THE PATH TO SEASONALITY
I fell in love with the Texas hill country the minute I set foot on the University of Texas campus in Austin, and I've been trying to get back there ever since. I arrived as a proper young lady in 1971, intending to major in Home Economics and work as a fashion merchandiser until I settled down to become a wife and mother. I started out wearing dresses, stockings and makeup to class every day. I also spent hours trying to tame my naturally curly hair into a sleek do. Then I discovered freedom.
Austin in the 70's was a place of new ideas: women's rights, anti-war demonstrations, environmental issues, vegetarians and health foods, street vendors and hippies. I never quite went so far as to become a real hippie (just couldn't get into that free love and drugs stuff) but I certainly sympathized with many of their issues, and it wasn't long before the dresses and stockings were discarded in favor of jeans, sandals, peasant blouses and wild curly hair.
Career plans got sidetracked when I fell in love with an engineering student who happened to be a waiter in my dorm. We married the minute I graduated, and began the nomadic life of oil company employees. As we moved from Indonesia to Bahrain, we talked about someday finding jobs in the Austin area and moving back. When we lived in Houston, then in west Texas, we took frequent weekend trips to the hill country with our two children. We went rafting and "toobing", and explored the many small towns in the area, to see which were our favorites. When we moved back overseas, we talked about buying a little cottage in the hill country, to use as our home base during our lengthy home visits each summer. We somehow never got around to it, but I never gave up on the idea. Meanwhile, I became obsessed with reading books about people who were actually living "the good life" - people like Helen and Scott Nearing in Vermont, Eliot Colemon and Barbara Damrosch in Maine, Frances Mayes in Tuscany and Peter Mayle in Provence. And I kept dreaming.
All of this reading eventually led to an epiphany - an honest-to-goodness, gen-u-ine, life altering revelation. One day I was standing in front of my bookcase, gazing at all of my favorites, and thinking about what I had learned from each. Suddenly it occurred to me that there was a common thread running through them all - something I dubbed "seasonality". For instance, in her book
Simple Abundance, Sarah ban Breathnach taught me that by bringing the seasons indoors to decorate my home, I would rarely grow tired of where I lived. Eliot and Barbara, who's TV show
Gardening Naturally had so inspired me, taught me that just as it's easier to write sonnet than free verse, it is also easier to cook well with seasonal limitations, for they spur one's imagination. Ferenc Mate told me, in his book
A Reasonable Life, that if we ate only "what is grown within a thousand miles of our bloody little houses", we might have the great pleasure you get from expectation and waiting, that special joy you feel on Christmas morning. Now if only we could find a place in the hill country, and put into practice all this new found wisdom!
Next thing you know, we were back in the states, our kids were in junior high and high school, and again we were spending all of our free time heading to hill country towns like Boerne, Fredericksburg, Blanco and New Braunfels. Each town has a distinct flavor all its own. One is very German - a great place to eat sausage and dance to an oom-pah band. Another is the best place to go rafting, but the area we felt most drawn to was the area around Wimberley, midway between two college towns. It seemed to be the area that attracted the glass-blowers, the potters, the musicians and bona fide characters. In fact, it was easy to imagine that many of the hippies who sold jewelry and crafts on "The Drag" in Austin during the 70's, were still alive and well in Wimberley! (I never saw quite so many vegetarian dishes on restaurant menus anywhere else.) I admit I had harbored some ambiguity about moving to a small town. I longed for the sense of community and the slower lifestyle they seemed to offer, but worried that we might also run into narrow-mindedness and prejudice - two things we had tried very hard
not to teach our kids. With so many artists and environmentalists living in the area, I felt hopeful that we could have the best of both worlds here.
* * * * *
When we were taking our daughter Alexis around to visit different colleges, two of her possibilities were in the hill country. One was the University of Texas in Austin. The other was Texas State University, in San Marcos. John and I both went to UT, and adored it, but it was a very different place thirty years ago. We thought it was humongous at 30,000 students, but that was nothing compared to the size it is now. The town of Austin is nothing like I remember it either. In fact, it's not a town anymore. It's a huge bustling city, with all the traffic and woes that go along with that.
When it came time for Lex to go tour the Texas State campus, John was tied up with work and couldn't get away. I had driven there from Dallas before, and it was just a straight shot down I-35, but I had no idea how to get there from our new home in Katy, so I went on-line and downloaded some instructions. We set out bright and early on a beautiful, sunny day, and went zipping along I-10 until we hit the town of Luling, famous for their annual Watermelon Thump festival (they even have a water tower that looks like a gigantic melon). At this point, our instructions said to exit I-10 and turn left, so we did. Then we drove, and we drove, and we drove, until finally I realized something had to be wrong. At last we came to a little filling station out in the middle of nowhere, and I stopped to go in and ask for assistance.
The lady behind the counter was chatting with a couple of cowboys when I walked through the door, but they all turned their attention on me as I approached the counter. When I asked if this was the road to San Marcos, the men started to grin. The lady asked, in her slow, Texas drawl, "Jew git those duh-rek-shuns awf that inner-nay-ut?" When I said yes, all three started chuckling, and she said "That figgers". Apparently I'm not the first to make this mistake, and we should have turned right at Luling, not left. I got back into the car, told Alexis what she had said, and we retraced our steps. Later, when John called to check on us, Lex told him of our misadventures. Since she hadn't gone into the filling station with me, I was shocked to hear her do a perfect imitation of the lady's Texas twang. I said "Oh my gosh, that's exactly what she sounded like! How did you know?" She got a funny look on her face, then replied "Mom, I wasn't imitating her. I was imitating you!" Well, shee-yut. Guess I've been back in Texas just a mite too long.
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