 400 (F). Melt butter in baking dish. Mix remaining ingredients together. Pour over butter. Add sweetened fruit. Bake for 40-45 minutes.
“Melt butter in baking dish” means put the stick of butter in the baking dish and put it in the oven while it’s preheating. By the time it’s preheated, your butter should be melted, or just about.
Obviously this is not the hot-jam-with-biscuits-on-top type of cobbler. If you use canned fruit and pour the juice or syrup in too, you’ll arrive more at dumpling texture than biscuit texture. And then there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities in between, depending on how much fruit you use and what kind.
HOW MUCH FRUIT: And no, it doesn’t say how much fruit to put in. The answer is basically “whatever you have” (or “until it looks right“). I have made this with several cups of blueberries and I’ve made it with a single small can of canned peaches. You can’t really go wrong. (Except with mango.)
SWEETENED FRUIT: What constitutes sweetened fruit will probably be a matter of personal taste. This is plenty sweet enough if you use canned fruit. I do not drain the water/juice or syrup that the fruit comes in when I use canned fruit, and if you do it like that, you’ll probably find you can get away with less than a cup of sugar in this recipe. In any case, I wouldn’t add any extra sugar with canned fruit.
In fact, I don’t sweeten any fruit I put in here with the exception, sometimes, of fresh berries, and only if the berries are the only fruit going into it. And then that usually just means the whole thing gets a sprinkling of sugar on top that’s honestly mostly for show – a little lemon sugar to top a blueberry cobbler, for instance. This is a moist cobbler anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if your available fruit isn’t already sitting in its own juices. So where you might sprinkle your fruit with some sugar and maybe a little cornstarch ahead of time to get a nice, thick fruit “soup” in a different cobbler recipe, that doesn’t make much difference in this recipe.
BUTTER VS. MARGARINE: I have tried this with margarine when someone was sent to the store for butter and came back with a tub of the pale yellow abomination because some people were raised by wolves.* I think it was absolutely disgusting: the texture/mouthfeel was all wrong, and it wouldn’t melt in the baking dish like the butter will, and it definitely tastes like margarine and not butter, so I just don’t recommend it. But I suppose it can probably be done if you really want to do it. Other people liked it and one of those people has accused me of being a baking snob, so I guess YMMV.**
*Same person who was sent to the store for cheese and came back with … something shredded and orange. Nowhere on the packaging did the word “cheese” appear, not even in the weaselly phrase “cheese food product.”
**I’m really not a baking snob. In fact, I’m probably the worst baker in my family. My daughter was a better baker than I am by the time she was 12 (and probably before). I was just raised in a family that doesn’t do boxed cake, and I currently live with people who might wax rhapsodic about baked goods that you can buy at the gas station. So in my opinion, I’m not so much a snob as I am simply not a philistine.
More fiddling around with a public-domain-based recreation of the little book of proverbs featured in our last installment of the Adventures of Jo Pantha and Maggie: The Early Years. Still not great, but getting better, I think.
I have a lot of trouble turning what’s on my screen in the image editor into a properly-sized, printable, and legible physical object. I did finally succeed in turning this one into a “greeting card,” but it was a tiny little greeting card – honestly probably better described as a gift tag lol
So I’ve turned it into a PDF now in hopes that it won’t somehow be a different size every time I print or save it, and in theory we’re now closer to normal greeting card size. If (for some reason I can’t fathom) you want a copy of it, here’s a PDF version downloadable below that you should be able to print and fold to make your own little greeting card. Or gift tag. Or whatever.
(I printed on a half sheet, 8.5 x 5.5, and so I had to trim a few inches of white space off one end before I folded it. I think I should have trimmed a few millimeters off the other end, too, though. Well, work in progress, I suppose.)
When your ma’am was a little girl, we didn’t have anything like cellphones or tablets or computers we could take anywhere we went, and for a long time, she and I didn’t even have a television set. We just read books and listened to music and played when we were home. I had never wanted a TV because I was of the opinion that watching very much of it turned people into idiots.
But when we moved to Germany, it would still be dark outside when we left the house to go to your mother’s daycare in the morning, and in the winter, it would already be dark when we finally got home, too. And there would be snow everywhere, and let me tell you, Lily, snow is only pretty in the postcards and picture books. In real life, snow gets really dirty just as soon as the sun comes up and people and cars and animals start moving around , and a lot of it will melt and turn into patchy puddles mixed with patchy ice, and it will all be dirty and gray and muddy and freezing cold and it will look like that as long as it’s still sitting there. Snow really sucks.
So we couldn’t really play outside as much as we used to. And your ma’am would get bored while I was cooking dinner or studying or doing office work. So we got a TV when we moved to Germany.
