Last day with the cousins....

A weekend visit is over way too quickly. How much better to stay a week than a weekend..... but a four-day trip was all my cousins L and A could manage this time, so we just made the best of it. Today was the last day..... we spent the morning with a leisurely breakfast, then went out to the yard to pick some of the first pecans from the trees. My cousin L couldn't believe how the nuts grow inside of green pods which turn brown from the sun and then fall to the ground. She picked up two handfuls of them within thirty seconds. We put them into a plastic bag and she held onto them as if they were made of gold. "Real Texas pecans," she said, pronoucing the nut's name as pee-can, rather than pa-cahn, as we say in the south.

On the way to the airport (nearly a two-hour drive) we stopped at a produce stand and my cousin A bought four Texas-sized sweet potatoes. We told her they'd bake up sweet, and taste like brown sugar had been sprinkled on them. She tried to pick sweet potatoes that weren't as big as footballs. Into her suitcase those went, along with a bag of homemade dried mango slices.

Closer to the airport, we stopped at Hank's Ice Cream.... a special treat for my cousin A, who is an ice cream junkie of the first order. No matter that we live in the Hill Country, home of BlueBell ice cream, my husband and I think Hank's is the best ice cream in the world. (We don't say that out loud here in the Hill Country.) Hank is a one-man operation, steadfastly refusing to turn his small ice cream shop into a mega-vat factory. He has been making ice cream for "too many years to count," using his grandmother's recipes. Hank says that once you go into factory-made ice cream, you lose some of the richness, a lot of the quality, and a good deal of the control. "Just not the same as making small batches at a time," says Hank. We have to believe him, because his ice cream tastes like none other in the world. Hank has always said he's not making ice cream to get rich.... he's making ice cream just because he loves making ice cream for the folks.

Then it was time for the airport. All during the ride, both of my cousins were looking at the countryside farmlands, the huge puffy clouds in the prettyblue sky that we had today, and they said their goodbyes to the small-scale Houston skyline as we crossed over into the city limits. My cousin A has vowed to come back with her husband and their youngest daughter. L said she would have wanted to stay longer if she didn't have two cats at home waiting for her.

After four days of having family here, the house now seems empty. We didn't do anything so special.... we had country days, country festivals, country calm. We tried to show them what life out here is like, and how its peacefulness allows me to not want to pay attention to the six o'clock news. "Living in a bubble," my cousin L has been telling me for the longest time now. But now that she spent four days here, L has come to appreciate this little bubble in the Hill Country. She didn't watch TV all the time she was here, nor did she miss it..... she didn't read a newspaper, nor did she ask for one. She did, however, listen to the goats, feed the chickens, watch the horses, and she held a just-laid egg that we found in the nesting box this morning.

As I type, their plane has already landed at JFK Airport in New York.... A's husband has met them at the gate and they're on their way home to Suffolk Country.... they should get there within the next half-hour or so. Our guest cottage looks as if no one had been there all weekend long.... they made the beds, brought the wet towels to the laundry room here in the house, shut the windows, closed the blinds. They did all the things that our 97-yr-old Aunt Dolly has always taught us all---- keep everything clean and neat and nice, especially if it all belongs to someone else.

Tomorrow will be laundry day.... washing all the towels, un-making the beds and washing the sheets, then making up the beds again. By tomorrow afternoon, the guest cottage will look just as it does now--- as if no one had been there.

Sure is quiet here........