Wildflower weekend.

Our young friend C (now into the last of her teen years) came up and stayed with us yesterday and today. As I type this now, C is with her friends in a nearby town, having dinner and going to a country line-dancing place called Hurricane Harry's, or something like that.

We spent part of yesterday afternoon collecting one of each wildflower we have on our property. I looked up the unfamiliar ones in my wildflower book and we marked all the pages that have color photos of each wildflower on our land. At last count, we have 27 different species. I have one of each pressed inbetween paper, and if they dry nicely, maybe I can make a collage out of them all.

The three of us went into Wellborn yesterday and had lunch at the Hullabaloo Diner. C had never seen a vintage chrome and tile diner before, and she seemed to like the idea of the swivel stools at the counter. The resident peacock was there in all his glory, with spreading feathers aimed at the sky for all to see and admire. We also went into College Station to "Shakes," for their delicious homemade ice cream.... the best around..... sort of a mix of hard ice cream and soft custard. Only two flavors, chocolate and vanilla, but they will mix in just about anything that you can think of. In my opinion, there's nothing better than plain old chocolate ice cream, and as long as the ice cream is perfectly delicious, it doesn't need anything else.

On the way back from College Station, we stopped to see the miniature horses at the convent near Navasota. There were four tiny recently-born horses, two of which I have already named (Rusty and Buttercup). No, we're not getting them. No, I don't want anything else to take care of. But yes, they were cute as cute can possibly be.... and we ooohed and aaahed over them for nearly an hour.

Today we drove into Burton for their annual "Cotton Gin Festival." The tiny town of Burton has the only still-working cotton gin in the entire country. We saw the original building, but the line of people waiting to get in was too long of a wait. We walked around the fairgrounds.... lots of food booths (selling either meat or fried things) and merchandise booths (selling everything from homemade apple butter to yard art). They had about 50 tractors all lined up for a "tractor pull," and for the life of me, we couldn't figure out what that meant. By the looks of things there, they would hitch a trailer to a tractor, fill it with dead-weight, and the tractors would take turns trying to pull it a certain distance. I guess the less time it took the tractor to get from here to there, the better the chances of winning the competition. We didn't stay around to see the results of that.

For lunch today, we drove up to Round Top, to Royer's Cafe..... grilled salmon on top of salad, with cherry pie for dessert. I tasted the crust, which was totally delicious, then ate the cherry filling and left the crust to eliminate those extra calories. Royer's is always fun, filled with vintage memorabilia and the best music from the 1950s and 1960s always blasting quietly in the background. Great place, and probably the only place to eat in Round Top. They're known for their hamburgers, which look and smell delicious, and if ever I were going to eat a burger, Royer's would be the place to do it.

On both days, we drove along such beautiful roads, stopping here and there to take photos of wildflowers and livestock. Fields filled with bluebonnets and paintbrush, daisies and yellow-stars, and a host of wildflowers of all colors of the rainbow. And when we got home today, there were a few cars driving down our own road, stopping to take photos of our wildflower fields. Too wonderful for words. I told one of my NY cousins about Texans driving around at this time of the year to take pictures of wildflower fields, and she told me that if people did that up in NY, homeowners would be calling the police.

But not here. There are small-town festivals, working cotton gins, vintage diners, 1950s music playing in the middle of a town with a population of just 77, and endless fields and pastures filled with the most beautifully fragrant and eye-popping wildflowers, for as far and as wide as your eyes can see. What a great place to be. And we live here.


About the chickens-- Scarlett has come out of her nesting box, with a little help from me. I just kept picking her up and taking her out of there, then walking to where the other hens were pecking in the grass before releasing her. "Go and play with the girls," I told her. Around about the 17th time, she stayed out, rather than running back into the coop and flying back up to the nesting box. I'm hoping Scarlett has turned the hatching-corner now...... otherwise, I will have to continue going out to the coop every half-hour to get her out of there.