Life On Snob Hill: Every Something Tells a Story

At this year’s Snob Hill Neighborhood Association Christmas party, which we hosted again because one of us happens to be the president, a neighbor made an early announcement. She wanted to review our Christmas tree.

This was not casual curiosity. She loves vintage ornaments in the way people love objects that have survived hands, houses, decades. We do not share much in common beyond geography on Snob Hill and this affection for old ornaments, but that turns out to be enough. We were happy to oblige. We enjoy a good ornament conversation, especially with a fellow aficionado. Objects can do that—create a small, sturdy bridge where shared history does not otherwise exist.

She moved slowly, deliberately, as if reading. She pointed out ornament after ornament, pausing to ask where this one came from, or how long we’d had that one. Each time, we had a story. What antique mall. Which thrift shop. Which parent’s storage bin. Which long-gone house it once lived in.

Eventually, she paused, looked at us, and said, “Boy, you have a lot of stories.”

We do, though we have never quite defined ourselves as storytellers. It is not something we announce upon meeting someone. We do not extend a hand and declare our tendencies. Still, they seem to be noticed. Many of the things in our home come with explanations, even if we rarely offer them unless invited.

This way of living with objects reminds us of Meret Oppenheim, the Surrealist artist best known for transforming ordinary things into charged, unforgettable works. In her Swiss home, objects were often accompanied by small handwritten notes, sometimes tucked discreetly inside them, explaining where they came from or how they were meant to be regarded. What might once have felt overly particular now reads as something else entirely: care made visible, memory given a place to rest.

We are far less elevated, and far less Surrealist. Still, the impulse feels familiar. To annotate. To leave leavings. To refuse to let meaning drift away.

That habit did not originate with us. Both of us had grandmothers who believed objects deserved context. They told stories of acquisition and handed-downness, of where something came from and from which branch of the family. They wrote names, dates, and notes on the backs of photographs and paintings, the bottoms of drawers, the undersides of things meant to last. We leave those markings untouched. They feel less like annotations than instructions. The only remaining father still alive between us, not in his mid-80s, has mentioned more than once recently that he’d like to sit down with a stack of photographs and a video camera running and explain who is in those photographs. We really need to take him up on that.

We share the habit our grandmothers modeled. When thrifting or antiquing, one of the first things we do is turn something over. We look at the backs of frames, the bottoms of drawers, the flyleaves of old books. One of the quiet pleasures of secondhand objects is discovering someone else’s attempt to give a something a little extra life. A penciled name. A brief explanation. A small insistence that this once mattered.

There is a lot of history captured that way. Other people’s, and eventually, our own.

We were reminded of this again when thinking about a college friend whose family was not much for keeping ephemera. What few photographs existed were claimed early by more senior relatives. Left without images, he went looking elsewhere. At tag sales and flea markets, he bought framed photographs of strangers whose faces he liked, or thought resembled him. He arranged them throughout his apartment, and later his house.

When someone commented on one, he would improvise a story about Grandfather Horace or great-aunt Audra. His lineage grew elaborate and oddly complete: Civil War and World War I veterans, gentleman farmers, dirt-poor sharecroppers, a racetrack tout and a dandy and a flaneur. It was almost entirely invented, and yet it felt authentic, even to us, who knew better. The care he took in building that history gave it weight.

There was, however, one family story he never made up, and it remained the best of them all. One of his grandfathers had been a dentist in rural Kansas who died after contracting lockjaw from working on a patient. It was stark, unadorned, and entirely true. The kind of story that needs no embellishment, and somehow made all the others feel plausible by association.

Inheritance, invention, and attention all arrive at the same place: the desire to give a life, or an object, enough context to feel anchored.

Our Christmas tree is a seasonal archive. Nothing on it arrived accidentally nor is situated haphazardly. Some ornaments came with price tags and dust. Others arrived wrapped in tissue paper that smelled faintly of basements and earlier Christmases. A few carry family names, which is a different kind of provenance altogether. Without their stories, the ornaments feel diminished. With them, they feel complete.

The photograph accompanying this piece shows another object that works the same way. It hangs by the front door on Snob Hill: a framed slab of slate, dark and worn, one corner still missing.

Long before it became this, it was part of a much larger sheet, rescued from a schoolhouse being demolished to make way for a new one. One of our fathers was a surveyor at the time. He saved the slate and carried it with him for decades, house to house. It was heavy, awkward, and not especially useful, but it had a past, and that seemed reason enough.

Years later, he figured out how to cut the slate into smaller pieces. For one of our mothers, he hand-carved a wooden frame so it could hang by the back door. A piece of chalk was tied to a string. Visitors could leave messages.

