Tea Time in the Garden by Milou Koenings

I had dinner outside last night, on my terrace, by candlelight. It seemed a fitting end to the summer. Tonight, my kids come home from a month-long visit to their grandparents in Chicago and in a few days we’ll all be adjusting to new routines, early morning bustle, making school lunches and hustling everyone out the door on time.

But last evening, lulled by the song of crickets in the darkness, I reflected on how eating outdoors evokes such wonderful late summer memories.

Liana Mikah

Sure, I’ve been blessed with many picnic memories. Some were delightful, like the one at the edge of a remote lake in Africa where various wildlife popped in to say hi, or the day I cooked breakfast, wrapped it up and took everyone down to the still-empty park to eat on the dewy grass. Others were disasters, like the time the extra gas canister in the back of the jeep sprang a leak and flooded all our food for the trip over and past the Mountains of the Moon, and that was before we got mired in mud ­— fortunately we can all laugh about it now, but it sure wasn’t funny at the time!

But the image that most comes to mind in the late summer if of my visits to my godmother. Every year of my earliest childhood, my parents shipped me off to spend two weeks with my godmother. 

She and her husband lived in Brussels, in a big house so removed from the boulevard that was its official address that one could pretend to be out in the country. It was a magical place to me. There was actually a library in the house — the kind with the rolling ladders to reach the highest shelves. There was a grand piano that I was allowed to “play” for hours. There was a dovecote, with the attendant cooing playing the background melody of each day. There was only one telephone and it was the candlestick kind that you need both hands to use — one to hold the little hearing piece to your ear and one to hold the base. It had been installed in the 1920s by my godmother’s parents, and sixty years later, she didn’t see any reason to replace it — it worked just fine.

One of my godmother’s passions was her rose garden, a wild, rambling thing that overtook the front alley with heady scents and glorious colors. At the edge of it, off to the side of the house, was a clearing with a gnarled old tree. There was a bench beneath it that had been there so long that the tree had grown through and around it so that the two were now one being.

My godmother had set a table and chairs before the bench, and every afternoon in August, she served tea under the tree.  And I don’t mean toss-a-tea-bag-in-a-mug kind of tea.  It was a ceremony planned for from early morning, when her first task after breakfast was to bake the pastry of the day. (My favorite was boterkoek, a Dutch pastry made with candied ginger.) Then, in the afternoon, there was laying out the tea tray: setting out a lacy cloth over the tray; stacking delicate saucers and cups and cake plates; the sugar bowl with its silver tongs; the creamer; the teapot, the plate of thinly sliced lemon.

Anita Austvika

At four, we’d go sit under the tree and my godmother would pour. This was the time that their friends knew they were welcome to come by. So, each day was different — on rare occasions it was just the three of us, but most of the time one or two of their friends would join us.  My godmother was a pianist. Her husband was an archaeologist. Among their friends were not only colleagues, but also artists and college professors in other fields.

There I was, a quiet child sitting under the tree, sipping my tea and nibbling my slice of boterkoek, imbibing the most fascinating conversations. I learned more esoteric things on those lazy August afternoons than I ever did at school — not least of which was the existence of Disney World in Florida. One of the friends, an engineer, had just returned from taking his family there. He explained in detail not only the rides, but also the ingenious ways in which they were constructed. It sounded so out-of-this-world, that to this day I fear a visit to Disney World would pale in comparison to the vision he described to us that day. (I have taken my kids to Disneyland in Paris, though, and admit I was not disappointed in the least!) I also now associate engineers with Disney magic, which is probably why I’m so fond of them.

Anita Austvika

My grown-up life is so hectic, there’s little room for this kind of genteel ritual. But if I need a little end-of-summer vacation, I’m grateful I can slip into my memories and still enjoy this one. 

And if an intertwined tree and bench or a gracious teatime make an appearance in any of my books, you’ll know where it came from.

Milou Koenings is a USA Today bestselling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.

Her other Green Pines sweet romances, I Love You Three, Reclaiming Home, The Kampala Peppermint Twist and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon,  Amazon.uk, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and all your favorite e-book retailers.








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Dusting by Milou Koenings

I don't usually let mess get to me.  But I do like things clean.  (There's a difference between piles of paper spread out on a clean table, and piles of papers strewn over half-eaten apples and candy wrappers, after all.)

Francois Shnell, cc-by-2.0

The trouble with being a "clean-nik," as opposed to a neatnik, is that it is a losing proposition in a houseful of kids. At the end of the day, there's never enough time to make everything as sparkling clean as I would like it. Scrubbing bathroom tiles always comes in a last when it’s a choice between that or feeding the troops, making sure they have clean clothes, and getting to bed before midnight. 

As for dusting... let's just say that when I was waiting at the dentist recently, rereading an old Agatha Christie mystery that had been left there, and the detective in the story noticed "day-old" dust in the murder victim's home, I laughed out loud.