Now it didn’t get any channels, and even if it had, they wouldn’t have been playing anything little American kids liked most of the time anyway. So when we wanted to watch something, we had to pick out a tape to put in the VCR player. We had a lot of tapes after a while, but your ma’am really liked to watch the same few tapes over and over and over again.
For example, she liked Winnie the Pooh an awful lot, as you can probably gather from the picture. But we only had one or two different Winnie the Pooh tapes. So it wasn’t too long before your ma’am had the entire thing memorized and I would get the songs stuck in my head and could never get them out.
One of our favorites was “Heffalumps and Woozles.” And I was wondering the other day if you’ve even heard “Heffalumps and Woozles” or if you’ve even seen any Winnie the Pooh. Well, honestly, you’re only one – you don’t need to have seen any Winnie the Pooh yet. (I am still of the opinion that too much TV turns people into idiots. Lazy ones with lousy cardiovascular health and quite often crappy posture.) But the music? You should definitely be listening to cool music already, and this one is a classic of its era.
You can watch it on YouTube (but I bet your mother remembers most of the words and could sing it for you if she wanted to… but I realize I don’t even know if your mother sings to you or not).
I know she remembers it because I used to call her gram’s dogs, Beau and Ziggy, the Heffalump and the Woozle respectively.
This is Ziggy the Woozle. At this point in his life, he had his own sofa. If you were careful, you could pet Ziggy once. If you were extra careful, you could pet him twice. But if you tried to pet him three times, he’d bite you. (Well, everyone except your mother. She could pet him however much she wanted.) It wasn’t really his fault, though. It was on account of his Evil Tail. But that will have to be a story for another letter.
I can’t find a picture of Beau the Heffalump to show you yet. I’ll come back and add it here when I find it.
And your dog Rocket? Rocket is definitely a woozle. (My dog Roo is a heffalump.)
Watch out for the Woozles, Lily, and give Rocket a big old hug and kiss for me. I miss her so much, and I hope I get to spend time with both of you one of these days really soon.
I told you in my letter about Grandma Conner’s horse named Ruby that I would tell you two more stories about horses. It took me a really long time to find the picture I was looking for for one of them, though, and without the picture, your mother would deny it until kingdom come.
This is your ma’am having a pony ride. This was when we lived in Baumholder, Germany. She was about two years old, and we would always go on adventures when we lived in Germany, your mother and I. And in Germany, adventures were pretty easy to find. Sometimes we’d go to the park and there would suddenly be pony rides and games there just because!
That’s what happened this day. We went to go play in the park and when we got there, there was that nice man with the really sweet, gentle pony, and there were other kids, and games to play, and somebody was even grilling sausages, and we had a whole lot of fun and we didn’t even expect all that.
Sometimes we’d go down the hill to the part of the village where the bakery was, and there would suddenly be a carnival there that wasn’t there the day before and wasn’t going to be there tomorrow.
Some weekends we’d decide to take the train to Frankfurt to go see dinosaur bones, or go to see a real castle in Heidelberg or Trier. We’d just get on the train or get in the car and go to a castle!
Once we went to the park and there were a bunch of knights and kings and queens all dressed up in pretty clothes and armor, having swordfights and jousting contests. We walked all around there and watched them for a long time.
Or sometimes we would go to visit your mom’s pet boar.
I’m just kidding – it wasn’t really her pet. But it liked her a lot and would follow her around whenever we visited the petting zoo – and we went a lot! We went everywhere together, and there were lots of places to go. It was a really cool place to live and a really cool place to be a little kid. I hope you get to visit Germany someday.
And if you turn a corner and see a carnival and pony rides, make your ma’am let you have a turn and don’t believe her when she says horses are evil, ’cause it’s not true, and secretly, she knows that đ
I have a little book, Springs of Indian Wisdom, published by Herder Book Center New York, copyright 1965 Leobuchhandlung. Its title page promises that it contains the wisdom of Aurobindo, Gandhi, Hitopadesa, Ramakrishna, and Tagore. From poking around on the internet, I suspect it once had a hardcover enclosing a spiral binding, but all that’s left for a cover now on this one is the title page, and at the final page, this dedication:
I don’t know when exactly this was given as a gift, but I’m tentatively placing it between 1965 and 1970, so the very end of what I’m calling “the early years,” right when our heroines are at the cusp of full-fledged adulthood. And I have absolutely no idea what an un-flower mind is, but perhaps this little book will give us a clue, window as it is into some of the later early adventures of Jo Pantha and Maggie.
