Update on Benjamin - 12/9/24

I wanted to communicate a quick update on Benjamin's recent surgery.  Since his fall and previous surgeries, he's recovered and has long been back at work, experiencing a nice recovery.  In seeing an orthopedic surgeon following several months of recovery, it was recommended that he have one additional surgery on his right foot.

Since the accident, the toes on Benjamin's right foot curl up tight.  He cannot straighten them out.  This contributes to pain as he's always walking on his toes and that causes a limp.  He works as an electrical engineer in a refinery, so he has to wear steel toed boots and this intensifies the pain.  The goal of this surgery is to reduce the limp and lessen the pain.

The surgeon went in under his foot and released some tendons, went in under his toes and worked on the capsules and this straightened them out.  His big toe was curled in an excessive fashion.  The tendons were cut and lengthened and using screws, the big toe was straightened out as well.

The doctor feels that the surgery was a success and scheduled a follow-up visit in two weeks.  Benjamin has moved back in with us as he has some limitations in the short term.  He cannot put any weight at all on his foot for six weeks.  He cannot drive for 3 months.  He'll also need to go back to rehab.  We took his walker out of storage, and he was using that until today, when his buddy brought him a pair of crutches.

Amazingly, he's not experiencing much pain and is in great spirits.  We're praising God for his Goodness throughout this whole ordeal.  We look forward to Benjamin's continued healing.

One of My Favorite Authors

My job requires a lot of travel.  On a typical day I'll put a couple a hundred miles on my vehicle.  For the first 30 minutes or so I'll pray until I get to my first stop.  For the next four hours (give or take) I'll listen to podcasts that I have on rotation.  I also have a library card and use their Libby app to listen to audiobooks.  I read a lot of different books by different authors and different genres.

One of the authors that I really enjoy is James Lee Burke.  He writes fiction crime novels, and if asked to describe his work, I call him the "Cajun John Grisham."  That might describe the type of writing, but I think James Lee Burke's writing is better.  It is lyrical, almost, and so descriptive.  If you close your eyes, while listening to the words read by Will Patton, he puts you right on the banks of Bayou Teche where you can hear the frogs croaking and smell the fish spawning.

I especially enjoy his "Dave Robicheaux" series which describe the exploits of Dave Robicheaux, the protagonist, and his sidekick and best friend, Clete Purcell.  JLB's stories weave throughout Acadiana in South Louisiana and into New Orleans.  Many of the towns, sights, sounds and smells are very familiar to me and the characters are real and endearing.  

"By now you've probably gotten the feel of South Louisiana. It's a beautiful place, but it's also a place of endings, or change that's hard to witness.  Many have a love affair with it, the way Dave Robicheaux loves it and almost destroys himself trying to save a lost cause.  Then there are those who have no conscience and abuse its swamps and rivers and marshlands as though they were a trash dump, and that's no exaggeration.  Sometimes when I'm fishing way down on the Gulf at sunset, I'll see an old storage tank rusting into the water, or bamboo flooded with an iridescent reflection that shouldn't be there, or a man-made canal streaming saline into a freshwater forest of gum trees and cypress and tupelos.  It makes me sad.  It makes me feel that I am watching the end of something, maybe even time itself."

- James Lee Burke from "Clete"

On my daily drives, as I'm listening to a James Lee Burke novel and looking out at the landscape around me that perfectly matches the setting of his novels, it's as if I'm right there in the book with Dave and Clete.  His prose is beautiful.  J. D. Salinger, in "The Catcher in the Rye," wrote that "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."  

A photo I took last week on LA 14 between Hayes and Lake Arthur, LA

James Lee Burke attended SLI which later became USL (University of Southwestern Louisiana) in Lafayette, LA.  He has a home in New Iberia and thus, is deeply familiar with its people, its culture and its problems.  He speaks of them with brutal honesty, so much so that you go back and read the words again, as they've touched a nerve of familiarity within you.  You immediately understand deeply what he's trying to convey.  They're thoughts you've had, but never verbalized.  There's a certain sadness that you can't explain while reading some of his work.

