Life On Snob Hill: The Thanksgiving We Planned — and the One That Arrived

A holiday pared down in attendance but rich in intention — where memories, music, and the company that arrives carry more weight than a crowded table ever could.

A small Thanksgiving relic from the years when our sons and their cousins staged covert ops to see who could reach the butter turkey first—and claim the honor of beheading it. We cherish that memory, even as our table has moved on from novelty poultry to the quiet luxury of Isigny Ste Mère Beurre d’Isigny. Some traditions stay, some melt away.

This year’s Snob Hill Thanksgiving was supposed to be a quiet, out-of-town affair at our Other Place in LoMo (lower Missouri) — just the two of us and the furchildren, well off the family grid. By pared-down, we meant only in headcount. The food, even for two, would still have been a magnificent feast. We weren’t escaping anything so much as stepping into the first day of what might become a new cycle — a different way of approaching the holiday altogether.

And then, as it so often does, life rearranged the seating chart. What we thought would be a table for two (plus a couple of hound dogs lurking for scraps) quietly expanded. Dad decided to join us — welcome news that felt right the moment he said it. Then a long-time friend, suddenly unmoored from her usual circle of gal-pals and nearby family, complimented our Facebook menu post. We replied, as we always mean it, “you’re always invited.” A few days later — the weekend before Thanksgiving — she half-apologized and then invited herself. Which, of course, was exactly the point. Our small table was now full. A Thanksgiving blessing, delivered in increments.

Over the years we’ve learned that the best gatherings, whether bustling or still, begin with our standing mantra: make it the best day, no matter who shows up.

The Murky Business of “Tradition”

The funny thing about traditions is that the real ones are rarely announced. They happen on their own timetable, without ceremony or proclamation. Deciding — or even noticing — when something becomes a tradition is murky at best. Can we ever truly know when a moment earns its “Because Its Tradition” seal of approval? Most first attempts don’t feel like traditions. They feel like experiments.

Take the year we handed out small journals to our sons — and to ourselves — to capture hopes and predictions for the coming year. We’d read about it in a magazine and pictured laughter, teasing, rediscovery. Instead, writing something meaningful on command proved harder than anticipated. The next year, the journals sat dejected and unopened at the bottom of a box with the decorations. When we found them again years later, someone snorted, “Oh, remember when Dad made us do that?” The laughter that followed was probably more memorable than anything we had written inside. The road to tradition is littered with these hopeful firsts that never earned their second time.

We sometimes wonder why Thanksgiving — the one holiday that keeps pulling us back to the page — continues to insist on being examined, remembered, and written about. Maybe it’s because nostalgia is a sixth sense on Snob Hill, guiding us toward the rituals that root us. Or maybe it’s because that Norman Rockwell ideal was baked deeply into us, and we’re still sorting out its meaning.

And yet, this holiday isn’t without its complications. Two years ago, a family member who will remain anonymous — unprompted and staring at their still-empty plate as though it were a historical crime scene — launched into a quiet but sweeping, tsk-tsking critique of Thanksgiving itself. They delivered a mumbled précis on whitewashed history, colonialism, genocide, the mythologizing of Pilgrims, the erasure of Indigenous voices, and the lingering stereotypes embedded in everything from school pageants to the green bean casserole. It was, in its way, impressively comprehensive — sentiments we could acknowledge, and perhaps even agree with, in a different setting — but it landed with all the subtlety of a fire alarm during grace. It felt, in the moment, as though they had hashtagged our holiday — and not in a good way.

Forks hovered mid-air. No one quite knew what to say except, perhaps, “pass the rolls.” If we believed in a kiddie table, they might have found themselves reassigned. And if the holiday were truly that objectionable to them, why show up at all? The moment was awkward, yes, but it also underscored something we already knew: Thanksgiving holds multitudes, and people bring their own meanings — and their own misgivings — to the table. And this holiday — among all the holidays we’ve lived through — is the one that keeps pulling us back to the page.

Both of us were raised with that Rockwell image — the big table, the perfect bird, the generational tableau. We absorbed it osmotically. But our current reality looks different. As the unified family Thanksgiving table gradually dissolved, the COVID years arrived — two seasons when we cooked the entire meal and then delivered it, standing back while masked relatives waved from porches. After that, as the table continued to shrink, we found ourselves operating a sort of culinary speakeasy — invitation-only, intimate, the care amplified rather than spread thin. Perhaps we’ve always loved the pursuit of a beautiful Thanksgiving more than the Rockwell version itself. And yes, we like having a hand on the tiller. Control isn’t everything, but it does season the stock.

Food Snobs? Hardly — But We Do Sweat the Details

At the risk of sounding like food snobs among the grateful — or the ungrateful — we aren’t. Our table has always welcomed comfort. We built the meal with intention, but never barred the door to beloved personal dishes. One mother swore by her Kraft macaroni and cheese, certain the grandsons adored her version. Its secret ingredient, revealed near the end of her life, was onion salt. Who were we to deny such tender alchemy? So we served it. Taste memory is its own cuisine.

That same mother was a devotee of sweet potato casserole, covered in igloos of marshmallows (natch), which, frankly, we consider an edible abomination. But did we show our disdain? No. We doubled down and made quite a show of landing the dish like a televised Apollo splashdown, though we did politely pass it along unscooped during its orbit of the table. More for Mom, we thought.

One nephew loved canned cranberry sauce, so we dutifully opened a can and plopped it onto crystal, its ridged aluminum imprint proudly intact. Everyone deserves a favorite at the table, however it arrives.

We were nearly embarrassed when another nephew (then in his early 20s), the one we’ve dubbed the sufferer of Clever Child Syndrome, became exasperated as we passed the oven-baked potatoes — a recipe of one of our mothers — noting that we had made his favorite. The clever nephew exclaimed, “Jesus, these are not my favorite. I said I liked them one time when I was a kid and now you serve them every year!” Well, yes, we did because we wanted to please. It’s okay to change one’s mind and taste buds, but that seemed overly insensitive. We can forgive the lapse.

Now that our table is smaller, we can shape the menu more closely to our own preferences. Mom’s mac and cheese and Sister’s salad had their place, and we honored them. But those were everyday foods. A festive feast, in our view, should lean into dishes you make only once a year — the ones that ask more of you and give more in return. That’s how we define a special meal — with an emphasis on special.

The Annual Playlist — Culinary and Otherwise

We love planning. Otherwise why would Thanksgiving begin to creep into our conversations in August? Every year, the ideas return like migrating birds — familiar shapes in refreshed patterns. Our Thanksgiving folder — an actual manila file labeled with menus, shopping lists, and emotional weather reports — has become a time capsule. Each year has its own playlist, its own folder, its own snapshot of who we were.

This year’s Thanksgiving has nudged us toward contemplating “last things” — not in sadness, but in clarity. We encountered the ecological term cage relic — the last surviving specimen of a species held in captivity. A humbling idea, but one that touched us. Some of our traditions feel like that: the last of their line, kept alive because we choose to keep them.

The Turducken That Never Was

Of course, one of us (we’ll let readers guess which) has long championed replacing the turkey with a turducken. The campaign began in the ’80s. But back when we hosted the whole family, a turducken would have landed like a turd. This was a clan that blanched when we introduced soup as an opening course — even in pumpkin-shaped tureens with individual lidded pumpkins. Half refused. Those refusers no longer sit at our table.

And soup is still served — though not this year, when the menu charted a different course.

A Quieter Rhythm

So this year, we take what comes. One son lives nearby, though he and his wife will be in Nebraska with her family. The other son lives in Los Angeles, and their rotation is fixed: one year with her family, one with her mother, one with us. Every third year, our table has a different vibe, with more stories, told faster and at a higher volume, and seconds of everything. And, yes, more than bit exhausting.

And yet writing Life on Snob Hill risks sounding insulated, as though our quirks are sngular. They aren’t. When we posted our menu on Facebook last week, a friend who almost never comments wrote: “Same here. Just the two of us.” His daughters and their partners also had other plans. It was a reminder that we’re not alone in this new landscape of rotating holidays and shifting tables.

The Menu

This year’s menu reflects that spirit — dishes we make only once annually, with joy and intention:

• Wild Mushroom and Prosciutto Turkey Roulade
• Skillet Cornbread Dressing with rosemary and sage
• Sweet Potato Biscuits
• Twice-Baked Cauliflower
• Green Bean Casserole

And yes, you read that right: a turkey roulade. Turkey has always been the least interesting part of the meal, but we’re not ready to retire it. We’ve tried it all — dry brines, wet brines, phyllo wraps, smoking. This year, we’re roulading.

Dessert, as always, holds court: Pecan Pie Cheesecake and Apple Stack Cake with Caramel Frosting.

Setting the Table

We used to spend cold, rainy November weekends driving through a nearby wildlife refuge, snipping bittersweet like guilty poachers and listening to George Winston’s Autumn or December. Music is its own seasoning. Nietzsche reminded us that “without music, life would be a mistake.” Thanksgiving without music would be something lesser. Winston sets the tone, John Denver warms the kitchen, and stadium rock keeps the pre-guest energy high.

We’ve never set the same table twice.Every table tells a story, and ours this year trades china for thrifted Thanksgiving plates — humble, right, and exactly enough. A few pumpkins, some cedar branches from our woods, and the smell of something warm in the oven stitch the moment together.

The Heart of the Holiday

Harold Bloom reminded us that art earns its power through beauty and imagination, not by drowning in context. Thanksgiving works the same way. We could annotate every dish — but the holiday lives in the tasting and the togetherness.

The magic lives in the hush when rolls emerge from the oven, the frenetic choreography of plate-passing, the gentle chaos of gravy boats and laughter. For a few hours, a table becomes its own tiny country, its borders drawn in linen and candlelight.

Bloom might warn against “the schools of resentment,” then take a second slice of pie. The meaning is in the moment, not the margins. On this day, context is gravy. Gratitude is what we taste.

Last weekend, an acquaintance wished us: “I hope you have the Thanksgiving you want.” A simple blessing, surprisingly resonant. We do feel nostalgia for Thanksgivings past, but resist over-polishing them. Not every gathering brimmed with harmony. And still — here we are.

And perhaps that’s the quiet reassurance threaded through this year: we’re finding our way, yes, but so is everyone else. Small tables, shifting plans, rotating holidays — none of it makes the day lesser. If anything, it makes gratitude feel shared.

This year, pared down as it is, might just be the Thanksgiving we want — a table that filled itself, a meal shaped by our hands, a quieter rhythm that feels exactly right. The kind of holiday that inspires one of those vintage postcards we love: Wish You Were Here.

This year’s Thanksgiving will be the best of them, for now — but we know next year will have its say.

