It’s Sunday and beginning to look a lot like spring! The snow is melting, and it was 38° when I got up this morning. I’ve heard flocks of geese moving for the last few days. There is a wheat field about two blocks from my home and they were probably looking for lunch, but they were huge flocks. Oklahoma keeps geese year-round these days but the ones I hear overhead were moving. I hope they know spring is just around the corner. According to the calendar it is about 30 days away.
I finished writing Blooming Greed, the second in the Keystone Lake series, and The Wild Rose Press has agreed to publish it, though I haven’t signed a contract yet. But it should hit the shelves within the year.
Instead of jumping right into the next novel (there are two potentials sitting on the computer) I got distracted by a different project. My cousins and sisters are putting together a book with family recipes, pictures, and memories. It has been so fun, and I already have more than 50 pages. I’m still waiting on recipes to be sent to me, but one cousin, an artist, is doing the illustrations and possibly the cover. I got phone numbers from my aunt and called up cousins I hadn’t talked to in 20 years – and they didn’t hang up on me!
One of the things that is fun is that we all have different memories of the same situation – and different recipes for the same thing handed down from our mothers. When this became apparent, I decided to make a section of the book for comparison.
An example is my grandfather’s barbeque sauce that he slathered on chicken as it grilled on his homemade BBQ grill. My mother said his recipe, given to her verbally, went like this: “Take a piece of lard the size of a hen’s egg and melt it. Then mix it with vinegar and salt and pepper and brush it on the chicken.” There were no measurements, but my memories of the barbeque sauce were wonderful. Two of my cousins had a different version and one even knew where it came from. It was a secret recipe from an old man who was the barbeque chicken king at the annual Portia Picnic in Arkansas.
But the book has brought back so many memories and in looking through a box of my mother’s mementos, I found the above picture of my grandfather’s hand-tooled leather wallet with Selective Service card, Lifetime Hunting and Fishing cards, and a drivers license. Oh, the things that wallet had seen as he strived to raise a family of eight children during the Depression and my grandmother baked biscuits to feed them all.
Expect the unexpected. I should have known when I started this project. But it is a tribute to my family, and I think my grandparents would be proud.
What are you reading this week?
Good morning and Happy Valentine’s Day from the frozen tundra! Brrrr! All of Oklahoma is covered in snow and we have lots more to come. So, with that in mind, expect the unexpected.
It’s Superbowl weekend and in my house that means we gather snacks and prepare to watch the commercials. I don’t care about football, but some of the best commercials to ever come down the pike make their debut at the Superbowl. It is pure entertainment. 
According to my calculations it is 48 days until spring. The jonquils in my front flower bed are up about two inches. We have cold weather in the forecast for next weekend but a fairly warm week prior to the onslaught. It is the time of year I hunker down and wait it out. 
This year’s theme is Expect the Unexpected – a tag line for my writing since I write more than one genre. But it also describes the year we’ve had as a planet. You all know I’m talking about the pandemic. I’m tired of being home, and tired of the news, but at least I’m not on the front lines taking care of patients or being one of them. I’m bored, not sick – thankfully. So, I write.
Each year I decide on a topic for the blogs I write. Sometimes I get off the beaten track, but this year the pathway is clear. “Expect the Unexpected” is what I’ve chosen. For some time, I’ve wanted a tag line for my writing and since I write more than one genre, this seemed like a good tag line and topic for this year’s blogs. 
I walked in the door at Lowes near the garden area and it caught me by surprise – cinnamon. Not the common fertilizer and weed killer smells. It smelled like Christmas. It took a while to find where they hid it. The scent was somewhere in the store. And I followed my nose. Up high above my head, I found them. Cinnamon pinecones. The scent of Christmas. I had to have those – later – closer to Christmas. If they were still there. I love the scent of cinnamon no matter the time of year, probably because it reminds me of my mother’s snickerdoodle cookies and Christmas as a child.
Peggy Chambers "Views from the Hammock" site 