Sometimes it is hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people.  The world in which they grew up in is a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present.  I know Cajuns that have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace.  There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term 9/11 means.  Over 40% of children are born to an unwed mother.  In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation.  Our politicians are an embarrassment that give avarice and mendacity a bad name.  

So how do you get angry with someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she's unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living, if she's lucky and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for.  

The temperature had hit 98 degrees at four in the afternoon.  The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs.  At sunset lightning pulsed in the clouds over the gulf but no rain fell.  And the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel.  I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear.  And then the wind died and the trees stood still and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun's afterglow as though a molecular change were taken place in the water. 

- James Lee Burke from "Robicheaux"

Looking out over the bridge in the Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge on LA Hwy 14 last week

As I look out at Spanish moss draped cypress trees, I half expect to see Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell pull onto Hwy 26 from a shell road in Clete's convertible red Cadillac El Dorado.  They'll likely have fishing poles hanging out of the car with bobbers fluttering in the breeze.  They'll wave me down and offer me a ham and onion sandwich from a grease-stained brown paper bag.

A bayou scene off of LA 14 near Lake Arthur, LA

If you haven't read any of his work, I encourage you to check out James Lee Burke, specifically his Dave Robicheaux novels.  He'll seem like an old friend.  You'll be sorry when the series ends. 

A Bumper Crop of Pecans!

We lit our first fire of the season in the fireplace this week.  We put off turning on the heat for as long as we can and enjoy sitting in front of the fireplace in the evenings, enjoying the warmth and the mesmerizing fire.  There are so many memories associated with fireplaces.  The andirons come from my mom's great aunt and uncle's fireplace.  The bellows hanging was my maternal grandmother's (Bumby) and the fireplace tools were from my paternal grandparents' home.

We've watched a TV show set in Canada called 'Heartland.'  The grandfather (Jack) in that program has a fireplace in his home and has special stones set in the fireplace that are named after people.  They are special and have a place in the hearts and minds of those who gather around the hearth to enjoy the fire.  I wish we would've done that.  In the home I grew up in, Mom & Dad have bricks in their fireplace that were from other buildings that were special to my parents.  They can point them out and there are stories to go along with them.  I think that's neat.

As 'fireplace season' progresses, this is a place at night where I spend a lot of time, sitting around, shelling pecans.  We have SO many pecans this year.  We'll take the small ones from our trees to the feed store we patronize.  They have a pecan shelling machine.  You can hear it pop as the pecans are fed into it.  The pecans are cracked (for a fee, of course, and you're charged by the pound).  I'll sit here and separate the shells from the nut.  It's mind-numbing, but pleasant work on a cold winter's evening.

Our neighbors let us know that they are so busy working on their house that they won't be picking up any pecans from their trees this year.  They didn't want to see them go to waste, so they told us to pick up all we wanted.  Wow!  How generous.  Their pecans are almost as big as golf balls.  On a beautiful afternoon last week, I set up my pecan cracking operation on the back patio while listening to an audiobook.  How relaxing!

My pecan cracking operation doesn't involve mechanized equipment.  I use elbow grease.  I use a Reed's Rocket, circa 1950 manufactured by the Arthur W. Reed Manufacturing Company out of Little Rock, Arkansas.  I'll show you how the process works.  It is wonderfully simple.  There is no rush to the process.  It doesn't require any deep thinking or ciphering.  You just settle in to a rhythmic, efficient repetitive motion.  The nuts go in a bowl and the shells go in a bucket to be either burned in the fireplace (they make cherry-red coals) or composted in the garden.

The Reed's Rocket is adjustable and thus allows you to crack any size pecan, walnut, etc. in it.  You can adjust the threads to accommodate a larger or smaller nut.  Once you get is set just right, you slip the pecan in and use leverage to pull the 'piston' down.

You hear a loud crack and little pieces of pecan shell fly across the patio, revealing the treasured pecan inside.

While the pecans from our trees are only about half this size, they are full of oil, rich and fat.  These pecans from the neighbor's trees are larger and just about perfect, from my vantage point.