They rarely did. There were not many visitors, and most did not take advantage of the invitation. Still, that mother lived in hope of a steady stream of arrivals, provided they were close family. Everyone else was met with a careful reserve. The slate waited patiently either way.

A nephew once expressed a more-than-passing interest in inheriting it, but first-born, or at least uncle, privileges prevailed. Now it hangs by our front door instead. One of us changes the chalk drawings with the seasons. The slate accepts whatever is written onto it.

It also reminds us of a book we loved mostly for the poetic cadence, lilt and alliteration of its title: Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars. The appeal was never culinary innovation so much as accumulation. Knowledge passed along in margins and packaging, where real life tends to happen.

“Every something tells a story” is not a declaration so much as a practice. A way of moving through rooms, objects, and seasons with attention. A habit of looking at the backs and bottoms of things, and leaving what you find there intact.

The neighbor eventually finished her review. The tree passed inspection. Glasses were refilled. Conversations drifted.

But the remark lingered — You have a lot of stories.

Yes, we do. And we don’t even have to make them up.

Life On Snob Hill: How We Complicate the Evergreen

Family, Tradition, and the Light We Choose

A mother found the tree farm in a short newspaper clipping. We wish we still had it — burnished, oxidized to that amber yellow newsprint gets with time — because it feels like the true beginning of the story. What was it that caught her eye? The promise of something more real than the Optimist Club tree lot? Something sturdier, truer, than the silver tinsel tree her own mother had put up since the 1950s? Did she have any inkling of what it would become? We wish we could travel back to that quiet moment when she read it, when imagination flickered before tradition hardened. That lost clipping has become its own kind of artifact — the precursor, the preamble, the forward.

From that clipping grew what we would come to call The Tradition, as these things do — gradually, quietly, until one day it felt fixed in the calendar. The Friday or Saturday after Thanksgiving meant a trip to the farm. It arrived as reliably as turkey leftovers crowding the refrigerator, as predictably as the light thinning out by late afternoon. Year by year, the ritual settled in, not with ceremony but repetition, until it became mistaken for permanence.

But enough reverie. We’re here to talk trees.

The farm itself felt timeless — a gravel road winding toward fields of Scotch pines, the wheezy tractor pulling a flatbed wagon lined with hay bales, the smell of sap and wet mittens in the air. It began modestly, almost accidentally, a side project started by an aerospace engineer who lived in St. Louis and grew trees on family land near Hermann, Missouri. The first time the family trekked out, in the late 1970s, it was only the second or third year they offered cut-your-own trees. There was a rough hayride into the fields, bow saws waiting in a wooden stand, and the sense — real or imagined — that you were participating in something elemental.

Over the decades, the farm grew. It added photos on Santa’s lap, a made in China gift shop, kettle corn, hot chocolate dispensed from those large cafeteria urns with spigots — powdered, unmistakably — and parking that eventually rivaled an NFL tailgate on a steep hill. It became crowded. It became a place where you might see people you carefully avoided the rest of the year, including the family from across the street, the Wittenbergs — nicknamed, unkindly, the Whitney Butts. Still, we went. Because it was Tradition.

One of the memories we still tell — and retell — is the rainy-year wagon story. The field had turned to pudding from days of drizzle. As soon as the wheezy tractor arrived, we clambered aboard. Across from us sat an entire family, growing in size with each retelling — sometimes five or six kids, sometimes a Cheaper by the Dozen brood, depending on the storyteller’s flair that year.

The father looked like he’d just stepped down from a deer blind. The mother was part church-lady, part Minnie Pearl, part Capote’s Sook — a composite character whose wardrobe grew more plaid and more threadbare with each telling. Their children were dressed spectacularly wrong for the cold rain — sometimes white patent-leather shoes, sometimes thin sweaters, sometimes, in the more embellished versions, flip flops. Memory is a slippery, generous accomplice. “No, no,” someone always insists, “you’ve got it wrong — they were wearing Converse.” Then the echo: “Wait — wasn’t there a baby in a bonnet?”

But the moment we all agree on is when the mother stood tall at the end of the wagon bed and hollered, “Hey!” Her children froze, turned in unison, and looked up at her expectantly. “Now spread out and look for a tree!” she commanded — as if the thousand trees surrounding us were hiding. The kids scattered instantly, toward the hills, toward the mud, toward everything. A moment of pure, chaotic Americana.

There were harder moments, too. One year, early in the age of The Tradition, our father had hernia surgery and was ordered to stay behind at the barn so he wouldn’t tear his sutures. There’s a photograph from that day — him bundled against the cold, pale, watching us ride away. It still undoes us. He wanted desperately to be with us.