Life On Snob Hill: Of Legacy, Latitude, and Attitude

Autumn thoughts on inheritance, impermanence, analog living and learning to harmonize a life in the greater St. Louis region, and St. Charles in particular

As readers, we are grazers — we live our lives nibbling at what life has to offer. We take what we believe we need, riskily leave what we believe we do not. Yes, we feast occasionally on one writer or one kind of book, but most days we graze across the shelves, across the hours. Lately our plate has been heavy with memoirs and biographies, especially those rooted in Paris in the teens and thirties or in New York during the same electric era — stories of artists, thinkers, wanderers and restless creative lives.

In this grazing, we stumbled upon a line by George Eliot who, despite the best efforts of several professors in our past, never quite set root in us. Sorry, Middlemarch — still a slog. But this line from somewhere else in her work caught us unexpectedly: “Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love — that makes life and nature harmonize.” We do not know exactly where it came from, and it hardly matters — the sentiment landed.

In our callow youth we might have clung to melancholy, believing ache equaled depth. Today it is harmonize that follows us down the garden path. Politics and modern life aside, we work as hard at harmonizing as we do in our gardens, rooms and walls — pulling the threads of our days into something whole here in St. Charles, just northwest of St. Louis, where the suburbs thin into woods and fields and where tending a handmade life still feels possible.

The word legacy comes from the Latin legatus, meaning ambassador, envoy, deputy — someone entrusted to carry something forward. (Yes, we looked it up.) Over centuries the meaning narrowed to property and money, then widened again to include reputation, values, influence — the intangible inheritance of character and place. Sven Birkerts once wrote that every act of reading is also an act of remembering, and that feels right here — a word can hold both history and longing. Yet language keeps shrinking, meanings pared down by speed and convenience. A shame; language is at its best when it stretches to hold memory and possibility.

We once assumed legacy meant leaving something to our sons — money, perhaps. A way of giving what we had not been given in our own Midwestern upbringing. But two truths: A) we may not have much to leave (as our own parents did not), and B) even if we could, money feels impersonal, tinged with entitlement.

We also assumed legacy meant grandchildren. That hoped-for chapter seems to have passed. And so we turn again toward the inner life — toward the kind of legacy one builds with words, photographs, gardens and the stubborn, hopeful labor of making meaning where one stands.

Marcus Aurelius reminded us that all things vanish quickly — bodies and memory both. Stephen Koch modernized the point: if no one minds the story, it dissolves. Both knew what we are learning on this little rise above the Missouri River valley: remembrance is never guaranteed.

We walk, too often, through Legacy Land — a Brigadoon-ish territory thick with emotional tar pits, where one step can feel like trudging through Mordor. Or, to use Tolkien’s name, the Land of Shadow. Ann Patchett, writing recently in The New Yorker, reminded us that death cannot be managed; perhaps legacy is simply our attempt to negotiate with that unmanageability.

Legacy, we now see, is not tangible. It lives in the minds of others — terrain we cannot landscape. Acceptance circles back on Snob Hill like a stray cat we keep coaxing closer. Acceptance demands diligence and patience — the former we have, the latter remains a work in progress.

We read. We write. We photograph — still often with film, because some legacies deserve grain and patience. We live. We tend our small patch — proof that process outshines product.

Impermanence also shows up in objects. One of us received the musket and powder horn, the banker’s table, the watches. To the side, our sister received Mom’s jewelry — the key quietly passed along, the costume pieces left behind. Title over merit. A familiar Midwestern family story. Twice told, on both sides.

That sister now earns her living as a business and performance coach — and a succession planner. Irony knows its stage. To her credit, she asked our father to deliver the news. But years have passed with no gesture, no small offering to say, “This too was yours.” Not right-a-wrong stuff — just acknowledgment. Silence polished the bruise rather than healing it.

Another father nearly handed a will to the wrong heir because “he is the son.” Enter Monty Python: “Someday, son, all this will be yours.” “What, the curtains?” In this case, the heir was a drug runner, addict, serial bankrupt — yet tradition trumped judgment. Time softened that sting. The jewelry’s remains sharper.

One of our sons says there is too much secrecy in our family. He is not wrong. Our family-night viewing was “Antiques Roadshow” and “Secrets of the Dead.” Hidden things, provenance, burial and unearthing — and the smug righteousness of PBS. Some inherit silver; we inherited silence and curiosity wrapped in good manners.

Autumn sharpens such reflections. Light angles, leaves crisp, the gardens show bone. We imagine relics — not relics yet, though the knees have opinions. We hope to be remembered less for objects than for how we tended, looked, made, cared.

We imagined grandparenthood — Midwestern porch rocking and soup wisdom. Artist Amy Sherald once said her grandmother was the internet. We felt that. We had elders who held the world together with casseroles and quiet knowing. We hoped to do the same. Life chose otherwise.

We look instead to gentler continuance. Writer Reyes Ramirez imagines future generations discovering that he “spoke and wrote and loved.” We hold that hope too. Ours may not travel through genealogy. Perhaps a niece or cousin-branch descendant — maybe even one from the jewelry side — will stumble across us and feel a tug. They will not, of course, be fastening a brooch or ring lifted under the gentle banner of “family decisions.” But they may receive something less portable and more durable: a sentence that stays, an image that sharpens, a story that steadies. Legacies slip past velvet pouches and land where curiosity lives.

Thinking too long about legacy courts loneliness. Better to return to living.

C. S. Lewis wrote about bombs, but the wisdom holds: if legacy comes, let it find us planting, repainting, writing, cooking, laughing — not huddled around theories of remembrance.

So we build. We tend. Sheds, trellises, fire pits, raised beds — the quiet handmade architecture of a life in St. Charles, Missouri, on the softer edge of St. Louis. A shed someone may love someday. A trellis that might feel inevitable to a stranger’s eye. That may be enough.

The interior legacy fades with us — but it has borne fruit: two good men carrying our better notes forward. Legacy can radiate without lineage. Influence travels in circles we never witness.

And this is where Eliot returns: harmonize. Legacy is not a musket or necklace or tidy family saga. It is how well we harmonized what we built with how we lived — in gardens and walls, in mistakes and tenderness, in photographs and autumn light.

Perhaps those conservationists were right: take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time. We have certainly taken pictures — enough to prove we were here and looking closely.

In the end, legacy lives in intangibles: affection, character, sense of place, a way of seeing. A life tended with care is its own story. No outside philosophers required — just the steady inner voice saying we did, and will keep doing, our best.

We feel our mothers’ hands on our heads at this realization — no musket, necklace or flowers required.

If anything remains beyond that, it is gravy.

Note: This appeared originally, in a slightly different form, in Tidings of Mapies litearary journal.

The Editorial We: Because, Living On Snob Hill, We Are Amused

There is a tale of the unfortunate equery who ventured during dinner at Windsor to tell a story with a spice of scandal or impropriety in it. "We are not amused," said the Queen when he had finished.-- Caroline Holland, courtier to Queen Victoria, in her Notebooks of a Spinster Lady, published in 1919

The impetus for this blog is simple: Stories from our lives on Snob Hill, especially those with the whiff of spice, scandal, and/or impropriety, are indeed amusing to us, and to you as well, we hope. We have always been guided by the words of the esteemed Southern social philosopher Claire Belcher, who said, " If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me," in Steel Magnolias.  Such people have been sitting next to us, sometimes invited, sometimes not, for 20 years now, and we thought it was high time we sat next to you, dear readers, and spread that spice and scandal, those vanities and humanities, and boners and bon mots, collected here, among 12 humble households, on a private private drive somewhere in Middle America.

Up, Up & Away On Snob Hill

We have recently added a new resident to our walls: a large, 43-inch-square painted canvas of a hot air balloon. Not the garish carnival kind, striped like a circus tent, nor the champagne-soaked fancy ones that bob over Napa Valley on travel brochures, but a more impressionistic rendering of balloon and countryside. A small cluster of silhouetted figures gathers beneath, gazing upward, as if waiting for some ascension or simply admiring what gravity will eventually reclaim.

We’ve decided not to show it here. Better to ambiguously describe it and let you fill in your own untitled rural balloon impression—if such a thing is possible. As our mothers liked to remind us, “Use your imagination!”

The painting is signed, or appears to be, by someone named Rhodes. Or perhaps Roles, at least according to an AI-assisted internet search that in its infinite wisdom insisted this was not a painting at all but a tourist rendering of the Greek island of Rhodes. WTF to that. (There is no whitewashed chapel, no cerulean sea, no olive grove—just balloon, sky, and people who look like they’ve wandered in from an Andrew Wyeth daydream.)

Beneath the signature are smudges that might be “66,” or maybe “86.” We lean toward “66” because there is something about the blue in that sky—a lighter, smudgier blue, definitely not the ubiquitous Baby Blue—that feels of another era. A “66 Blue,” if such a hue exists. God forbid it would be the 1966 Color of the Year. The same way avocado green and harvest gold feel inextricably shackled to the 1970s, there is a shade of blue that, if not invented, was at least perfected in the 1960s.

This blue jolted us back to graduate school, to a short story we abandoned called “Jesus Blue.” It was meant to be the recollection of a boy’s dislike for Sunday School (and the even more dreaded Vacation Bible School), as remembered by his older self. Forced to stare at those church-basement portraits of Our Dear Lord—body turned leftward, hands clasped dutifully, robes flowing gossamer around his almost ladylike frame—he developed an intense dislike of that shade of blue (as well as the Exact Same Pose that the Olin Mills photographer had insisted he make recently at the portrait studio). The color clung to the memory like the smell of a stinky sneaker, into which his sensitive young nose had recently been crammed by some locker-room bully. Workshop readers and others who read the piece all said the same thing about the title: “I know exactly that color!” If only the rest of the story had resonated as well.

This untitled painting, which we now call simply the Balloon Painting, is our latest acquisition (if modest folks such as ourselves can claim acquisitions). Some family members have “suggested” our tastes are leaning bougie. But that, we assure you, is a discussion for a later installment of Life On Snob Hill. So brace yourselves, dear family members, for a reckoning—one of those “this will hurt me more than it hurts you” moments (which we all knew then, and know now, was bullshit).

Still, the Balloon Painting embodies our intent to decorate with originals, one-of-a-kinds. We’ve never understood how people can gush, encouragingly, over a framed picture from Target (or its kin) when they have the exact same thing hanging in their own kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, or rumpus room (a term we know is out of favor, which is exactly why we trot it out, knowingly and winkingly (irony is such a dead art these days)). That’s just consumerism in action, reinforcing the idea that where you buy your stuff determines its worth. We bypass that by seeking out the singular. As Sook says in Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” when a rich woman offers to buy Buddy’s and Sook’s freshly cut tree: “There’s never more than one of anything.”

Which is why we prefer art that insists on its own stubborn presence, even if it might not meet museum quality or deserve assessment by some precious, over-educated critic. The Balloon Painting is precisely that.

We weren’t looking for it. We were at an antique mall, browsing as one does—knowing full well that you rarely find the exact thing you’re hunting. (Case in point: we currently need a round mirror with an old gold frame for a tufted fabric coffee table. We swear antique malls used to be teeming with them, but now that we “need” one, not a single one in sight.)