This book is still under copyright, and there aren’t that many pages, so I should probably only share one or two as a sample. Most pages consist of some proverb or quote set in what is perhaps meant to be a decorative faux-Sanskrit-esque font and accompanied by simple artwork resembling block printing, like so:
However, a few of the quotes are accompanied by really beautiful, brightly-colored paintings of flowers. Near as I’ve been able to tell, these paintings are public domain – they’re reproductions of Mughal style miniatures from various extremely old sources. (I’ve been able to locate some of them elsewhere and confirm they’re out of copyright.)
So what I’m doing is essentially reproducing these by finding public domain flower miniatures to slap these quotations onto, and I’m turning them into greeting/thank you cards that I’m sending family members. Here’s my first one. I’m not super happy with the resolution on the frame – this painting didn’t have a frame, so I had to Frankenstein one from a different painting – and I’m still working out the kinks on some of this. I’m no artistic genius and I couldn’t use any graphic design/photo editing software at all as of this time last year, so I still have a lot to learn. Also, the font is meh… working on finding something affordable (read: free) that gets us a little closer to the original aesthetic, too. So consider it a draft:
Now the book attributes this quotation only to “Indian Wisdom,” the publisher’s version of “anonymous,” I suppose. Near as I can tell from my research into the Vedic sacred texts, however, credit for this quotation actually belongs to the Beach Boys. But I suppose one takes inspiration where one can find it. No judgment here.
(Ok, only a little judgment lol)
I’m going to keep playing around with these, though, as I suspect they may hold they key to what Jo Pantha meant by “losing your un-flower mind.” So stay tuned for the next chapter of “The Adventures of Jo Pantha and Maggie” (or: “Karma incurs some bad karma by making fun of Vedic proverbs”).
I thought there was a small chance I might get to see you at least in passing this Christmas, but it turns out we couldn’t go anywhere at all because one of the guys Mike works with got sick with COVID. We had to stay home until we could see the doctor and be sure we weren’t sick, too. So we couldn’t even go to the grocery store for a few days. I had made cheesecake cupcakes, a lot of them, to bring to your great-grammy’s house. Since we couldn’t go after all, you know what we ate for basically two days? That’s right, cheesecake cupcakes! I still like them but it’s ok with me if I don’t have them again for a few months.
I hope you had a good Christmas. You’re still a little young to have asked for a pony, but by next year you should be big enough to. And I think you should really make it count, just aim for the bleachers with this one.
So don’t just ask for a pony – ask for a gingerbread Christmas goat. That you can ride.
Oh, and a drum set. Every toddler needs a drum set, don’t you think? *I* do :).
I found a book that you need for your Christmas present, but I understand you’ve moved and I don’t have the address you’ve moved to. I’m hoping your Aunt Pascale can get it for me so I can send something for both you and Rocket. (Rocket’s gonna need a Thunder-shirt for the New Year’s Eve fireworks noise, poor baby.)
Good night, Lily. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I don’t guess it’ll ever really matter to you that I missed an entire year of your life since you can’t remember it anyway, but I always will đŠ
I wanted to tell you about your great-great-great grandmother Mary Louise Hall. Her daughter Mary is my grammy and your mother’s great grammy. Everybody calls her Grandma, though. This is a picture of you and Grandma.
So Grandma’s mother was named Mary, too, but everybody called her Mae. Mae lived in Pensacola, Florida her whole life, and that was a really long time, because she lived to be 100 years old.
This picture was taken sometime around 1920. That’s her bathing suit she’s wearing – they are going to the beach. And that’s what cars looked like back then.
Mae was so much fun. She used to play games with us and tell us all kinds of stories. One game she played with us when we were little was called “Hold Fast To What I Give Ya.” You had to hold your hands in front of you with your palms together like you’re praying, and then Mae would do the same thing, except she had something hidden between her hands. And she would slide her pressed-together hands in between yours a few times, saying “hold fast to what I give ya!” every time she did it. And you would have to pay attention and be ready to hold tight onto whatever it was she had in her hands when she was ready to let go.
Sometimes it was a stick of gum or a piece of candy. Sometimes it was a dime or a nickel or even a quarter. (This was in the 1970s and 1980s – a quarter was a big deal to us kids back then. It used to buy a whole lot more than it can buy now!)
I don’t remember Mae ever tricking us with that game and giving us anything gross or weird, like a Brussels sprout or a burnt-out match or a dead lizard, but I think it would have been *absolutely hilarious* if she had done that. Maybe I’ll pick the tradition back up for you and Teddy if I ever get to see you again. Maybe I will have the occasional cruciferous vegetable or desiccated amphibian or dog treat mixed in with the quarters and the sticks of gum.
Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have tipped my hand here. I might have to come back later and edit this letter so I don’t give anything away!
Karma Soup 