So there I was, one evening, duster in hand, trying to polish up our living room, despairing that I can never get it as perfectly clean as I would like.

In a moment of frustration, I looked at the stuff on the hutch above the china cabinet and exclaimed, "I'm getting rid of all of this. All it does is collect dust."  I grabbed the carved owl statuette that my mother had given me the day I got my first job after college. "I'm packing this up."

My beloved came over and took me by the shoulders. "Stop." I was turned around to face the three shelves and their ten or so knick knacks. "Do you know what I see when I look at this?

"That's the souvenir we bought that day at the crafts fair..."  Yeah - fifteen years ago. It was a perfect day. Just the memory made some of my tension melt.

"That's what your mom got you when you got your first writing job — and that other owl, that was also a gift from mom.

"This tree of wire and stones — the kids were so proud to have made that. And this jar from my grandmother's house, it reminds me of all those visits to her. The seashells? Didn't we have a wonderful time when we took the kids to the beach? They were so happy! That brass candelabra from your grandfather, I know how much it means to you.

"You know what I see when I look at this? I see our life, our family. I see our home.  And I hope it is dusty. I hope it's full of dust. Because that means we're far too busy taking care of our kids and each other and living our life together, to worry about a little dust."

Well.

What could I say? Except I'd just fallen in love all over again.

You might still find me waving around my duster late at night, but now each time I walk by that hutch and spy some dust, I can't help but smile.

Milou Koenings is a USA Today bestselling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place. 

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon and Amazon.uk. 








You can find her on her website,www.miloukoenings.com, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.

Beach Angels by Milou Koenings

Every once in a while, you meet someone who restores your faith in humanity.  This week, for us, it was at the beach.

Beach party, anyone?

 

I took some of my kids to the beach with a friend and her little boy. My friend's little boy, Eli, has Downs syndrome. He's thirteen but looks like he's six.

At the beach we go to, there are various areas where businesses have concessions to rent out chairs and parasols. Some have wooden gazebos set up, too.  The friendly owner of the particular concession we'd been to last time had given me his phone number. I texted him that we were coming with special-needs children—would he please reserve a gazebo for us?

When we arrived, we discovered Roy had saved us the one closest to the water that connected to the boardwalk. Wow, I'd forgotten to mention it in my text, but he'd remembered we had a kid in a wheelchair.  

We were intending to spread out sheets and just picnic on the wooden floor, but within minutes, he had brought us chairs and tables. When he noticed my friend had trouble easing into the low beach chair, he brought three more to stack them, so she'd have a higher chair. He did the same for some of the kids. With boundless enthusiasm, he lined the sunny side of the gazebo with parasols. And as the sun moved across the sky throughout the day, he kept moving those parasols for us, too.

But I eyed the array of extra chairs and more tables than we really needed, plus the parasols and added them all up in my head. This was going to be expensive. Whatever—might as well make it nice for the kids, I figured.

We thanked Roy and Eli went up to shake his hand. Roy was so taken by him and the other kids that he couldn't do enough for us. The whole day, either he or his father, who works with him, kept stopping by to make sure we didn’t need anything. Sometimes people aren't so welcoming of families with special kids, so we were very grateful.

Roy offered to take the kids up to the lifeguard tower to meet the off-duty guards. Next thing we knew, Eli was waving at us from the window way up high. The kids got a tour of the all the emergency equipment. They stood on a surfboard and sat in a canoe.  They were in seventh Heaven.

Spot the surfer?

 

After I retrieved the kids from their impromptu field trip, Roi started asking me about Eli and his mom, who is also disabled. I told him how Eli's father had left them when Eli was two, unable to handle having a son with Downs. No one's heard of him since. Usually, people hear this story and make sympathetic faces. But Roy was so shocked that he froze.

"How can a father do that? How can any man do that?" he asked, incredulously. I shrugged—unfortunately, I know too many of these stories to be shocked by such behavior.

"No, really," Roy insisted. "My sister adopted two foster kids and she's also alone. I'm over there every day. I go over all the time, so those kids know they might not have a father, but they've got an uncle. Kids need a man in their life!"

I couldn't have agreed more, but I was touched by this guy's passion about it. We talked some more and it turned out he volunteers regularly with special-needs kids. Well, that explained why he was so good to us, I thought.

But we weren't the only ones he was being good to. Roy sent his father to us with an enormous platter of watermelon.  The kids were too excited about it for me to turn it down and say we'd brought our own food. Add another expense to the bill, I thought. 

Roy's father stayed to chat a few minutes and told me later that Roi had hired him when he realized how depressed his father had become once he'd retired. "I was a little lost, and driving my wife crazy," he admitted. "So now I work for my son," he chuckled. "I get to be a beach bum all day—what could be better?"

"He's getting married in two weeks, you know," he added. "They're moving so they can be in walking distance of us and of her family, too."