Our son from L.A. was with us, and it was he who spotted the Balloon Painting. He said he’d passed by it several times, paused, and kept returning to it—it continued to “speak” to him. And when he showed us, we immediately agreed. But the size, oh the size. At 43 inches square, it wasn’t a casual commitment.

“But,” our son added, “if you buy it, I want it when you’re done with it.” Which, euphemistically, means: “When you die!” This from a man who, true to his new hometown, is more mid-century modern than Snob Hill’s genteel-poverty aesthetic. He’s also—shocking, shocking—on the hunt for the ultimate Velvet Elvis. That’s his cross to bear.

At this point we must admit to coyness. Because we weren’t considering the Balloon Painting for Snob Hill. We had, in fact, just bought a small house two hours south. Not an annex, not Snob Hill South. Family members (the bougie accusers) dubbed it “Your Second Property.” Until we can think of something better, we call it Golden Pond, for its location near a 40-acre lake. If we were honest, “Off Golden Pond” would be more accurate. No dock, but a kitchen window view of a corner of the lake and hills that more than compensate.

Golden Pond has high-peaked walls—something Snob Hill sorely lacks. One wall was waiting for a painting with lift. The Balloon Painting had upward movement swirled into it. Even in the antique mall, price tag slashed to a sale figure, we knew exactly where it belonged. Call it kismet—just not Kottage Kismet.

Now installed, the Balloon Painting belongs. We find ourselves pausing before it, letting the eye travel upward, catching new gestures of color, noticing overlooked edges and brushstrokes.

And yet, our attention lingers on the signature: Rhodes. Who was Painter Rhodes? The search so far has been fruitless. We may never know. And yet Rhodes painted with enough clarity and restraint to release this image into the world—optimistic, balanced, and a little ambiguous. Which, come to think of it, isn’t unlike parenting. We raised two sons, launched them upward our own little DNA satellites, and still enjoy (most of the time) watching them float across our sky. This is what we mean by living Off Golden Pond.

We’re reminded here of another painting—one inherited from a grandmother who claimed she bought it at London’s Thieves’ Market just after the war. She liked it because it depicted a mother watching her young son play with a ball. An echo, perhaps, of all those Madonna-and-child knockoffs (so many of them sentimental dreck). Its mystery signature eluded us, until Antiques Roadshow cracked the code with an insider database and valued it at approximately $800. “Next!” they said, ushering us along. It still hangs in our living room. Had it been less good, it would have been exiled to a lesser room at Snob Hill. Thankfully, one grandmother had style.

We enjoy living with the Balloon Painting and anticipate doing so for as long as we’re stewards of it. That’s how it should be. The best advice we’ve heard about buying art isn’t to treat it as an investment but as a source of enduring pleasure. The Balloon Painting delivers, at a fraction of the cost of anything you’ll find in a glossy catalog. That’s terrific ROI. Some art we’ll keep only for a time before releasing it back “into the wild,” as someone surely did with this piece. And we’re comforted that this one will live on for at least another generation in our family.

That’s legacy, with a capital L. Off Golden Pond, that feels close enough to Dylan’s promise—not when he paints his masterpiece, but when we hang ours. And yes, we can’t help ourselves: another tune drifts in—“Up, Up and Away,” the Fifth Dimension reminding us that, balloon or not, levity is always part of the lift.

P.S. Our search for Painter Rhodes continued after this blog was published, and turned up a likely match: Mickey Rhodes (1936–1982), a Missouri painter active in the mid-20th century. His canvases—Riverboat, 1966 and Factory on Riverfront, among others—still surface at St. Louis auction houses, trading quietly in the secondary market. So yes, Mickey Rhodes existed, brush in hand, right here in Missouri. Which means the Balloon Painting carries more than charm; it belongs to a modest but genuine strand of St. Louis’s 20th-century art legacy—now improbably extended to Snob Hill (and Off Golden Pond).

AI’s the Kind of Asshole Who Brings Store-Bought Dip to a Snob Hill Soirée

We recently indulged in a bit of digital slumming and asked one of those upstart AI platforms—Perplexity, bless its eager little circuits—to dream up five blog topics in the refined, vine-covered spirit of Life on Snob Hill.

Working with AI is a bit like having a neighbor show up to your garden party with an unvetted plus-one and announcing, “Meet my new friend…Sméagol.” You don’t slam the door—you’re too polite for that—but you do keep an eye on the silver. At first, the thing is eager to please, nodding like Uriah Heep, flattering like Mr. Collins (no AI pride, only prejudice), and offering the kind of fawning that only makes you long for the blunt honesty of someone who isn’t trying quite so hard.

So, in the spirit of curiosity, we decided to invite this peculiar guest out—just the two of us—for a quiet little luncheon. And that’s when it got interesting. Sometimes, AI behaves like someone on the far edge of the spectrum of social intuition: polite enough, but missing the point entirely. No sense of nuance. No emotional intelligence. Other times, when we gently correct it—when we try to nudge it toward proper Snob Hill sensibilities—it can be a real asshole.

But we persisted. Because if nothing else, a good experiment deserves a fair trial. So we asked it, as graciously as possible, to help us write about life on Snob Hill, and here are the following topics and our responses:

Estate Sale Euphoria: Treasures, Tact, and the Thin Line Between Hunting and Haunting – A romp through Snob Hill’s most coveted estate sales, blending gossip, vintage finds, and the art of maintaining dignity while elbow-deep in someone else’s nostalgia.

A “romp”? Darling, this ain’t a flea market. We attend estate sales for the objects, yes—but also for the backstory, the quiet shaming, and the opportunity to correctly identify which Limoges patterns are pre-war.

Negronis at Noon: The Art of Day Drinking When You’re Judged by Your Lawn – Part confessional, part survival guide for cultivating effortless elegance—and plausible deniability—through creative libations and perfectly timed citrus garnishes.

We’ll be generous and call this a rookie misstep: like so many hopefuls, AI assumes the “good life” requires alcohol. Bless its silicon soul. Here on Snob Hill, we prefer the No-Groni — all the ceremony, none of the aftermath. And trust us, no garnish can camouflage a glaring lack of taste.

Porch Railings and Power Plays: Decoding the Real Social Order – A deep dive into how architecture, landscaping, and the placement of Adirondack chairs reveal rivalries and alliances more intricate than any debutante ball.

They lost us at “deep dive.” Social order on Snob Hill isn’t deciphered—it’s understood at birth. And while we do appreciate a well-placed Adirondack, nothing disrupts the aesthetic quite like questionable lawnwear. We’re talking cargo shorts, ironic tees, and the ongoing horror that is lawnweird: mowing in Crocs, compression sleeves, and a do-rag that looks borrowed from a gas station clearance rack. There are dress codes, Harold.

Gossip as Currency: How News Travels Faster Than High-Speed Internet – A gently savage sociology of Snob Hill’s grapevine, dissecting the performance art of brunch chatter—where every compliment comes with a concealed blade.

Wrong! There’s nothing gentle about the game here. Compliments obviously come fully loaded, and the “blades” aren’t hidden—they’re wielded openly.

And then there’s awkward to say, “AI,” which our associative brains makes us think of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” For this exercise, AI exudes a generic charm and a “short little span of attention,” breezing past the incidents, accidents, hints, and allegations that truly define Life on Snob Hill. It hears the words but misses the meaning.

Fur Coats in Fifty Degrees: Seasonal Denial and the Theater of Excess – Meditations on Snob Hill’s unique microclimate, where fashion trumps forecast and the weather is whatever most flatters your latest expensive purchase.

We don’t deny seasons—we declare them. And if the calendar says autumn but our shoulders say sable, then so be it. Microclimate is just a state of mind—and a state of wardrobe.

To be fair, the effort was valiant in a “bless your heart” sort of way. But as Fran Lebowitz (almost) said: style without irony is just effort. And effort, as we all know, is what other zip codes are for.

While we chuckle at AI’s fumbling attempts to grasp Snob Hill—much like raising our sons, it’s a never-ending lesson in adulting, patience and WTFs. As they say in “Show Boat,” it’s a lot of “make believe”—and AI’s trying desperately (too hard) to earn its own invitation to the party rather than as someone else’s plus-one.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out that all this digital showboating guzzles enough power to keep all 12 Snob Hill households running for months. This blog’s share? A dainty but not insignificant sip, yes, but “small” doesn’t mean harmless. The tech bros selling this shiny future conveniently forget to mention the power bill.

So while AI’s enthusiasm is… let’s say “admirable,” we prefer our drama and discernment with a lighter carbon footprint—thank you very much. For all the keen observations and barbed wit we dispense here, the planet might be wondering if the juice is worth the jolt. We’re not really convinced it is. At least not for our us and our Life On Snob Hill endeavors. What we create here is made the old-fashioned way: by hand (or keyboard), with care, and without a single algorithm in sight (do not OK-Boomer correct us as you notice the hashtags below; we’re aware of the workings of the interwebs. Allow us our delusions).

Just don’t call it “artisanal.” We have standards.

Life On Snob Hill: Ballad of the Sunflower, the Swarm and Princess Pumpkin

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee. / And revery. / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few.” — Emily Dickinson

We’re not ones to curate perfection on Snob Hill. Nature has its own aesthetic, and frankly, we find it far more compelling than anything we could plan. That’s why we were both amused and amazed when a volunteer sunflower recently sprang up in one of the least likely spots imaginable—a patch of dry, unimpressive earth that we hadn’t so much as looked at twice. Yet here it is: tall, determined, and just today, blooming with a sunny, audacious face that seems to say, “I’m here, and I meant to be.”

This season has brought another unexpected gift: bees. While we had planned to purchase two packages, life on Snob Hill had other plans. One colony arrived via swarm trap—buzzing in and making themselves right at home. The second simply showed up and settled into one of our empty hives as if they had RSVP’d to a party we didn’t know we were hosting. Now, both colonies are thriving. Like the volunteer plants, the bees seem drawn to this place. And like us, they’ve decided to stay.

It’s not the first time this hill has surprised us. Each year, morning glories crop up like old friends, weaving themselves around our more “intentional” plants and adding their own flair to the garden party. We’ve never had the heart—or the nerve—to stop them.

This season, a plucky little cherry tomato plant has joined the mix—growing precariously from the side of one of our composters, as if it simply couldn’t resist the challenge. It’s now locked in a gentle battle with an ambitious young morning glory, the two of them twisting and reaching around each other in a slow-motion scramble for sun and space. We’re staying out of it. Whatever will be, will vine.

Our favorite tale of garden tenacity, though, has to be the pumpkin we came to call Princess Pumpkin. She arrived via a renegade vine that slipped through the front fence, across the patio, and onto our wrought iron table—where she proceeded to drop a single fruit in the very center, like a centerpiece chosen by nature herself. We watched her grow from a curious orb to a proper pumpkin, flat and elegant, as though she were born knowing how to pose.