About 1 in 10 are bad, and I just throw them away.  Let me correct that.  Nothing goes to waste.  As it turns out, Belle eats them, even those that have bad spots.  A pecan-eating dog, can you imagine?  In just a short time, I filled a blue plastic 'pea-shellin' bowl with shelled pecans.  The contents filled two 1 gallon sized zip loc bags.  We'll put them in the deep freeze for later use.

This just scratches the surface of the pecans we'll have on hand.  We'll be shelling pecans all winter long, both on the patio and in front of the fireplace.  It's a good thing that we love pecan pies!  If you drop by to visit, we'll send you home with some shelled pecans.  Maybe Tricia will share her oven roasted pecan recipe with you.  It's got Worcestershire Sauce in it.  They are so addictive that you might have to attend a 12 step program once you've indulged.  

If Life Gives You Lemons...

Our next door neighbors are so good to us.  We look out for one another and help each other when needed.  On Thanksgiving morning, we received a call from them telling us not to worry if we heard anything, because everything was alright.  She then proceeded to explain that her husband and son were out duck hunting on the bayou in their bass boat.  It was before daylight and they made a turn and the wind was blowing real hard.  The waves lapped over the edges of the boat and swamped it.  It sunk and they had to be rescued by Wildlife & Fisheries.  They had a lot to be thankful for, though.  No one was injured and, believe it or not, they were able to return the next day and recover the boat!

They called us again on a happier note.  Their lemon tree had produced more than they could eat.  They invited us to go pick all we want.  Tricia walked over and picked a basketful.  We plan to go get some more or they'll all go to waste.  I wish I would have something to put beside them so that you could see their size.  These lemons are double the size of the store-bought lemon.

Here's what we like to do with them.  We slice them in half on a cutting board.  We use an old fashioned juicer to extract all the juice from the lemons.  We do this also with oranges and tangerines.

We pour through a sieve and into a 4 cup measuring cup.  This strains out the seeds an pulp.  I use a spoon to press any remaining juice in the pulp through the sieve.

I pour into ice cube trays.  Remember ice cube trays?  We don't use these to make ice anymore, but they still serve a number of purposes.

When they are full, i put them in the deep freeze for four hours or so.  You've just got to be careful, because if you spill some, it makes a sticky mess.  Ask me how I know.

Once frozen, we pop the lemon juice ice cubes into a gallon sized zip loc bag.  Then, whenever recipes call for lemon juice, we grab the bag out of the freezer and thaw out however many cubes we need for the recipe.

When life (or a good neighbor) gives you lemons, make lemon juice (or lemonade, if you wish).

A Favorite Idea for Peppers

It seems as if all of our peppers struggle mightily during the long summer days, wilting and not producing much at all.  As the days grow shorter and the temps fall off a bit, the peppers catch a second wind.  Suddenly, we are awash in peppers.  We're pickling (by lacto-fermentation) quart after quart of banana peppers.  We brought several baskets of banana peppers to give away at church as everyone likes pickling them.  We're dehydrating jalapenos and habaneros and grinding them into pepper.  We're making poppers with jalapenos and hot banana peppers.  We're dicing and freezing Anaheim peppers that Tricia uses to cook with.  In fact, the wife told me, "There's no sense in planting bell peppers anymore.  They haven't been producing well and Anaheims are better."

And then I went and checked on the bell peppers and there was a half dozen of them on the little bell pepper plant.  Well, what do you know?  They must have heard that they were fixing to be stricken from the planting rotation and quickly produced to save their spot.

 I brought them inside and we promptly cleaned them up and cored them.  We had an idea for supper tonight - something we hadn't done in a while: Stuffed Bell Peppers!  Tricia has a quick recipe that she puts together.  It's basically dirty rice, with a little tomato sauce added and then topped off with cheese, put in a baking pan and toss in the oven for a spell.  Some people like them topped with tomato paste/sauce, but we like cheese on top.  They turned out so good, we brought a couple to our son, Russ, who lives in a town about 10 miles away.  Russ loves peppers.  He said they are his favorite vegetable in the garden.