Twenty years later, our mother stood in that same barn door with that same forlorn posture. Another cold, damp, bone-aching day — the kind that far outnumbered the storybook snowy ones. Lupus and fibromyalgia made the trip unbearable, but she still came, wanting to be part of it even if she couldn’t tromp through the fields. There is no photograph of her standing there — though in memory it feels like there should be — but the image is just as sharp: her shoulders tucked slightly inward, watching us head off again. Echoes upon echoes.

The farm changed. We changed. The family changed.

We should have known the end was nigh for a real tree (we can’t bring ourselves to call a cut tree a “live” tree) when this scarecrow Santa greeted us from atop a hill at the OG tree farm. We memorialized the scene with a Holga camera to make this photograph.

There came the year of the blight. Unable to harvest enough ready trees, the farm trucked them in from out of state and stuck them into holes like cut flowers returning to the earth in disguise. Around that time we had read The Overstory and The Secret Life of Trees, so naturally we imagined the rooted trees gossiping about the impostors. Even the evergreens, it seemed, were judging us.

And yes, for a long while, our tree was real. Fragrant. Messy. And always followed by raging sinus infections that turned December into an endurance sport. We held on longer than was sensible because traditions dare you to. Eventually, antihistamines won the argument. We switched to artificial — not lightly, not without guilt, but with relief.

Artificial trees, for all their sins, at least gave us choice. Balsam. Douglas fir. Trees with branches generous and sturdy enough to actually hold an ornament, rather than forcing it into submission. The tree farm — like all the others in this part of the country — was limited to Scotch pine. It’s simply too warm here to grow the trees Martha Stewart promoted and purred over, making their virtues sound practically erotic. Scotch pines, by contrast, were never equal to the task. Their branches turned baubles into squatters, compelled to perch, recline, or sprawl, draped across the tree like a poncho thrown over a coat rack.

You could get balsam and fir at the tree lots, but we were cut-your-own people. Still, we voiced our longing for the Martha trees often enough. And every time, without fail, one of our fathers trotted out The Balsam Fir Story. It was always the same: the year his parents brought home a balsam, left it standing in its base on the porch after the holidays, and watched as it dried and curled in on itself. He told it with his arms standing in for the branches, slowly folding inward, elbows bent, wrists sagging — an attitude with a collapsed bras bas, though ballet terminology was nowhere in his vocabulary. He wasn’t much for all that flitting about, and besides, no one did that on the Andy Williams Christmas specials — or if they did, he looked away. “Just like witch’s fingers,” he’d say. Then again, for emphasis: “Just like witch’s fingers.” We were never quite sure why this desiccated choreography was reason enough to reject the balsam outright, given that a Scotch pine, left on the porch under similar conditions, simply shed its needles and ended up looking like a shaved dog. But he doubled down. The anti-balsam bias held firm. Okay, Dad. We get it.

Artificial trees, for us, still earn their keep — and they earn their replacement. We have a tendency to keep things longer than we should: cars, favorite sweaters, grudges. Trees fall into the same category. We limped along for years telling ourselves, We can probably get one more year out of this one, a phrase elastic enough to stretch across four or five Christmases. Every January, during the annual ritual of De-Christmasing, we said, It’s time, then packed it back into its box and shoved it into the basement. Each December we grumbled anew, until last year, when we took it to the curb before sentiment could intervene. The old tree had crossed the line. It had grown openly hostile. It drew blood. Out it went.

One of us finally reached the point where we couldn’t keep living in the weirdness of it all. Not hypocrisy. Not travesty. Just weird. Weird to go to a tree farm and not get a tree. Weird to cheer “timber” for someone else’s. Weird to interrupt our own family’s rhythms for a ritual that had become more memory than meaning. We hung in as long as we could. Then came the switch — a new, better-reviewed, more “Instagrammable” tree farm, discovered by a sister who trusts Yelp with the confidence of a medieval pilgrim following relics. It was closer to her house, of course, and shinier, and felt like a glossy New Coke version of the original. That sealed the Tradition’s fate for us.

Still, every year, that mother invited us anyway, always adding, “Are you sure?” If there is a regret — and of course there is — it arrives the way certain songs do. One line from Sinatra’s “My Way.” “Regrets, I’ve had a few…” And the box opens.

Let us pause, briefly, for a pivot into the irony sphere — where good intentions meet capitalism and everyone politely pretends not to notice. We were raised on “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965!), imprinted early with Lucy’s pronouncement about the big commercial racket. Layered onto that is Clark Griswold stomping through the woods proclaiming, “I give you the Griswold family Christmas tree!” as heavenly light beams down. So what were we doing at a tree farm if not paying for a curated reenactment of authenticity? The longing is perennial. The retail is, too.