Not everyone embraces such randomness. Some prefer tidiness and symmetry and plants that stay politely where they’re put. We get it. But here on Snob Hill, we find joy in the wild surprises—the volunteers, the scramblers, the uninvited guests who make themselves right at home.

“Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”

— Dolly Parton

Here’s to the sunflowers that bloom where they shouldn’t, the tomatoes that tangle with poets, the bees that choose us, and every Princess Pumpkin waiting to be discovered.

One Tree (Snob) Hill

For centuries, philosophers have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: what is humanity’s place in nature? Are we caretakers? Conquerors? Cosmic accidents with delusions of grandeur? From the serene balance of Taoist teachings to Genesis’s thunderous declarations of dominion, we’ve long debated whether nature is our companion or our quarry. These worldviews—man and nature versus man versus nature—still shape our choices more than we’d like to admit. And they echo, rather disturbingly, in that ancient catalogue of vices: the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

But let’s set aside their biblical branding for a moment. Strip off the ecclesiastical robes and you’ll find something deeply human underneath—something almost genetic. These so-called “sins” aren’t just dusty moral scoldings; they’re evolutionary potholes, behavioural defaults that, if left unexamined, prove deadly. Yes, deadly— for our communities, economies, ecosystems and entire civilizations. Pride poisons leadership. Envy corrodes collaboration. Greed? Oh, don’t get us started.

Greed, in particular, has had a stunning PR makeover—recoded as greed-is-good ambition, innovation or just the market doing its thing. But a vice in a power suit is still a vice. And now that vice is accelerating climate change.

Which brings us—perhaps faster than we’re comfortable with—to the warming world outside our double-paned windows. The science isn’t just in; it’s been laminated, peer-reviewed and politely screaming for decades. The planet is hotter, storms are wilder and whole regions are slowly sinking, burning, or drying up. And yet, somehow, large swaths of the population continue to “debate” whether climate change is real, as if melting glaciers were a matter of opinion.

We know many “deniers” really aren’t confused—they’re arrogantly complicit. It’s not that they don’t believe the climate is changing; it’s that they believe they’ll be fine. That their big-assed pickups, bass boats and goosenecked glamping buses (or their gated communities, private jets, and platinum portfolio brethren) will outlast the consequences.

We cannot abide their wink-wink, nudge-nudge hypocrisy. Because in the end, it’s easier—and far more profitable—to let the world burn than to question whether our lives might need to change. As one now-viral observation puts it: “Humans are the only species that will choose extinction because it’s cost effective.”

Imagine that. We’re the only species clever enough to engineer our own demise—and cynical enough to call it a business model. Or, in the immortal words of George Carlin: “The planet is fine. The people are fucked.” We know better. We’ve always known better. But knowing isn’t enough. As Oscar Wilde quipped, “I can resist everything except temptation.”

Fiddle-dee-dee tomorrow is another day is killing us. Which raises the question: what does any of this have to do with planting a tree on Snob Hill?

We took a hint from David Bowie: “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” And, as poet Alexander Smith wisely observed, “A man does not plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.” So, if we want a tomorrow worth hearing, maybe it starts with something as simple—and as stubbornly hopeful—as planting a tree right here.

This morning, we planted a Saucer Magnolia on the crown of Snob Hill—a place as self-important as its name suggests, but not without its... opportunities: a bit more shade, a bit less erosion, and maybe, with time, a whisper of Southern charm. The Saucer Magnolia, ubiquitous around here but never unwelcome, is all drama and grace—those blousy, tulip-shaped blooms arriving in a flurry of pink and white just when winter has overstayed its welcome. It’s the kind of tree that doesn’t just grow; it poses. Perfectly at home with Snob Hill’s own flair for the dramatic, the Magnolia fits right in—elegant, a little showy, and unapologetically distinctive.

Experts estimate there are approximately a trillion trees on our planet, a staggering number that underscores both the scale of nature and the fragility of what we risk losing. While this single, “little” tree might seem like a small gesture against the overwhelming tide of climate change, it’s one of the few choices firmly within our grasp. After all, from the tiniest acorn grows the mightiest oak — and every mighty forest begins somewhere. Based on something a local “old timer” told us, 100 or so years ago, our property was a cherry orchard. We find that a little hard to believe — cherries in Missouri? But we love the idea.

Finding the tree, however, turned into a minor quest. We made the “mistake” of asking for help on a native plants social media group, assuming—naively—that plant people were, you know, helpful. Instead, we were met with a chorus of strident responses, dripping with condescension and composted outrage. Apparently, suggesting a Saucer Magnolia is tantamount to ecological treason. Keyboard botanists (read: dilettantes with strong, albeit sometimes well-intentioned, opinions) lined up to scold us for daring to covet a tree that wasn’t born and raised in our zip code.

But guess what? These so-called “destable invaders” flourish in our area, bloom like a Mardi Gras parade float and are exactly the sort of botanical drama that Snob Hill demands—native or not. In the end, we found a glorious specimen on Etsy, of all places. That’s right: The same place you buy ironic tote bags and artisanal beard oil came through with a tree worthy of center stage. Delivered. In. The. Mail!

Side note: In defense of the native plant people, we understand and seek to make good plant choices. That’s why we spent no small amount of money to remove the four Bradford Pears we planted on the streetside hill. They truly were “trash trees” and we sorely regret planting them.

So, yeah, it’s only one tree in a trillion, but that’s one more tree than we had on Snob Hill before. And, true confessions, we planted three other trees this year, in what we hope are the last trees we’ll ever be planting. Realistically, though, it’s only a matter of (too-soon) time before at least one tree—the pin oak—gets the axe. And if we’re being brutally honest, we’re probably looking at a triple feature of arboreal tragedy once you factor in the two Chinese elms, both of which have been slapped around by ice storms like they owe winter money. Those brittle little drama queens snap under pressure—literally.

As for the pin oak, it’s already circling the drain, thanks to a charming little scourge known as gouty oak gall and its evil twin, horned oak gall. These were brought to us by microscopic wasps from the Cynipidae family, which inject their eggs into the tree’s branches like tiny tattoo artists with a death wish. The tree reacts by forming grotesque little growths—galls—that slowly choke off its own limbs. So unless we’re ready to commit to years of pruning, expensive injections and, ultimately, the cathartic, galling roar of a chainsaw, that pin oak is a goner. But hey, we’re planting trees faster than we’re losing them—so far. Snob Hill: come for the pretension, stay for the arboreal attrition. Our arborist says the pin oak has several, somewhat healthy years in it before we have to euthanize it.

To hedge our bets (and possibly our property line), we also planted three native redbuds—because nothing says “we care about the environment” like driving two hours round-trip in a gas-powered vehicle to pick up Earth-saving trees from a nursery in the middle of the state. Sustainability, but make it scenic. The third redbud just showed up one day, sprouting defiantly through a tear in the landscape fabric and gravel by the back gate like a tiny green middle finger to our garden plans. Naturally, we yanked it out of its scrappy little birth canal and gave it a new home, fully expecting it to perish out of spite or botanical stubbornness. Every expert warns redbuds hate being transplanted, especially when you go poking at their precious taproots. But this one? It’s thriving. Possibly out of spite. And yet, we respect that energy.

For the past 30 years, our stewardship of Snob Hill has been the contribution of a walnut tree, delicate Japanese maples and four (now down to three) heirloom apple trees that somehow survived our well-intentioned chaos. Among the legends of our arboreal empire is the Lady Apple tree—a sapling planted when our oldest son was just about his height. We have a photo to prove it: tiny kid standing next to a tiny tree, both awkwardly gangly and full of promise. Now? Despite being branded a “semi-dwarf” (which apparently means “surprisingly tall”), that Lady Apple is pushing 20 feet into the sky. That’s one heck of a growth chart for both kid and tree.

Planting trees is more than landscaping; it’s a vote for the future. Lucy Larcom nailed it best: “He who plants a tree plants hope.” It’s poetic, optimistic and honestly, a little stubborn—just like us. Because in a world where our one trillion tree friends are fighting pests, storms and climate chaos, every seedling we shove into the dirt is a middle finger to despair and a soft promise that maybe, just maybe, the future will be greener.

So, here’s to trees: our leafy, stubborn little symbols of hope, standing tall (or semi-dwarf) on Snob Hill, daring whatever comes next to try and knock them (and us) down.

Our new Saucer Magnolia: a bright, stubborn promise that despite storms and pests, hope grows here—and tomorrow just might be greener.

Life On Snob Hill: A Messy Slate

I will forget these things, but I’d like to forget them more slowly, more surely.

—Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s

There is a piece of slate now hanging by the front door here on Snob Hill. Upon the slate is a statement of love, written and decorated with hearts by Father, who carved a frame to hold the slate. The slate is a piece of a rescued blackboard from the Cape Girardeau High School where two grandmothers, on paternal, one maternal, attended — both must surely have sat at attention and viewed this very same blackboard — this black board.

The blackboard came to us this weekend, complete with the message of love, now somewhat degraded. Years ago, when Father gave this framed piece of slate to Mother, he decorated it with his message of love. They hung it over a fireplace in the kitchen and never erased the message, as it were a painting. So we have inherited both a physical object and something far less tangible and more precarious. We wanted this to hang by the front door, with a piece of chalk tethered by a thin cotton braid, so visitors, if so inspired, could leave us a message. But with the handmade message of love to a departed Mother, isn’t something we can bear to replace.

Sometimes what we remember and what we feel is painful, and it’s difficult to express, and so we have to find ways to put language on impossible feelings that we never anticipated we’d go through.

— Venita Blackburn

“According to Wikipedia, “Marshak, Stephen in his Essentials of Geology, slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic rock. The etymology of slate also tells us that it was traditionally a small, smooth piece of the rock, often framed in wood, used with chalk as a notepad or notice board, and especially for recording charges in pubs and inns. The phrases "clean slate" and "blank slate" come from this usage.

So, one of us writes: Yet our slate — as well as our own, more metaphorical slates — are neither clean nor blank. I hung the framed slate by the front door, but now I cannot bear to wipe it in preparation for another message. Just as chalk has touched the slate, I see — I know — that my parents touched. They marked each other. That touching created me and I still feel the contours of their marking upon me. I’ve lately become a bit obsessed with collecting examples of actual writing by my grand- and great-grandparents, and especially from my Mother.

Dad recently gave me thick folder of recipes that included a precious few written by her hand. I may never make the old casserole (she was not an inspired cook, much less a foody), but I could stare at her handwriting for a long time, trying to imagine her concentrating on transferring the directions onto a notecard. She wanted so desperately to be a good wife, mother, housekeeper and hostess.

There are many ways to divide, to demarcate one’s life. I’ve lately realized that I went for a long time wrestling with my daddy issues. Then transitioned to my mommy issues. I see now that really, all along, these have been merely me issues.

I’m obsessed with that part of life — these confined spaces where there’s no acceptance, there’s no big healing. You’re just right there in the crack of a catastrophe.

