Thursday Dinner

Thursdays Tom and I (and often DiAnne, bless her sweet self)cook for the farmers, and whoever drops by. Last night I stopped to shop at the shed on the way up to the house--picked up tomatoes and butternut squash. Pulled up some carrots from our garden by the kitchen.

Made roasted butternut soup (with roasted carrots, peppers, onions, an apple, orange juice, and whatever else was orange and within reach), filled out leftover pasta salad with the tomatoes, and Tom heated up some Scottsboro barbecue and made slaw--as always, with too much celery seed.

Then Eric showed up with this gorgeous basket. You can't see the lovely little potatoes underneath. Arugula and our very own Shitakes!

Arugula under the pasta. DiAnne made a green bean casserole (every bit from scratch, with our own green beans), and brownies turned up with Mark and Stephanie, a strawberry pie with Elizabeth and Raina. (Though Raina, true to her 18-month-old self, mainly wandered around, climbed on chairs, and said "no!", both tentatively and definitively.)

And tonight, maybe risotto with the mushrooms. Arugula omelet for lunch?

Yo-Yo. Rollergrrls. Moon.

Yo-Yo Ma in the incomparable Schermerhorn on Friday night: an all-Dvorak concert, and the Nashville Symphony is terrific!

Saturday night went to see the Nashville Roller Derby--a wonderfully gritty evening in the old Municipal Auditorium, with Rambo and Maiden America skating on a flat concrete floor, families and friends hollering from the sidelines. This is just plain fun, once you figure out what the jammer is.

Sunday: DiAnne's melt-in-mouth green beans and meatloaf, a full moon sailing between the trees, and our first-of-the-year Victoria bloom--an armful of gorgeous floating in the pond.

This morning folks are gathering to help put up our hoop house, which has been a bit of a skeletal embarrassment since we got the supports up months ago but haven't made much progress since. Until today. PortaPotty in place. Cumberland River Compact literature out. I dropped off a pot of veggie beans.

Really. You gotta love Nashville, don't ya?

Scottsboro 55th Barbecue

Blazing--that would be the wood fires all night long under 95 pork shoulders, tended by shifts of our neighbors. And that would be the day of the barbecue, tagged at 101 on the Lewis'Country Store billboard.

Our local Community Club has been doing barbecue on Labor Day Saturday for 55 years, and anyone and everyone who has ever lived in or around the area seems to show up--country band, a bit of sedate boot-scootin', and really good barbecue, beans, slaw, cornbread (the kind that looks like a stout pancake), kid's games, yard sales.

After rounding at the hospital, I served 'cue for a couple of hours, then scrubbed up a considerable pile of pots and pans, and the steam table. My fellow dishwasher was Linda, just retired from 39 years as a Metro bus driver. Miss Nancy worked on cornbread, George O. managed the cashbox.

Tom pulled pork for a while, but our real hero is Jim, who took the midnight shift and then worked most of the day as well. One guy drives from Knoxville each year to help out--grew up on Bull Run Road, and painted the Club and installed the swings for his Eagle Scout project twenty-five years ago.

I've lived out here since 1983, but am still a newbie by CC standards. We enjoy the overlapping generations and shifting groups that mark this as a real community, not an artificial, pay-to-get-through-the-gate simulacrum.

And, by the way, George tells me he's taken up pipe smoking. Burning holes in his pink shirts.

That's all the news for now.