After a few years of that awkward transition — when we were faintly ashamed of having gone artificial yet still dutifully piled into cars to traipse out to the tree farm — something shifted. At the time, it felt like penance: participating in a ritual whose outcome we had already outsourced. But distance clarified things. Families like ours are no longer bound quite so tightly. The nuclear family has been quietly dismantled. Instead of bundling together on a hay-bale-lined wagon, we now conduct the search more or less alone — tromping through websites, interrogating search engines, comparing dimensions and lumen counts, arranging pickup and transport ourselves. There is still care. Still deliberation. Still the serious business of choosing the tree — or at least the one that makes sense for our ceilings and for the crates and barrels of ornaments waiting their turn. The same instinct, expressed through different materials. The same, but different.

Which brings us to this year’s debate — not whether to buy an artificial tree, but what kind. Pre-lit or not. Eight feet or nine. Height versus girth, which turns out not to be a metaphor but a genuine point of contention. One of us argues for vertical ambition — high ceilings demand a tree that understands proportion. The other insists that fullness matters more, that girth carries the visual weight, that a tall, skinny tree is just showing off. Cost, of course, lurks behind every aesthetic argument, pretending not to listen while taking notes.

Then there is the matter of light. One of us believes the magic lives there — that ornaments only become themselves when properly illuminated. The other maintains that ornaments should stand on their own, that a tree shouldn’t need theatrical lighting to make its case. This disagreement has persisted for decades and has resulted in trees wrapped, unwrapped, and rewrapped with the care of a long-running détente. Visitors always comment on the results, asking how we do it. When we explain, they usually throw up their hands and say, “That’s too much work.”

Well, yeah… And your point is?

Pre-lit trees complicate everything. For years we avoided them — early-adopter tax, questionable longevity, insufficient candlepower. Eight hundred lights for an entire tree? One of us could burn through that on the lower branches alone. LEDs helped. Prices came down. Technology matured. Still, we hesitate. There’s something suspect about outsourcing the glow. And yet here we are, considering it, because even resistance evolves.

We are wary, too, of letting the purchase itself become a symbolic act. The C-word lurks here — commercialization. December runs on buying, on the idea that meaning can be rung up at the register. We dip in. We taste. We hope not too much.

And yet the desire persists. Long before LEDs, people clipped candles to trees just to make them glow — a risk we can admire if not replicate. Perhaps the next iteration will be holographic, AI-assisted trees that bloom from a small box when you walk in the door, reading your mood and deciding what kind of glow you need. That will have its charms — Star Trek holodeck charms — but something will be lost, the way a frozen turkey dinner gestures vaguely at Thanksgiving.

We suppose we could not write about Christmas trees — holiday trees, Hanukkah bushes, whatever evergreen proxy gets you through December — without at least acknowledging the music that insists on accompanying them. We have tried, valiantly, to avoid “O Tannenbaum.” We should like it more than we do. Even Aretha Franklin belting it out with operatic conviction couldn’t quite salvage it. John Denver’s “Alfie, the Christmas Tree” means well but infantilizes the tree, no matter the cultivar. We do have a soft spot, though, for “Little Fir Tree” from the Captain Kangaroo Christmas album — nostalgia doing most of the work, which is probably the point.

In more recent years, we’ve found ourselves unexpectedly fond of Cyndi Lauper’s “Early Christmas Morning,” less for its lyrics than for its Cajun lilt and loose-limbed warmth. “Listen to the children sing / Watch them dancing all ’round the Christmas tree…” she urges. That part never quite applied in our house. With our two sons, there was no dancing — one a bit of a Peter Pan, the other more of an Eeyore — and certainly no patient circling. Dancing would have interfered with the main event. Gift opening was never so much opening as it was a Christmas spasm of tearing and shouting: ripping, shredding, paper everywhere, joy expressed at full, sugar-fueled velocity, choreography be damned.

When we think about the Christmas tree, we are thinking less about the lighting schemes or ornament choreography — topics for other days — and more about the tree itself. Real or trying to be real. Unadorned, at first. The tree represents one of the dualities we love about the season: the public bustle of December and the quieter work at home. The decking of halls. The once-a-year tea blends brewed carefully and poured into vintage china that emerges only now.

This is where the tree comes in. We become its tailors. We bring in this green stranger and assess it — size, girth, limbs — as if we haven’t done this countless times before (with artificial trees, we somehow forget, and that forgetting feels like a gift). We decide where it will stand, what it will hold, how it will inhabit the room. We are inviting something unfamiliar into our home and asking it to celebrate with us.