— Venita Blackburn

I grew up in the days of schoolroom chalkboards. Sometimes I was tasked by a teacher to wipe the board. There was a long tray beneath each large slate for holding chalk — white and pale green, blue and yellow. I don’t recall red, pale or otherwise. I remember the boxes of chalk, usually at the far ends of tray, with the word “dustless.” There’s really no such thing as dustless chalk because chalk is dust laid upon slate, just waiting to wiped away to make black space for another message.

So what to do? Should I allow Dad’s chalk dust to remain, still proclaiming the mark he and Mom made, but knowing the message will slowly fall from the slate. Do I shellac it in a sad attempt at preserving it, if just for a bit longer? I worry that would be like looking at the same sentiment carved into the trunk of tree, wondering who the hell the people behind the initials were. Or do I, let others do the dirty work for me, waiting for some visitors to drop by, wipe it clean and leaving the message: Sorry we missed you!

To which, I would be compelled to add: You have no idea.

Quoting Wenderoth again:

Yes, our homes are dust. Don’t pretend you are surprised.

Life On Snob Hill: A Christmas Elegy

By CB Adams

The season is turning to Christmas

I'm longing to be by my dear mother's side

So…

I'm coming home for Christmas

To be with my family

And loved ones so dear

—Manny, Cabral, Mathus

We have always loved the song “I’m Coming Home for Christmas” on the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Christmas Caravan album. Years ago, it felt depressing. Now it seems nostalgically prescient.

2023 has been a year of elegies of Proustian proportions, remembering things past. Seeing that phrase — Proustian proportions — suddenly seems hyperbolic, but isn’t that what profound emotions often feel like — outsized, hyperbolic, compared to the the situation that evokes them?

It’s in the feeling that’s Proustian, the recognition that memories are all that’s left us. The time is gone, and so, too, should be the expectations that things like the holidays are repeatable, immutable. We are not good at change, and learning to embrace change — the reality of it — is a painful process.

This is about the notion of home and Christmas — of an internal Christmas compass that has always pointed true-north homeward. But that cardinal direction points to somewhere else now. Growing up, home and holiday were a given, just part of the unexamined family life. As we grew and matured, the holidays had their touchstones — Granny’s angel food cake, Grandpa’s cigarette smoke, Mee Ma’s divinity and bourbon balls, Mom’s pressed cookies. They all are sense memories, including a sense of being safe and happy and intensely loved.

Even after we moved out, first to college, then to marriage, early careers and then our own children — our Christmas compass still pointed to that “other” home, the one in which our memory mothers still shuffle through our memory houses, preparing the usual Christmas memory-cheer.

Our mothers are gone now, and with them, those times and that version of our family. We struggle this year to put into words how or why we felt this small, but profound, shift in our compasses. Our mothers worked hard to create those special holiday memories, and we have always turned — internally — to the comfort that they represented. Thus, Christmas was always “back there.” It was a time and place, though we didn’t acknowledge it at the time.

Now we are reminded of the song “Bookends” by Paul Simon: “…Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you.” Our mothers exist only in memories now. The phrase “yehi zichra baruch” that our Jewish friends have shared, resonates with use because those memories are a blessing. And with their passing is a waning magnetic energy. Our compass has swung to a new true north — here on Snob Hill. Or maybe it swung years ago and we’re just now noticing it. We worry about becoming the middle-aged version of what we call the younger generation’s obsessive navel gazing. We may notice the wrinkles around our navels, but it’s the gazing that’s the issue.

As Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová wrote in “Falling Slowly,”:

…Take this sinking boat and point it home
We've still got time
Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice
You'll make it now…

This shift is perhaps small yet certainly profound. We think of the place — now memory bound — of where we point when we point to home. We now think of that home as being our own home. And we certainly hope that we created — sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently — that sense of home and holiday for our sons. We hope they have a Christmas compass that points to Snob Hill.

Yes, it’s about the changing of generations. It’s about the passage of time and worrying that we weren’t present enough in the past. We hope that past is now prologue for the family now. True north may have shifted, but we know it is still true. And yes, it’s about loss. You can’t have an elegy about the future, that honor goes to the past…and memory.

We end, thinking of “Homeward Bound,” another song by Paul Simon:

…I wish I was

Homeward bound

Home, where my thought's escaping

Home, where my music's playing

Home, where my love lies waiting

Silently for me…

Life On Snob Hill: A Thanksgiving Elegy

By CB Adams

We live in selfish times.

We were originally writing this to be a diatribe about the profound disappointment we feel about certain portions of our family. Part of us still wants to vent that spleen, unpack their actions and motivations— and give the proverbially dirty laundry a thorough airing out. We can’t avoid thinking of the current state of our family’s Thanksgiving as akin to the Black Knight’s “tis but a scratch” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members of our small family have been hacking away at this family’s tradition (see turkey wing above) for several years. Yet we continued to think of those amputations as just scratches. That’s on us. Cue Depeche Mode’s “Wrong.”

But who, other than ourselves, would want to read that diatribe? Our cooler collective heads have prevailed, even though we are still committed to exploring the (what seems like sudden death) current state of the Snob Hill Thanksgiving. We must embrace the end of one set of Thanksgiving traditions and expectations as well as the unknown contours of the holiday in the future. Yes, we are already thinking ahead because it may very well take at least a year to decide how we will celebrate. To define the ultimate Snob Hill Thanksgiving takes time and attention. We sweat the details.

It is our belief that Thanksgiving is a single day, as opposed to that following holiday — the quanchrismukkah that has bloatedly become an entire season (nay, fourth quarter) of the year. We remember when the word “season” was reserved for the natural progressions of nature’s calendar. We further believe that in the single Thanksgiving day, our efforts should be on gathering and gratitude. But, because it is a single day, there’s a certain pressure upon it that other celebrations do not encounter.

This year, more than half of our already small-and-shrinking family seceded from the established family traditions. They avoided the celebration that we’ve hosted for more than 30 years and left us feeling disrespected, abandoned and hallowed out. We can’t control the actions of others, and we know full well that expectations are just resentments waiting to explode. Hence, our original impulse to rant and rave King Learishly. Or Sally Brownish in the Charlie Brown Christmas: “All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.”

Seating on Snob Hill.

Part of us, still does. We want to wave the metaphorical finger (middle and otherwise) at those family insurrectionists who created the loss in our Thanksgiving. But we won’t because the situation now (and next year and the next and so on), just is. We are not without an understanding of — and a sympathy for — the pressures that family expectations exert on the holidays — especially with the so-called ‘blended families’ of which we are members. Choosing one side of the family over another is a Sophie’s choice (if you don’t understand that analogy, read the book or at least watch the movie), and it sucks for the side that’s left on the platform.

We won’t live in the past (even though Thanksgiving has always seemed about trying to preserve at least something of the past, at least the past’s tradition). Isn’t the past not even really past (to bastardize from Faulkner)? We have not arrived at this juncture without precedence. Our Mother lamented the slow-and-then-all-of-a-sudden dissolution of the family Thanksgiving for many years before she passed. As we discussed the family dynamics, she used almost the exact same words as Sally Brown — all she wanted for our family was our fair share. That share, of course, is defined differently for each contingent within the family. We live in selfish times, after all.

The New Thanksgiving will not be judged by number. It may the American Way, but bigger is no longer better. We liked adding extra leafs to the dining table, squeezing in an extra, mismatched chair or two to accommodate our family and guests. But the Snob Hill Thanksgiving reboot, Part Deux, 2.0 will be better (curated?) by being smaller. That’s our choice in these selfish times.

We, along with Mother, noticed a couple of the youngins in our family attended some of our past celebrations stoned because we assumed that was the only they could “get through” the holiday. We find this an odd reaction (other than the usual callowness of youth) because our Thanksgivings were almost always completely drama free. These under-the-influencers contributed to the disruption of our notion of family, but we believe in attraction rather than promotion (or obligation). If you don’t want to gather at the Snob Hill Thanksgiving, or you have to get stoned to endure it, then perhaps best to decline the invitation.

We will acknowledge our own younger days and the copious amount of alcohol we consumed. Is that so different than cannabis? Perhaps not. But in those days, almost everyone partook of the ole John Barleycorn and our own consumption was based not on “getting through” the day but…well, any excuse to overindulge was good enough. That, plus drinking at someone else’s expense was always attractive too.

In recent years, some have even come, sat at the table, declined to eat because they had another table to attend, then left. If that’s the level of attraction we can elicit, then absence is indeed a better option.

Sad.

As we (and our family) have aged and parents/grandparents have passed away, the Norman Rockwelllian, Currier & Ives-ish, ideal of Thanksgiving has become outdated and unrealistic — much as we valiantly fought to maintain it. That ideal is no longer sustainable (if it ever was), at least in our family. We have great memories of Thanksgivings past, and those can’t be taken away or tarnished. If anything, in the light of the future parameters of this family’s Thanksgivings, those memories will be ever more brightly burnished. That famous Rockwell is at best a hoped-for ideal, an ideal that could probably never have been achieved.

We tried.

We liked trying.

But we are done trying.

And that is okay. It has to be. Our family is not alone in this downsizing. We do not understand, nor do we condone, the idea that in order to create a new tradition, you must kill the old. The half of this family that seceded are pursuing their own ideal Thanksgiving. We wish them well, knowing they could very well find themselves in our situation sometime in the future. We wish them well dealing with that disappointment, should it come.

As we contemplate the future Snob Hill Thanksgivings, we will continue to focus on quality (certainly no longer quantity). We want to share with those who nurture our souls and the spirit of the day. To those others bound to us by family ties, we can’t help but cue up that old Electric Light Orchestra song “Don’t Bring Me Down.”

We live in selfish times…we probably always have.

And so we lean on the words to “Let It Fall” by Over the Rhine:

…Whatever we've lost
I think we're gonna let it go
Let it fall
Like snow
'Cause rain and leaves
And snow and tears and stars
And that's not all my friend
They all fall with confidence and grace
So let it fall, let it fall…

The plate awaits.

Life On Snob Hill: The Stuff of Bittersweetness

We were reminded this weekend of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” This can be interpreted or applied in any number of ways. For us, it is a bit of an admonishment as we look at some long-wished-for family items that we removed from the house of a now-widowed father. One the one hand, we could be pleased that we “finally got” some items that we’ve wanted for years.

On the other hand, we obtained these items only after the death of a mother and a father’s decision to sell his home of 30-plus years and downsize. That’s the price of these pieces. It makes us assess our own home, especially as we just celebrated the marriage of a son. In those wedding preparations, we never heard the phrase, “Setting up housekeeping” or “Building a home.” Those were common phrases when we were married, and we heard it often in reference to our own parents’ post-wedding responsibilities. Wedding gifts were mostly directed toward the necessities of young newlyweds as they set up their new household.

Our son and daughter-in-law have been together for several years, and they explicitly have stated they don’t need “necessities” like a toaster or everyday dinnerware. Instead, they have requested funds for their upcoming European honeymoon. Fair enough. That’s their reality. Ours was different.

