muppet patriots sing it proudly...

happy 4th of july!



I'm going to spend my 4th of July on the Frio river -- floating in the cool, cool water and being a lazy bum and recuperating. For someone who wants to spend more time at home and less time traveling, I seem to travel a lot, no? I have declared August to be "Thalassa stays home" month. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime, I'll be making homemade vanilla ice cream and roasting marshmallows far away from home. Envy my ice cream! It was my grandma's fantastic no-cook recipe and it always brings back wonderful, sweet, sticky memories of running around the backyard at her house. We had to dodge around the pomegranates that had fallen from the trees because they would trip up small children, they were so big. And we had to jump over the French drain my grandfather had installed smack across the yard for reasons none of us could ascertain at the time. It was just a speed bump to us. And we weren't allowed to repeat any of the more interesting words my grandparents used.

But we had ice cream, and inflatable swimming pools, and tree swings, and my grandma poured whole bottles of bubble soap into cookie sheets so everybody could get their bubble wand into the stuff at once. We didn't have to crowd all 6 of us around the tiny neck of a bottle to make bubbles in her yard, no! She made the most delightful cobbler, grew the sweetest strawberries, and -naturally- froze the best ice cream on the planet. My grandfather would pour the salt into the ice and pretend to be grumpy when we stole the salty hunks of ice out of the bucket and grouse about how much better that ice cream would taste if he made us kids turn a crank handle for it instead of using electricity. It's what love feels like, to me. So I make sure to share it every 4th of July and any time in the summer that I can get more than three people to stand still around a whining bucket of ice.