That, more than anything, may be why the tree — real or not — endures. Not as symbol or spectacle, but as companion. A participant. A reminder, standing patiently, that amid all the noise and commerce and motion, we still make room for something green, something hopeful, something that insists, gently, on being present.

Oh, Christmas tree, indeed…

Coda — After the Lights Are On

And so the tree we chose — carefully, argued over, justified — now stands where it was always meant to stand. It emerged from its box without drama. The pre-lit worked immediately, which still feels faintly miraculous. The remote behaved. The tree topper, also remote-enabled (a detail we would once have mocked and now accept with measured gratitude), clicked on as instructed. Three brightness settings. White or multicolored, at will. No dark patches. No muttering. No blood drawn. In the brightness department, it does not disappoint.

After the initial lighting and decorating rituals — the unpacking of ornaments, the small negotiations, the rediscovery of things we forgot we owned — we settle in. Not for a long winter’s nap, but for a short season. In recent years, we’ve grown more aware of how brief December really is. The days are short, literally and otherwise. The light arrives late and leaves early. The season moves faster than it used to, no matter how much we dress it up.

When we pass a car on the road with a tree strapped to the roof — netted tight, trunk facing forward, children visible in the backseat — we smile. We recognize the scene instantly. We know where they’ve been. We know what comes next. We send them good cheer, silently, without irony. Their tradition is no longer ours, but it is familiar. It is ongoing.

Our tree stands quietly now, doing what trees have always done for us this time of year: holding light, marking time, bearing witness. Real or artificial, complicated or not, it participates. And for this brief stretch of December, that feels like enough.

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. Or when we wanted to put a spin on it, we’d quote Del Griffith, the John Candy character in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,”: “You know, when I'm dead and buried, all I'm gonna have around here to prove that I was here are some shower curtain rings that didn't fall down. Great legacy, huh?”

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.

Morning Glories, False Fall—and the Nostalgics Among Us

Early morning on Snob Hill, our small hillside enclave in St. Louis, and late summer is showing its hand. The light slants lower, shadows stretch longer, and the air carries that faint metallic tang that suggests autumn is waiting just offstage. For a few days we even believed it had arrived early. Those mornings were crisp enough to make us reach for sweaters and to wonder whether we should start clearing the hummingbird feeders.

But it was only a tease — a “false fall,” the weather forecasters call it. Now the Missouri heat has returned, the rain still refuses to come, and the gardens are looking worn down. “Peak-ed,” as Mother used to say, drawing the word out as though the plants themselves were too weary to keep their heads up. The Morning Glories, however, haven’t gotten the message. They’re still flinging themselves across trellises in a violet-blue flourish, as if late-summer gardens in St. Louis can’t be told what to do.

And it’s in moments like these — between what was and what’s next — that nostalgia creeps in. We admit it: we think of ourselves as Nostalgics. Not people who live in the past, but people who take time to turn it over, the way you might handle an heirloom teacup. The past is how we got here, wherever “here” is — even Snob Hill in Missouri.

For us, nostalgia often arrives in the cusps of seasons, those liminal edges. There’s the rush of spring planting, followed by the weary end of August when the tomatoes hang bruised and the hostas eaten down. There’s the flurry of Thanksgiving plans, followed by the carcass aftermath. There’s the glitter of Christmas (for us), followed by the gray January hours of packing it all away.

As our friends in recovery have shared with us, “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” That strikes us as the healthiest kind of nostalgia. Not denying what came before, but carrying it, letting it shape us without dragging us under.

Nostalgia gets accused of being sentimental, even indulgent. But we think it tempers us. It teaches us to value the present, to see that today’s Morning Glories in the garden are tomorrow’s memory. Nostalgia doesn’t just pull us backward; it reminds us we’re in the middle of making new memories, which, like ornaments, will one day get packed with all the others.

So yes, we’re Nostalgics, and gladly so. Nostalgia isn’t about clinging to the past; it’s about keeping company with it. Letting it remind us who we’ve been and how we’ve arrived here on Snob Hill. And maybe it begins, more often than not, in a moment like this one: early morning light, the gardens fading, and even in their tiredness, still teaching us how to look ahead.

Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The line has been overused and, too often, misrepresented. But it serves us here. Nostalgia is the proof: the past folded into the present, as inseparable as roots and soil, seasons and light in this corner of St. Louis we call home.

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.

Jed Clampett, Edna Lewis and Remembrance of Tomatoes Past

Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian writer known for her incisive essays and novels that often explored family life, memory and the quiet struggles of everyday existence. In one of her essays about English cooking, she wrote, “A dull sadness weighs on every place where food is served or sold.” It’s a line that struck us recently as we found ourselves standing, awash in that special kind of white dust found only on graveled roads, in front of a family farm stand, somewhere between hope and resignation.

