Four different people insisted that we go to Jeni’s in East Nashville for Ice Cream, so, obviously some totally-unnecessary-but-absolutely-necessary 11am ice cream snacks were in order. Oh, my, the flavors! Two scoops each, clockwise from Daddy’s (hiding behind the flowers): Brambleberry Crisp and Loveless Biscuits and Peach Jam, Mama’s Queen City Cayenne (a rich, spicy dark chocolate) and Sweet Corn and Black Raspberries, Sweetheart’s Askinosie Dark Milk Chocolate and Bananas + Honey, and my Salty Caramel and Brown Butter Almond Brittle. Words can’t even begin to describe.
Category: Adventures
Music All Day
In Nashville the music goes all day. Every morning, the neon starts to buzz and the doors fling open with a gust of that very particular bar-beery-bleachy funk that quickly gives way the smell of cooking breakfast and the sound of a thousand honky tonks tuning up. From 11am, to 2am, music comes from every doorway, a buncha “Friends in Low Places”, a few “Redneck Woman”s, and a whole lotta “Wagon Wheel”s. And while every place has a (pretty incredible) live band, only Robert’s Western World plays the old country music exclusively. Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams… the good old stuff. A recession special gets you a thick-fried baloney sandwich on white bread, a bag of chips, and a beer for $5, the walls are lined with boots, the floor is covered in sawdust, and from morning to midnight it’s absolutely glorious. 
Take that, talking pumpkin
Move over plastic pumpkins, decorative gourds, and automated motion sensor witches that say things like “Witch goul are you!?” when you walk by (seen/vaguely startled by this yesterday at Lowe’s while trying to buy rake hands). Those kind of cheap-o made-in-China disposable decorations? Pshaw. This house, a low-slung shotgun in New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, has it nailed. So simple, so awesome, I’d keep this crazy driftwood-spanish-moss-raven tableaux up all year. 
Thanks to Miss McKay for adventures in spanish moss and for the top picture.
Oh, Hello America
Well, hello there. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, America. A long while since we’ve gotten down and dirty and traveled an expanse other than the I-95 corridor. A while since we’ve flown past cotton fields just starting to brown and jut out their soft fluffy whiteness, through soft old mountains and densely wooded hushed battlefields, across ancient migratory paths and deep silted deltas, sawgrass palmetto swamps with Spanish Moss overhead and small cool rivers gilded in a Miami-pink-and-aqua deco-copper palette sunset with geese reflected in the almost still water, heading to warmth as winter marches ever southward. It’s been too long since we heard your music, your mountain twang, your river strut, your slouching blues, your wealth of sound, as thick as the cicadas still are in October on the dark dirt byways of the Natchez Trace. It’s been a while since I’ve seen your moon from the road, watched it go from a tiny crescent over Appalachia, grand and slow over the big river, and foggy and waxing almost full over the Bywater. And, just as we were gone, now we’re home. The garden needs tending, the leaves are down, wood needs to be stacked, and America, you are here too.
map from here, it’s a very large file size, I’m thinking of maybe having it printed large scale? thoughts tousle at home…
Off to the Races
What could be better than a perfect indian summer day spent outside eating fried chicken and drinking champagne with your family and your best friends? That+horses. My nine year old self would approve.
The Catbird Seat
It must be getting on fall… the dogwood started sporting red leaves back in late July, we hear the geese in chevron flying overhead every twilight, and Jeff says the wooly bears started coming out last week (the fuzzies are apparently an ancient harbinger of winter). And the birds are back. After a summer of desolation at the bird feeders, the suet melting in the heat, the millet moldering behind its squirrel proof cage, the birds are swooping in again. Chit chattering all morning through to cocktail hour, fattening up their glossy summer plumage before it’s time to brown down. Dr. Russell the Cat Scientist is constantly taking data measurements and consulting his reference tomes watching them at the window, from the catbird seat.
Spy Rock
Miss Rav and Ann Marie and I had gotten a recommendation for a new hike: “it’s kind of a slog, but I swear it’s totally worth it when you get to the top. You’ll just have to see for yourselves” our sort-of-out-of-shape friend said, and that’s the ideal reference point for hiking advice for me. I don’t want trail-running triathletes to tell me something’s a walk in the park, especially if I’m of the mindset that the airbrushed alter-ego trucker hat that Rav gave me and a tribal necklace will be sufficient for “hiking equipment”. 
Our friend was right, the hike itself was a relatively short (5 miles round trip) but insistently steep trek ending with a sheer-rock-face scramble up to a bald point of granite, Spy Rock itself… we were pretty sweaty, but when we reached the summit, took in the stunning 360 degree views of the Shenandoah valley on all sides, and felt the breeze through our hair, well, it was totally worth it. 
And here’s a video Ann Marie took because it’s awesome. “Do you think we can hike to that rock outcropping?” “Maybe we can fly there”.
Montauk
And then we packed up the F-150 with surfboards, bikes, lounge chairs, coffee, guitars, scarves, whiskey, tents, necklaces, and bahn mi’s and headed out to Montauk. We judiciously used our lack of showering and/or anywhere with a roof to go to avoid becoming embroiled in any of the overarching Montauk sceneyness, and pretty much spent all of our time gazing at the ocean, getting into it, surfing/watching the surfers, eating fried seafood, and drinking beer. That, singing songs, killing a Thursday NYT crossword, and waking up to infinity stretching off into the distance and it was an alright time indeed.
Thank you to AMR for the snap of the surfboards and for inviting me along for a little tag-team-third-wheel.
blah. blah. blah.
In New York this week, I’ve been here for 24 hours and so far I’ve already seen four bands, eaten pork buns, Ippudo ramen, and a pretty killing patty melt, held a baby, and ridden 11 CitiBikes. So far so great. Can’t wait to see what the rest of the week brings.
Silver Streak
Maybe it’s the time I’ve been spending aboard Journelle’s The Grey Lady—an airstream trailer retrofit as a rolling lingerie salon and champagne den— but I can’t get the graceful silver bullets out of my mind. Oh, adventure!
Feather By Feather 