Wow. Families that stick together. I wanted to cry to know that still exists.

Later in the afternoon, Roy showed up with ice creams for everyone. Eight of them —that's got to be at least another $20, I added mentally.  Whatever, for one day in the summer, let's live it up.  Besides, by then the kids had ripped them open and had chocolate melting all over their chins.

We stayed longer than we'd expected. The sun was low in the horizon when we decide we had to go home. We packed everyone up. Then I went looking for Roi to settle up the bill. The guy really had treated us extra special. No matter how much it is, I told myself, I'm going to give this guy a really good tip.

He saw us, all packed up, and came over to say goodbye. He shook all the kids' hands.  Then Eli gave him a hug and just had to give him a blessing. That's what Eli does—when he meets someone he really likes, he insists on putting his hands on their heads and giving them a blessing. The boy can't talk, but his meaning comes through loud and clear anyway.

And then, Roy refused to take any money. At all. I tried to insist. 

"No way," he said. "I let you think you'd pay so you would feel okay about accepting things, but this is my treat."  He grinned. "It's for me, it makes me feel good!" he said, in the nicest way, as if we were the ones doing him a favor by not making him take money. "And next time, you better tell me when you're coming too," he said to the kids.

Next to us, an older man on a lounge chair was watching. I saw him wipe a tear from his eye.

I couldn't cry till I got home and got everyone to bed. But in a world that lately seems so full of creeping darkness, it was so good to know there are still a few angels out there.

Oh and, yes, I do think I feel a surfer/beach hunk romance novel percolating in the back of my mind!

Milou Koenings is a USA Today best-selling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.  
 

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon and Amazon.uk. 

You can find her on her website,www.miloukoenings.com, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.

 

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Blackberry Jam and Other Memories by Milou Koenings

My grandmother had apple trees.  And lots and lots of berries.  Gooseberries, blackberries, currants - red and black.   

Steph, cc-by-nc-nd-2.0.

 She would peer at us kids from the kitchen window whenever we sounded a bit too far away.  Because the farther from the kitchen we went, the more fruit there was to pluck off the bushes, to savor, crouching down behind the thickest cluster of leaves, keeping an eye for the twitch of the kitchen curtains while tell-tale juice ran down our chins and stained our dresses.

No matter how many berries our little hands picked though, it didn't seem to reduce the enormous amounts of buckets of fruit that filled the kitchen when it was time to make jam.  Grandma had this strange metal contraption that sat on the stove.  It hissed and it sputtered and it growled while we cowered at the far end of the room.  

When it was time to open the little tap near the bottom of the monstrous pot, we'd get kicked out of the kitchen altogether.  But my cousins and I would peer through the open doorway to watch the ruby and amethyst potions fill one glass jar after another.

Eventually, the jars would be added to those on the wall of shelves in the basement and one by one, show up at breakfast.

I got Grandma's cookbook recently.  A five-volume set published in France in 1959 that my mother inherited from her.  My father found it and mailed it to me.  

It's mine now.  

The volumes have been taped together multiple times.  They've been rebound in contact paper.  A coffee table set, this isn't.   

It shows every sign of having been well-used.  

But I love turning the pages and coming upon little notes in Grandma's handwriting, and a few pages later, comments by my mother.   

Every once in a while, I come upon a bookmark; I've found permission slips meant for kids' teachers and store receipts from the 1970s.  And even flight information from January 29, 1964, when my mom and dad were working together running an airline in the Congo.   

Not surprisingly, one of the five volumes is dedicated to jams and preserves.

So is it any wonder that I've got my characters hard at work making blackberry jam? 

Here's the recipe.  But remember, it starts with harvesting the berries yourself from the backyard!

Phil Long, cc-by-2.0

Blackberry Jam

3.5 kg (7.7 pounds) of blackberries

1 kg (2.2 pounds) of green apples

4 kg (8.8 pounds!) of sugar

1/2 liter (1 pint) of water

1. Clean the blackberries and peel the apples.
2. Cover the fruit with sugar and let them sit for several hours.
3. Pour the mixture in a pot, add the water and cook, stirring.

Elsewhere, the cookbook recommends adding lemon juice to blackberry jam.  But you'll notice the recipe gives no indication as to how long this should cook. The book says it all depends on your stove and how high the flame is ... that's specific, isn't it? 

Have you ever made jam? I confess I never have!

Milou Koenings is a USA Today best-selling author. She writes romance because, like chocolate, stories with a happy ending bring more joy into the world and so make it a better place.  

Her Green Pines sweet romances, Reclaiming Home and Sweet Blizzard are available on Amazon and Amazon.uk. 

You can find her on her website,www.miloukoenings.com, on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.

 

Sign up for our newsletter and keep up with Sweet Romance Reads!

 

And please join us at the Sweet Romance Reads Cafe to chat with our authors. We love to hear from you!