We didn’t grow up with sad food, exactly—just food that was dutiful, functional and guided by the best intentions and worst recipes. Between the two of us—partners raised on opposite ends of the culinary spectrum—we had two mothers. One had the credentials—a dietitian trained in the 1940s—and she cooked like someone who had learned nutrition by way of ration cards, postwar pamphlets and pressure cookers. She was even trained to pressure cook spaghetti (the carb, not the sauce) using that tiny boiler room that thinks it’s a rocket ship, if you can imagine.

Meals were neatly balanced, relentlessly beige and always approved by a father, whose palate never fully left the Dodge City train station diner of his childhood. He liked what he liked—salt, starch and seasoning that meant nothing more than salt and pepper, never straying from his memory of meatloaf on a divided plate.

The other mother was an adventurous spirit, but not in the kitchen. She was trapped in the age of convenience cooking, where dinner was assembled more than made. She cooked the life and flavor out of almost everything—except baked goods, which somehow escaped that fate. Her casseroles were a different story: determined and dutiful, constructed from instructions on the backs of soup cans and cereal boxes—cream of mushroom, dried onion mix, crushed saltines, frozen spinach—ingredients with more shelf life than flavor. She trusted the recipes, followed them faithfully. And we paid the price at the table.

Though she never said so, we suspect now that she may have felt outmatched, maybe even a little cowed, by a Dad’s side of the family. That was where great-grandmother Myrtle May held what we would now call a “side hustle,” working a few days a month at the local diner. Those were the days advertised for her chicken ’n dumplings and “Myrt’s pies,” which drew fanboys and fangirls who came just for her cooking. She was famous thereabouts, and she delivered that same appeal at family gatherings.

John T. Edge, founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance, once wrote that “the kitchen is where memory and identity simmer together.” Myrtle May’s chicken ’n dumplings weren’t just a recipe but a living story, passed down one plateful at a time and shared love. Her dumpling recipe was never properly documented—no handwritten 3x5 card with her secrets survived her estate. Some of us have spent a lifetime chasing that magic, but we should probably lay down the quest. What’s missing isn’t just the technique for dumplings as soft as pillows yet never mushy—it’s her love and time with the family that made them unforgettable.

Maybe that’s why we drive now—out into the hills, into the fields, down the gravel roads—to find food that feels different. Food that feels like ours.

We’d made the trip this week to find heirloom tomatoes. Eating seasonally, we’ve looked forward to tomato season all year. Around here on Snob Hill, it’s not “tomato” or “tomahto.” We say ta-may-ter—just for the fun of it, you understand. After all, with a master’s degree in English, we’re fully qualified to mess with pronunciation whenever we please. Why settle for boring when you can sound like you’re ordering something fancy at the county fair?

Fresh sliced Black Krims, Brandywines, Green Zebras or Cherokee Purples—or whatever beauties the soil yields—paired with fresh mozzarella, drizzled with a good balsamic, olive oil high in the acids that give it that unmistakable olive taste, scattered with fresh basil, coarse salt and cracked pepper. This isn’t innovative cooking—though we seek that too, in quiet rebellion against the casseroles and calorie counts of our mothers. No, this is honest food. Simple. Dreamed of. A brief seasonal ritual. One plate, five ingredients and a moment that tastes like memory.

But this year may be the dream deferred, we thought, standing before a tomato-less table, staring at zucchini the size of green zeppelins. Corn whose tassels were crawling with ants. And tucked among the summer’s overgrowth, a sign—handwritten in the familiar script of someone trying to sound optimistic: “Tomatoes, maybe next week. Be patient.”

And so, we must wait.

Because eating seasonally isn’t just about what’s available. It’s about what’s possible. It’s about restraint, rhythm and the pleasure of anticipation (or so we keep telling ourselves). Our gardening friends have warned us recently—“Too much rain.” “They’re slow this year.” “It’s not a good tomato season.”

Still, we return. We believe. Not in abundance—but in the quiet promise of arrival. Tomatoes don’t appear on demand. They show up when they’re ready, and only then. So we’ll keep making the drive. Maybe next week. Maybe the one after. We believe in tomatoes the way some people believe in miracles, or Mercury in retrograde.

Because when they do arrive—when they’re soft and strange and sweet in the way only a height-of-summer tomato can be—we’ll remember why we waited. And when the oil hits the cut side of a Black Krim, and the juice runs just a little too far across the plate, there won’t be any sadness at all. Just be present, just be present, we will tell ourselves, for we know this, too, shall pass.