When told we were free to pick up some asked-for family pieces (is ‘heirloom’ too grand a word?), we felt gratitude and excitement. When we arrived, we also had the opportunity to unpack some storage bins and review the contents of a couple of cabinets. There was a yin-yang about this process. As the mid-century bun warmer was discovered and bestowed, there was a visceral, sense-memory of the smell of crescent rolls wafting up as the shiny, penguin-festooned warmer was passed around at parties and holidays. The piece is still in pristine condition — proof of how lovingly a mother had taken care of this wedding present. How small it seems now, and how small those crescent rolls must have been compared to the supersized ones of today.

But the hope and love and care that gleamed from its surface is shadowed by the loss of the person who cared for it. Preserving it, even. We would gladly return it to have her back.

Our domicile on Snob Hill is no manse. It is a modest-sized home, yet perfectly sized for us. When the other set of parents downsized, we made a few cross-state trips, U-Haul in tow, to bring home the furniture and other items that we wanted. Then we faced the challenge of how to incorporate those items into the tight, puzzle that is our home. It took months after each trip to rearrange and accommodate those items — usually at the expense of pieces we had acquired at estate and tag sales. Family pieces always trump items we had purchased more recently.

That still holds true. We are now the proud owners of a grandmother’s wrought iron, glass-topped table. It came from the best home furnishings store in southeast Missouri (which may or may not be damning with faint praise). This grandmother had impeccable taste, and we were anxious about whether or not it would be transferred to us. It was, and it is now displacing a larger similar table that already fills our sunroom. Hello, Craigslist and Marketplace. We will be sad to see that table go (and we just had the seats and backs reupholstered last year), but after repainting the ‘new’ table, we are happy.

Not everyone wants to be the steward of family heirlooms — or has the room for them. We have certainly curated the pieces that will best fit into our home. Some, sadly, will go out of the family. We can’t take it all, and the next generation won’t take most of it. There are plenty of stories about the youngins not wanted grandma’s china or tchotchkes, and so we go into that here.

We filled the bed of our truck with the items (and there are still others we want). We were reminded of and couldn’t help feeling acutely the sentiment in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” in which, a city daughter visits her mother.

“‘‘Oh, Mama!” she cried…I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.”’

We feel the need to ensure that we didn’t seem greedy or grubby, yet still wanting to emphasize how much we wanted certain items. It’s hard to know where that line is. We are still stung by the words of the mother who so carefully cared for that bun warmer, one of the rare times when she was handing over another family heirloom: “If I give you this, I better not find out you turned around and sold it!” There’s context to that incident, not for here — and maybe not for ever. It’s probably moot now that she’s gone, anyway.

And that’s just what happens. Couples make a life together. Create a home with stuff — something borrowed, something blue, something new. We can feel all the hope that goes into housekeeping because we experienced it. But nothing is forever. At some point — sometimes sooner (divorce, death, etc.), sometimes later (as in this case) — the stuff of coupling must be released.

Driving home with the truckload of items, items we remembered from our formative years, we hope to honor the transfer of tangible, touchable family history. Yet it is also a truckload of bittersweet reminders that family ‘time’ is never static, always changing. And can merely haul that notion around.

Which brings to mind the opening stanza of Mark Terrill’s poem “Down At the Gate”:

“You could never add up

all the years it took

for this time to finally come.”

Family heirlooms destined for Snob Hill.

Life On Snob Hill: In the Flesh

We have four, poorly sited heirloom apple trees on the property and we can attest to the finicky nature of apple crops — generally poor sunlight, late frosts that damage the blossoms, the biennial nature of some varieties. The past two years have yielded almost no apples, but two trees were rather abundant this year, especially our "favorite" tree, the Lady Apple, also known as the Christmas Apple.

This year has been an interesting one for our Fameuse Apple. According to the “Out On A Limb” website, it is “…also called Snow, is one of the oldest North American varieties. Historians have speculated that the apple may have originated in France, although evidence suggests that it is more likely to have originated in French Canada sometime before 1700. By the 1700’s it was widespread in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, and it may have made its way to Maine via that route.”

How it got to Snob Hill was through a mail order catalog 15 years ago. Ours is a hit-or-miss kinda tree. This year was a hit, but a majority of the crop withered on the tree because it almost immediately began to go bad as soon as it was ripe. We couldn’t eat them fast enough. They hung for a remarkably long time, fermenting and looking like burgundy scrotums.

We had fun this week, using our long-poled apple picker to find a handful of still-good Fameusians.

Again from the website, “Like McIntosh, Fameuse is very susceptible to the disease, “scab”, a cosmetic blemish that can be removed by peeling and does not affect flavor. The apple’s other name – Snow- comes from its “snow white” flesh. It is really, really white. The 1865 Department of Agriculture yearbook summed it up: ‘Flesh-remarkably white, tender, juicy...deliciously pleasant, with a slight perfume... No orchard in the north can be counted as complete without this variety... It is just so good that everybody likes to eat of it; and when cooked, it is white, puffy and delicious.’”

We still have a small basketful of Lady Apples, with many more on the tree. Such is its nature. Who knows if it will bear next year, so we enjoy them when we can.

A final, interesting bit about the Snow Apple, “Here’s an 1889 recipe for something called Apple Snow that might be perfect to prepare using these apples: Pare and core tart, juicy apples; stew with just enough water to keep from burning; sweeten with white sugar; flavor with lemon, the juice is better than the extract; sift through a potato masher or beat it until light; eat with whipped cream.”

It’s easy to see why the Fameuse is also known as the Snow Apple. Like snow, they melt fast.

'Growing Through' Summer on Snob Hill

A relative offered this chair earlier this year, saying, “It’s great chair that just needs a new seat.” Little did he know it was destined to become a Grow-Through chair.

It’s a bit ironic quoting Robert Frost – with that icy surname – as we experience the height of summer here on Snob Hill, but we sweatily embrace his notion that, “The best way out is always through.” The heat and humidity of life here have definitely “built” as they say. The two Hs are a fact of life here in the upper south, an area that may well become the middle south as the planet warms.

We have no choice but to embrace the weather and be grateful for air conditioning. Things may slow a bit in the summer, but they don’t stop. We visited an architectural salvage “yard” last weekend and acquired a length of wrought iron railing for an upcoming project. We also brought home two metal chairs to add to our collection of what we call “Grow-Through” chairs.

This became a thing several years ago when one of us brought home a chair, plucked from a pile of free items on a neighbor’s lawn. We said at the time, “Don’t know why I picked this up, but I like it.” The chair was missing part of its back and had no seat (as none of the Grow-Though chairs have had). For reasons lost to us now, we spray painted the chair purple – a color not in the usual Snob Hill palate. We moved the Purple Chair around the property for a few years before hitting upon the idea to use it as a decorative plant support. That seemed like a risky thing to do because it skirted the practice of repurposing old toilets as planters or bathtubs as grottos for virgin mary statues.

The original Grow-Through, the Purple Chair.

We strive always in the gardens of Snob Hill for balance and conservative use of decorations. With the two new chairs (painted a chartreuse similar to that of the potato vine in a front planter) we don’t want to overdo the use of Grow-Throughs, but these, with their mismatched grape cluster backs, are a welcome addition. It’s too late in the garden season to use them, but we have decided to try to use all of the chairs in what will become the trial Chair Garden.

The Grow-Though chairs serve more than one purpose. Yes, they support tall plants. We like this year’s for a clump of Bee Balm and the first Hollyhock we’ve ever grown successfully. The chairs support the plants, especially after rain, and they protect them from our big-butted dog Maggie, who can unintentionally decimate a garden with her sashaying hind quarters.

We think of our bees, who begin their winter preparations with the summer solstice. The heat and humidity can be unpleasant, but that’s life in this part of the world at this time of year. The cold and too-dry days are ahead of us, and we will dream back to today’s enveloping summer season.

The Grape Chairs, painted and ready for next year’s Chair Garden.

Salmon Fishing On Snob Hill

Somewhere between Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America and Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing In the Yemen lies our Snob Hill. And these thoughts…

Just as there are changes in the seasons and changes in current fashion and even changes in attitudes/changes in latitudes, to borrow a phrase from Buffet, there are changes – evolutions – constantly in motion on Snob Hill. We will celebrate our 25th anniversary as stewards of our piece of Snob Hill this coming August.

How time flies.

We are watching with interest the transition of a few properties here on the Hill. One house has stood empty but well maintained for approximately 10 years. The owners, part of the old-old guard, moved nearby to the inherited home of a mother, and use, as best we can fathom, their Snob Hill location as one of the nicest storage lockers ever. To be clear, the house is not abandoned, per-se, because the owners visit often and their yard man appears regularly to cut grass, trim bushes, and collect leaves.

We also have two elderly widowers on the Hill, and their two fates – though ultimately the same for all of us – are as individual as they are. One, Frank, is a cancer-battler who has kept his wild white hair, tousled up like Heat Miser in The Year Without Santa Claus, and who has been pursuing in his later years a modest career in stand-up comedy. But that is another story. We have nothing else to say about him now other than we refer to his slow strolls up the lane with a vocal, protective schnauzer named Aggy as “Franks Wild Years” in deference to Mr. Tom Waits.

How time ain’t nothin’ when you’re young at heart.

The other widower, Grant, hung onto his independence with a tenacity that was not sustainable, yet was also somehow admirable. His wife passed several years ago, and his own infirmities corroded his mobility, his moods and his ability to care for himself. Yet he insisted in both driving one of two vehicles – a PT Cruiser and a Ford Expedition – living out his remaining years at home. He gave it the ole college try, which required a couple of years’ worth of home healthcare providers who provided inconsistent quality to his care and wellbeing. When this arrangement because obviously untenable, the family moved him to a nearby assisted living facility just before the COVID-19 pandemic.  

How time runs like a freight train.

But it is his wife, Angela, to which we return. She was a master gardener associated for many years with our city’s botanical garden. She was known locally in the70s and 80s as the “Herb Lady” and people would clog the lane each spring to purchase plants she raised in her small greenhouse. We recently conversed with a woman at a nearby farm who, when she found out where we lived, described exactly this occurrence.

As might be expected, a master gardener saved some of the best plants and garden design for her own purposes. Yet, as cancer slowed her down and her passing, her once-admirable garden rooms with their English cottage influence and secret pockets, have gone to seed, to use an old phrase. They are now lush with poison ivy and oak, Virginia creeper and the invasive bugaboo honeysuckle. Still, many of the established plants still exert themselves through the weeds.

Such was the case this past week with a planting of a unique, salmon-colored iris. Among the world’s irises (and we claim to be no experts in the botanical sense), these are off the beaten path. Yes, we began to covet these irises. We desired the irises. They became an item of recurring conversations along the lines of “Wouldn’t those look lovely in certain parts of our own gardens? We know just where to tuck them.” Yet, as co-presidents of the Snob Hill Neighborhood Association, being caught as poachers would be both unseemly and just plain wrong. So we did the right thing. We called one of the siblings. We were not piggish. We asked to be allowed to dig up just a few rhizomes. To our delight, the sibling not only said “please do,” and added something about her mother’s legacy.