As is often the case, we had too much stuffing and not enough bell peppers.  So we did what anybody would do.  We made do with what we had on hand.  We have an abundance of beautiful Anaheim peppers on hand.  Anaheims will not stand up, so I just sliced them in half, making something sort of like a boat.  We spooned the stuffing into the Anaheim boats.  While bell peppers are sweet, Anaheims have a little heat, but not much.  Mild, I would call them.

The last few nights, the temperatures have dipped into the mid-30's.  The peppers will continue to produce until the freeze gets 'em.  For right now, we're still picking and finding delicious things to do with them.

Mission Accomplished

Right outside the garden gate, I caught a little creature.  A bug.  A ladybug, to be precise.  It could have been a gentlemanbug, perhaps, as I'm not sure how to tell them apart.  The bug was quickly trying to get away, but I wanted her (or him) back in the garden.  Ladybugs are beneficial insects.  I need all of them that we can handle as the stinkbugs absolutely tear up my tomatoes and right now, I'm having a heck of a time with caterpillars on our beets.

Let's get to the heart of tonight's post, Mission Accomplished.  That phrase is often used when a goal is achieved.  George W. Bush infamously put a banner up, if I recall correctly, that had that phrase on it, and I don't think at that point that the mission was accomplished.  Sometimes the goal is reached; however, and this is one of those times.  What am I speaking of?

Each year as the summer heat beats down, I long for cooler temperatures and a respite from the high heat and humidity.  It is in those dog days of summer that I plant a row or two of green beans.  Snap beans, you might call them.  The goal is this: We want to have mature fresh green beans to harvest and eat as a side dish for Thanksgiving Day.  To this end, I planted two rows of Contender Green Beans that I had saved from seed from the spring crop.  They germinated and grew and here is a photo of them the day before Thanksgiving:

The plants, other than some leaves that insects ate on, look good.  But we need to look beneath the canopy to see if we reached our goal.  Drum roll, please.  Well, how about that?  I see mature green beans, ready to harvest.  I also see some that need another week of growing time, and then I see blooms that promise more beans after that!  Looks like a healthy crop of Thanksgiving green beans.

I picked a bucket full of the ripened ones.  Some were a little over ripe, but we'll eat them.  After Tricia washed them, I snapped off the ends of the beans and stringed them.

It's always a good idea to string them, especially as they are a little larger or the strings are a tough when you're feasting on them.  One thing is for sure, fresh green beans are a real treat.  Tricia sort of stir fried these in butter and added dried cranberries and chopped pecans for a nice, festive, tasty side dish.

Mission Accomplished on this year's crop of fall green beans.  We had a mighty fine mess of them and believe it or not, we just finished up on the leftovers tonight.  The best part is, these Contender green beans will continue producing for us until the frost kills the plant.  We may actually be able to freeze or can some to set aside for the winter months.

Happy Thanksgiving 2024

Thanksgiving 2024.  I hope you had a great one!  This is always my favorite holiday.  We started it out reading about the first Thanksgiving.  William Bradford and the pilgrims fleeing persecution and arriving in the New World at the Plymouth Colony in 1620.  Life was hard and they suffered loss, but their faith in God was strong and over time and with much effort, they succeeded.  Good lessons for today!

A stiff north wind blew all day.  We lit a fire in the fire pit and enjoyed its warmth.  Tricia, Russ and Benjamin were here for lunch, along with Mom & Dad, my mom's cousin, Julee Rae, my brother, Kristian and his wife, Emery, and their chocolate lab, Scout.

Tricia, Benjamin & Russ

In the evening, we gathered around the fire pit and talked while the fire blazed.  My sister, Jenny and her husband, Brett along with most of their 6 boys were here for supper.

We ate entirely too much food, and we laughed and visited, enjoying good conversation and each other's company.  Not everyone was able to make it and we deeply miss those that weren't here.  As time marches on, we learn to appreciate the little things.  In retrospect, the little things aren't so little.  We don't know how long we have with one another, so we value greatly each moment.

Brett, Jenny, Dad, Mom, me, Tricia, Emery & Kristian (with Scout in the foreground)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  God is so good to us.  Even though we've suffered loss this year (Tricia's brother, Orlando), we've experienced His Goodness, His Presence and His Love as He strengthens us.