Edna Lewis, the great Southern cook and author, said, “Real flavor comes from time and patience, and from knowing the earth that gave it birth.” Ginzburg and Lewis never met, but we like to imagine them sharing a meal—one that might convince Ginzburg to never render the same disdain for our blended Midwestern and Southern food as she did on the English.

Around here, food is patient and particular, steeped in memory and stubborn love—never dull, never rushed. And Lewis would certainly have appreciated Jed Clampett’s parting wisdom:

“Y’all come back now, y’hear?”

“Roadside Stand” — a silver gelatin black-and-white photograph by CB Adams, made during his many excursions to Cairo, Ill. Shot with a vintage medium format Rolleiflex, this image evokes the complex spirit of the town Huck Finn described as “a good place to be, but... a low-down place to live.”

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Lookie Lou’s and Drive-By’s: A Snob Hill Ritual

We spotted her the other day, idling by her old house — again. Same car (sans husband, who we heard was either dead or perhaps bedridden), same time of day, same slow roll past the patio arbor, now leaning ever so slightly like it's tired of holding up memories. It’s a ritual, we’ve come to realize. A quiet one. And strangely, one we understand more than we expected.

When we moved to Snob Hill three decades ago next month, she was part of a tight cluster of older women who had already claimed this hillside. They’d been here for decades, forming a social order as stratified as the bedrock beneath their foundations. We were the new kids — in our mid-30s, full of ambition and fatigue, with a five-year-old in one hand and a bun in the oven. Our second son was born just three months after we moved in. For over a decade, ours were the only small children on the hill, their shouts echoing off the allée of canopy-touching mature trees (now almost all gone or replaced) like a declaration of change. The old guard didn’t always take kindly to that noise — or us. We had our clashes, politely, with nervous hands and tight smiles.

But now, thirty years later, we find ourselves part of that old guard, watching as new families arrive with their own sticky-fingered futures and sippy cups.

Her house — the one she drives past and still known by her family’s surname (as in, The ‘X” House) — is back on the market now. And we wonder: Who will buy it? Will they plant hostas, paint the front door a regrettable yellow, or tear out the yard’s “best’ feature, a white azalea? Her drive-by ritual has made us reflect on our own, especially as we trade light waves as she travels by, usually without stopping.

We don’t often drive by our first house — that suburban ranch one of our fathers once whispered looked like “a double-wide…with ideas” and where we lived for eight years before landing on Snob Hill. But every few years, we cruise down the old cul-de-sac and take inventory. The yellow paint we so happily chose, now replaced with something blander, but more tasteful. The heirloom apple tree (a tradition that continues here) is gone — cut down without ceremony — and the decorative gable cutouts we designed to make the house less cookie-cutter, more home, have been stripped away. That house tried so hard to be something — and so did we.

We over-engineered the back deck (to survive a nuclear winter, we joked), and when we last drove by, it was still there — though the jigsaw-cut spindles we crafted by hand from 1x10s had been replaced with ubiquitous square 2x2s. They were never quite vases, never quite Gothic, but they were ours.

And then it hit us. This isn’t just our ritual, or hers. It’s part of a much older tradition, stitched into both our family histories. We've traveled with each other’s in-laws to see the first homes they bought. We've stood in front of long-gone porches with parents and listened to them say things like, "We planted those lilacs back in '53."

One trip we’ll never forget was to Illmo, Missouri — named for the marriage of Illinois and Missouri, though now it’s little more than a crossroads. A great-grandfather built a house there, and his widow — “Granny” — lived in it for 60 years (about 30 of which after he died). We’ve been back many times, including the time we took pictures with a father who once asked to go inside and take measurements. He wanted to have blueprints drawn up so he could recreate the house for himself — a dream never realized. When Granny finally moved to assisted living, she swore she dreamt every night of walking the halls of “her house.”

Another time we drove to Burlingame, Kansas, to see the house where grandparents raised a father in a stately Victorian with a steep staircase he remembered as Everest. He could recall how it felt to climb those steps, not just how they looked. That house, like the Illmo one, felt like a map of the people we loved.

Which brings us back to our elderly neighbor, now just a motorist circling a memory. We never really liked her, if we’re being honest. But there’s something about her ritual that softens us. Maybe that’s one of the lessons Snob Hill still has to teach: the slow work of understanding — others and ourselves.

As Lewis Nordan wrote, “You can’t get lost in a place you’ve never been. But you can get lost in your own hometown.” It’s true. These houses — be they ranches, Victorians, or stone-clad hillside homes — speak in creaks and echoes and shadows. They hold onto our laughter, our best intentions, our failed repairs.