Like naughty children, we entered our neighbor’s overgrown gardens. We brought along our cell phone with the text from the sibling, just in case we were questioned about our activities. We carried a small shovel known as a “poacher’s spade,” which seemed only appropriate. We were careful where we removed the rhizomes, choosing to remove only those whose absence would be most unnoticeable. We also found another delicate blue iris, which we also chose to add to our garden.

As we planted the new flowers, we also realized how many of the plants on our property came from neighbors – clumps of ornamental grasses grabbed from a nearby yard with a handwritten Free! sign, clumps of hostas that a Snob Hill neighbor gave us after their son didn’t want them, and a new yucca that our next-door gave us after yanking it unceremoniously from her hill. We were also surprised this year when a neighbor from across the street had a “bumper crop” of tomato seedlings and offered “as many as you want. “ They weren’t our preferred heirloom varieties, but for free, we gladly accepted some.

We have come to prefer such botanical hand-me-downs in part to save money, but also because we know the plants are from our terroir, our local environment. They have histories. They also connect us with their owners. Sometimes, the “owners” are just the latest in a long line of plant hand-me-downers, like the plants from our parents’ gardens we shared in The Family Sedums.

We are surrounded by so ways of marking time – wall clocks and watches, holidays and birthdays, calendars and cadences, seasons and solstices, apps and emojis. We observe Snob Hill time, which is marked by the way of our sons visit (partners in tow) and park where they once played in piles of leaves. By the way neighbors move on, pass on, or relinquish their independence. By weather events, like the ice storm that disarmed trees whose branches broke like gunfire, like the tornadoes that spared Snob Hill but left us without electricity for a week, like the unnatural, eerily quiet skies during the days after 911, by the cautious, distanced chats in the lane as we sheltered in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. This kind of time almost always begins with “Do you remember when…?”

 Taking a bit of someone else’s garden is like trying to carefully scrape a bit of color from someone else’s painting. It could be a type of theft. It can also be a gift. A share. Like asking for Grandma Myrtle’s chicken and dumpling recipe and having her transcribe the faded, crumpled, stained 3x5 card in her recipe box, then hand it to you. It’s a loving act of assimilation. An opportunity to take someone else’s approach, or practice, or creation and   make it your own.

 In our desire, we thought of ourselves as iris thieves, which led us to recall something from Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief:  "Collecting can be a sort of love sickness. If you collect living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, because even if you manage to find and possess the living thing you want, there is no guarantee they won't die or change."

Which in turn led us to recall some lines from the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris:

“…And all I can taste is this moment

And all I can breathe is your life

And sooner or later it's over

I just don't wanna miss you tonight…”

Behold! The Holy Grail of Nut Grinders!

So, why the fanfare for this humble item? We are reminded of the quote, “I am haunted by waters” by Norman Maclean from the ending of A River Runs Through It. We have been haunted by this nut grinder — not by it’s presence, but by its absence.

For years, we have followed the example of countless PBS and cable cooks who chopped nuts with a knife (not to mention wending our way through Martha Stewart’s Christmas Cookbook). Sure, it was quick and efficient, but not even our best Damascus steel could provide the tactile delight we felt turning the crank of this humble grinder. Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and, we admit, the occasional cinnamon stick, fell through the tin chute and were transformed by circular tines into the nut gravel required for cookies and cheese balls. A culinary chipper-shredder.

Remember, we would say (sometimes out loud, more often just to ourselves)? Remember how fun it was to chop nuts with that old grinder? The one our great-grandmother bought at a Christmas Bazaar at the Methodist church and gifted to our mother. Yes, that one.

As Tim Burton once said, “Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It’s less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.”

The problem was, of course, memory and its damned specificity. We scoured garage sales, estate sales, and antique malls. We found plenty of nut grinders — plastic ones, electric ones, hand pumped ones, but never that one that we remembered. It had to be that one or nothing.

Imagine, then, a Thanksgiving day as our family gathered. Imagine it was this year, for instance. Imagine, too, our mother who extends a brown bag with handles, brimming with colored tissue paper. Imagine setting this “hostess gift” on the counter and turning to baste the turkey, only to have your mother pick it up and hand it to you again. Imagine as she says, “Please open this now. I think you’ll be pleased.”

And imagine your childhood flooding your eyes and the back of your throat as you pull it from its nest.

It may not be the prettiest item. It may not be the latest and greatest in nut grinding technology. It not even be exactly the color and pattern, neither of which you remember. But the design, the glass bottom, and, of course, that little handle. It’s almost — but only almost — better than the memory of it.

Beware nuts of the world. Behold, the holy grail of nut grinders.

Bedding Down on Snob Hill

The irony did not escape us recently when Parents phoned to inquire whether we had any interest in accepting the offer of their king-sized, extra-long (Dad has long legs), four-poster bed. We said we needed to think about it, which is to say, with more than a little artistic license, that we needed to “sleep on it,” which is often a euphemism for something along the lines of, “No, but we don’t want to hurt your feelings.” We should be clear also – by bed they meant bed frame, not the bedding, mattress, and box springs.

While we were sleeping on it that night, we realized something: So much history from one little fact. We have never purchased a bed – either had to, wanted to, or otherwise. Not for ourselves individually. Not for ourselves as a couple. Not for either son (cribs not included). And neither new nor used. We have bought mattresses, box springs, sheets fitted and flat, and egg crate and memory foam toppers, but never the bed. How’s that for intelligent design?

Childhood beds do not count because our wonder years were featured like apartments with furniture included, so starting in college, we slept in the dorm bunk, imported a bed from home, or slept on a life raft mattress on the floor (aka the faux-futon). Our first apartment as a couple was furnished with her childhood bed because it was a double, compared to his frameless single life raft, but the name-brand solid cherry bed did not survive more than a few years of service, no doubt because it was neither purchased or designed for the vaults, tumbles, and hard athleticism of early married life.

Fortuitously, yet sadly, around the time that we could no longer tighten the bolts and screws of the old cherry bed, a cherished grandmother died and left to Her the antique that was – and still is – known as The Lincoln Bed. It’s the kind of bed that inspired us to imagine donning bed clothes, night caps, and curly toed slippers (shades not of grey but, “And Ma in her kerchief. And I in my cap”).

This was, to borrow a phrase from tea time, a proppa bedda, befitting our then new-found status of first time homeowners. It anchored the euphemistically referenced Master Suite in our new ranch-style starter home, described by an inebriated father on his first visit as “Nice and new and all, though it does resemble a double-wide from the front and the butt (he said ‘rear’). In retrospect, we wish we could take back our needlessly apologetic reply, “Well, we had to start somewhere. But home alone, to be as honest as Abe, we had fun referring to it as The Lincoln Bedroom – Missouri Annex.

Eight years on, and we were planning on taking The Lincoln Bed here to Snob Hill. We were trying to negotiate that rare occurrence, the door-to-door move, and we were being batted about by the mortgage company like a shuttlecock during a game of drunken badminton. Before the closing, we secured an additional private visit. We measured and diagrammed (oh, the joys of graph paper) the placement of our bedroom furniture, including The Lincoln Bed.

We still appreciated the walnut behemoth, Boyone was five and Boytwo was due in a few months, and this patch of double bed real estate was beginning to experience, not quite border wars, but certainly lines of scrimmage. Into this moving mix, a Mother unexpectedly offered to give us her nearly new, recently acquired king-sized four-poster bed with what seemed to us to be fancy, almost high-tech mattress composed of a series of water tubes. After months of visiting bedroom stores and mattress retailers, Mother had chosen this bed as the cure for her sleeplessness and fibro myalgia. Six months after delivery, neither condition had improved – plus she didn’t like using a small step stool to ascend/access the bed. To borrow an analogy that could not have been made at that time – getting into this bed felt to her like assailing The Wall in Game of Thrones (nor was she a fan of Pink Floyd).

So we inherited the four-poster. Boytwo would graduate to the Lincoln Bed in a few years after he graduated from his crib. We learned to love spreading out. Besides many good nights of sleep, there is really only one story related to this bed. While hosting the annual Snob Hill Christmas Party a few years after we moved in, our neighbor the Death Star heaved herself upstairs rather than send her obedient lackey and sycophant husband, Sam, just to nose around the second floor of the house, ostensibly to retrieve her coat.

Her husband was code named (by us, anyway) Sam for Secret Agent Man because he had “retired” from some sort of other job while in his 50s to become a real estate agent for the company co-owned by our next-door neighbor. He never seemed to sell anything. We think he just liked to see his name planted on signs throughout town like toadstools after a heavy rain. Still, he seems to still have captured the soon-to-be deceased widow market—those little old ladies to shed their mortal coils as well as their earthly abodes—an always diminishing but ever sustaining segment of the local housing economy.

The coats were piled on our four-poster. And, yes, we did—and still do—have a brass chandelier above the bed, a perhaps extravagant touch, except we had acquired it during a silly bitof aggressive bidding – fueled by the double trouble of competitive bidding and an open bar at our sons’ school’s annual dinner auction. It was for a good cause we told ourselves, but the truth lay elsewhere, hung-over. The morning after (there’s got to be one and there’s no pill for it), as the boozy fog lifted, we stared at it – the chandelier – wondering what we were ever going to do with an extra chandelier (and reciting the morning-after mantra “What were we thinking. What WERE we thinking?”) an answer appeared – the bedroom.

Out of breath, and thinking they were unobserved, the Death Star said to Sam, the almost code-like, “To the manor born.” They nodded to each other, as long-established married persons often do in the nearly silent, private language, created during their years together. We could only ponder her assessment of our boudoir and recall the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King of Swamp Castle says, “One day, lad, this will all be yours.” To which his son Prince Herbert replies, “What, the curtains?”

The next bed we did not purchase sits now in pieces in the living room. The four poster this spring let us down finally – and literally. The footboard suddenly split one night when we were sleeping, no athleticism required.  The jokes have abounded about whose side was the one that collapsed. Thanks to the dust ruffle, the temporary repair we made with lag bolts and sistering boards, we were able to make the repair, but it bothered us knowing it was there and not knowing when next it would fail. Then a Father called the offer of his four-poster king-sized bed. He was reluctantly downgrading to a single bed so a Mother could continue to make it for him. The king-sized bed had become for her a painful, herculean task to change the sheeting.

And so, almost 20 years from the receipt of our last gifted place of repose, we have avoided again the opportunity to buy a bed. Yet, there are still consequences. The bed has been sitting in pieces in the living room for more than two months with a deadline of Thanksgiving to install it in our upstairs master bedroom. It’s not as easy as it may seem, but that, as they say, is another story.

For now, we will ponder all of this history from just unpurchased beds. We’ll sleep on that...for a bit longer.

The Family Sedums

We received the call a few weeks ago.

Well, not that call, but an important call nonetheless. We are referring of course to the call from Mother, who wanted to know if we would like the family sedums.

Some receive the family jewels, others, apparently, the family sedums. They were currently in pots on her deck and, despite her best efforts, something insisted on eating them, “to the quick,” as Mother put it. Every morning she would look outside to find another sedum reduced to a sad stub. She had moved the pots all year, from driveway to walkway to deck, trying to make them inaccessible, in successive order, to the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks, groundhogs, beavers, slugs, and gypsies, tramps, and orchid thieves.

To no avail.

The solution, Mother had concluded, was total exile, to secret them from her house in another county to ours … if we wanted them. We did, but this begs the question, “What if we said no?” The answer is, of course, “Not an option,” which sounds like the catchphrase from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that is our life. We are the inheritors of the family jewels and the family sedums.

Her offer came with some precedent. We already have the reputation as the repository of the family flora. Already rooted are the Hen and Chicks we were given in childhood by a great-grandmother who gave us “starters” from hers that she grew in strawberry pots, and Old Bastard, the maple tree flourishing in the backyard that is the progeny of the magnificent specimen a grandfather (the eponymous Old Bastard) had in his front yard before the Missouri Highway Department cut it down to widen the road.

There are no plant import regulations between St. Louis and St. Charles Counties. The sedums arrived in pots so large and heavy Father had brought along a ramp to slide them into the child-sized red Flexible Flyer wagon, the only wheeled conveyance we had since the red wheelbarrow’s tire went flat and we felt too cheap to spend $32 for a new one.  Who knew so much would have depended upon it?

Any of our looky-loo Snob Hill neighbors were rewarded with the sight of two 75-year-olds and two 53-year-olds (one limping along in a cam boot) guiding the sedums down the uneven stone walkway the way those people in the Macy’s Day Parade handle the giant Snoopy balloon on a windy Thanksgiving day. After safely seated on the front patio, our neighbors no doubt continued to be entertained as we stood, gesticulating over the pots, which Mother was quick inform that she wanted back.

There were three varieties of sedums, each with its own history and all of which are botanically unexceptional. They are just garden variety sedums. Mother pointed. Father pointed. We stood with hands on hips, trying to follow their disagreement about which sedum came from which side of the family. We can only be certain now of this: there is one from each side of the family and one that was purchased years ago by our parents. With a knowing glance, we acknowledged to each other that in a few seasons, after the sedums became established and spread in their new home, the confusion would only grow.

What our neighbors could not hear next was the story Mother told of the sedums from her own mother’s garden. This grandmother was a wonderful and giving woman with a tragic taste in men. She married twice after divorcing mother’s father (the only good one of the bunch). The third was a carpenter named Raymond (forever ruining that trade and name). Our grandmother was no gardener, but she liked to have a few flowers to brighten the yard that overlooked an interchange on Highway 55. She could never get anything to grow because Raymond delighted in running over with his riding lawnmower whatever she had planted. Tulips, marigolds, and Black-eyed Susans – all succumbed as he rode over them, laughing.

The only plants he could not kill were the sedums that she protected in beds, built of unattractive concrete blocks that lay along the basement foundation. During the last year before she died, Mother dug up some of the sedums and took them home. She nurtured them for more than 20 years and when she moved to two new houses.

Now this sedum legacy continues on Snob Hill. Family folklore blends with family plantlore – proof that love has the capacity to outlive cruelty for as long as we care to tend it and pass it on.

And Mother has her pots back.

--CB Adams

Life On Snob Hill: Strangers on the Hill

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One of our favorite authors is Lewis “Buddy” Nordan. A few weeks ago, we were reminded of his short story “The Sears and Roebuck Catalog Game” from his collection Sugar Among the Freaks. We were reminded because a For Sale sign has sprouted like an alien toadstool on the lawn of a Snob Hill property.

We were reminded of Nordan’s story because, as he wrote in the second paragraph, “My favorite game was to open a Sears and Roebuck catalog and sit with my mother on the floor or on her lap in a chair and to point to each model on the page and to say, What does this one do” – where does this one live? – which one is her boyfriend?”

We were reminded of this because we have for years played a similar game we call Who’s Next?, as in, who’s leaving the Hill next. This is a game that is both simple and quite complex. Cold War strategy has nothing on this exercise. There are only 12 homes on Snob Hill, but the houses and families who live in them are as intricately entwined as players embroiled in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

We admit that Who’s Next evolved from our early days on the Hill as we plotted to dismantle what came to be known as the Axis of Evil (this term was promptly appropriated by the second Busch administration). Very few properties on the Hill come to market, and this was even more true 18 years ago when we acquired our homestead. As the newcomers then, we quickly intuited the power structure, which was an oligarchy consisting of C, M, and J – or the CMJ Corporation, as we called it.

These three women had, without contest, ruled Snob Hill for years, due to the low turnover of properties. C was a woman who owned the world's largest collection of jean culotte skirts and favored short-cropped butchy haircuts. M was the widow of a local doctor infamous for wearing silk robes at his dinner parties, cross-stitching Christmas decorations, and being caught in flagrante with a male patient. J did not just hen peck her husband, she bludgeoned him. She was a heavy, round woman whom we nicknamed The Death Star. We are still sure she generated her own gravity.

These Supremes passed judgment on a panopoly of issues – judgments that they did not keep to themselves. Boys: too noisy. Dogs: too yappy. New house paint: too yellow. Trash: set out too early. Grass: not cut often enough. Fire pits: illegal. Today: not as great as yesterday.

We, and a select few of our other neighbors, tried for regime change to no avail. We dreamed of a coup d'état, or a putsch, or an overthrow, or some other sort of sudden deposition. Yet still they reigned. The best we could do was wish for the dismantling of the CMJ Corporation. It was a war to be won through attrition. We assured ourselves that time would be our best defense. “At least,” we reasoned, “If we can’t unseat them, we can outlive them.”

And Who’s Next? was born. Actually, in its original form, it was Who’s First?. Who would be the first to leave the Hill? This topic provided hours of enjoyment as we contemplated who would lead the exodus. We became, for all intents and purposes, the Snob Hill Actuarials – masters at weighing age, health, income, family pressures, the local real estate market, home and property maintenance, and overall openness to change, among other variables. And each time we played, the outcome was different. We became fond of a line from a Lucinda Williams song, “If wishes were horses, I’d have a ranch.” We were living on The High Chaparral.

It took several years, but M was the first to relent. She had been a widow for at least 20 years and did not work, but when she announced her departure, she said she was “retiring” to Arizona. We could only suppose that dictatorship had taken its toll. Several years after that, C and her husband downsized to a local condo development. J is still holding on, in a way. She and her husband, Chicken D, moved out of their house and into one they inherited close by, but their Snob Hill house remains empty and un-for-sale, sort of like one of Saddam Hussein’s abandoned palaces.

We continued to play Who’s Next?. At least two years ago, we correctly identified the current household in the Dutch Colonial as next. We liked the widow who lived there. It took us a while to get to know her because we had been warned by the CMJ Corporation to avoid here because “she drinks.” This was conveyed in the same whispery, gossipy way that cancer was mentioned 50 years ago.

The For Sale sign appeared without warning. We had hoped for some advance notice. The agent’s name on the sign was Cookie Rottermich. We wondered who would want to say, “Cookie is selling my house”? The image of a passel of Keebler Elves scampering about the place, tjuzing and prepping and staging was disturbing, to say the least. And even though our computer cannot access Google translator, we are sure Rottermich can be loosely translated from the German as Rotten Milk. Not a good sign.

A week later the open house was announced. The Dutch Colonial was the only house we had not yet seen inside in the 18 years we have lived on the Hill. Apparently this was the case with most of our neighbors because as we entered, the house was crawling with them. It seemed there were more neighbors than potential buyers. We are a nosy lot.

We toured the house, then met some Snob Hillers and discussed, in the kitchen, the inadequate size of the kitchen, the general condition of the house, and the recent sewer issues that had been mitigated. In the living room we met some other Hillers and discussed the owner’s desire to move to a retirement community and whether she was asking an appropriate price. We fell into two camps on this issue: those of us who thought it was correctly “priced to sell” and those of us who thought she should have set the price higher. We have our own property values to consider, after all. With other neighbors, we compared who had been in what houses and who had made significant home improvements over the years. Between ourselves, we proposed some light to moderate demolition and the benefit of turning the screened porch into a four season room.

We admit we dished about living on the Hill. And some of the outsiders kept an ear cocked to our conversation. Especially someone we nicknamed Blue Notebook Man. He practically followed us around. We swear he even took some notes. We noticed he had two young sons (oh, and a wife). This interested us because of the three families with children, there are four girls and two boys. Two additional boys would help equal out the hormonal balance of the neighborhood.

A few days later, we thought we spied Blue Notebook Man assessing the house with a home inspector. A few days after that, some surveyors were taking measurements. Yet, still no Sold sign. We had to remind ourselves that some agents wait until the deal is done before announcing it.

A week or so later, the news was official. But no Sold sign. Instead, it said “Too Late!”. Too late for what? Was this a message to us? Was it too late for us to vet the potential new neighbors? Was it too late for us to sell first? Was it too late for the sellers to back out? Or was this an agent/conspiracy theorist with a new spin on The End is Near! sign? A simple, unambiguous, easy-to-understand Sold sign would have caused much less anxiety.

Now we wait. Will they move in before the Snob Hill annual Christmas party? Or will the current owner insist on one last holiday before moving to the next phase of her life? Will there be boys? We don’t know.

But we can say this: Welcome Strangers!

And ask: Who’s Next?

Our Life on Snob Hill, The Beginning

Many towns and cities have Snob Hills. When we moved to our own private Snob Hill 17 1/2 years ago, we were the youngest family on this twelve-household incorporated subdivision. We had one five-year-old son and one on the way in a few months. We were living in a newly built suburban ranch-style house that my father in law called a glorified double-wide. We had been looking to move into an older, more traditional home for a few years. We wanted a house to go along with our antiques. We found several homes, but they either needed too much remodeling to live in during renovation or they had already remodeled and were beyond our means. We were mildly complaining about our situation one Sunday after Mass when an elderly parishioner urged us keep driving around town and sooner or later something would turn up.  We took her advice and drove home on a street unfamiliar to us.

And there it was: an Open House Today sign planted haphazardly on a brushy hill. The house was obscured by a tall wooden fence. A peek through the gate and we resolved to return at the advertised time. Call it kismet or call it serendipity, but the only thing keeping the divorcing owners (both anesthesiologists) legally together was this house. Due to this  "divorce situation," as the agent put it, the owners had just reduced the asking price by 30 grand -- just barely within our range.

​We came. We stayed all day. We made an offer. We made a door-to-door move about a month later. Our life on Snob Hill had begun.