And here’s the kicker: both our sons, now grown men, have independently told us they hope we keep this house in the family. But we don’t have the heart to tell them that probably won’t happen. Someday, maybe, they’ll find themselves idling at the corner, looking up at the windows, remembering how the light fell across the kitchen at dinner, and starting their own drive-by tradition.

As Tennessee Williams once wrote, “Time is the longest distance between two places.”

And maybe that’s why we drive by. To shorten the span just a little. To see if the light is still on.

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Well, Bless Your Byline

Life On Snob Hill’s meditation on writing, hubris, and why nobody—no matter how clever—owns the alphabet

We were leafing through one of our favorite Southern magazines the other day—the kind that swaggers with cultural critique, back-porch philosophy, and just enough grit to scuff up its own boots. It’s not your garden-club-and-grits type of publication. No, this one likes its bourbon neat and its history complicated. It’s the South with the varnish peeled off — just the way we like it.

Which is why we nearly dropped our glass of tea when we saw a curious byline tucked under a story:

“Words by Jane Doe.”

Not “By.”
Not even the classic “Story by.”
But “Words by.”

Now, we know what they’re going for. A little edge. A little style. That writer-as-artisan touch. We suspect they want the phrase to hum with intimacy and authorship—like the writer just plucked these syllables from some wild linguistic garden and arranged them in a hand-thrown clay bowl. And sometimes, to drive it home, the same byline appears beneath a photo with “Photos by” the same person. Which is fair—photographs are made. Composed. Captured. Shaped in the eye and the hand. But by that logic, why stop at “Photos by”? Why not go full tilt and credit them with “Pixels by”? Because that’s where this new logic leads—credit for the raw materials themselves, not the craft of arranging them.

But still. We squinted. We winced. We sighed.

Because writers don’t make words.
They inherit them.

Let us not mistake arrangement for invention. You can string together a sentence so clean it whistles, build a paragraph with the structural integrity of a Greek temple. But you didn’t mint the words. They come from somewhere older, deeper. From etymology, oral tradition, kitchen tables, church pulpits, dictionaries, dive bars, and dust jackets.

We’ve long said—often while trying to explain our livelihood at a dinner party or to an incredulous uncle—that it’s amazing we make a living using words. All those thousands and thousands of (free!) entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, far too many to choose from, and yet people who don’t—or can’t—use them with any real precision pay us to do it for them. Incredible. Not alchemy, exactly. But close.

And here’s the thing: we don’t own those words. Not really. No one does. There are a few exceptions—phrases freighted with so much history, trauma, or reverence that they demand our precision and respect. The Holocaust, for instance. Or Jim Crow. Or 9/11. Words and phrases that carry the weight of memory, injustice, grief, or collective experience. But most of the time, as writers, we are not owners—we are stewards. We are like the old knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, guarding a shelf full of options and whispering to ourselves before we type: choose wisely.

And yes, choose with honor. Like those little roadside produce stands where a dozen ears of corn and a tin cash box sit unattended under a hand-painted sign that reads “On Your Honor.” No cameras. No checkout clerk. Just trust. That's the spirit we believe words deserve—honor and care.

And we can’t help but recall that line from R.E.M.: 
“On your honor / on your honor / you promised...” A line that reminds us, if not binds us, to remember: the words we use say something not just about our craft, but about our character.

Even Flannery O’Connor, not known for her modesty, put it plainly:
“The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”

The words are not ours. They are what we make live.

And if you're still thinking we're being too fussy, allow us a moment with Tom Waits, patron saint of gravel-throated wisdom:
“Words are just words. They don’t mean nothing until you give them something.”

To say “Words by” feels, frankly, a bit hubristic. It’s like admiring a quilt and saying “Thread by.” Or staring up at a barn and calling it “Hammer by.” We don’t do that. We say “Built by.” “Crafted by.” Because we understand the difference between tool and creation.

We’re all for honoring the writer. Believe us—we are writers. But a little humility isn’t a bad accessory to wear with that editorial swagger.

So here on Snob Hill, we’ll stick with “By.”
Just “By.”
Quiet. Confident. Durable.

(Story, by us. Words, on loan from the ages.)

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: Cuttin' Heads

Imagine our surprise today, reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers A Food History of the Modern South, when we came to this passage that triggered a long dormant, yet long-stored memory: “‘…Neal talked of catfish stew, describing how the men of the family nailed fish to a tree and stripped the skin from the bones of writhing carcasses.’”

From the pages of this fine book to the depths of our memory came thoughts of trips to Lawrence, Kansas, made first from our first apartment in Kansas City and then from our addresses in St. Louis — all long before we became ensconced on Snob Hill. Along the Kansas Turnpike, there wasn’t much to see, a fact we came to know well because we made the trip often.

But there was one thing. Off to the north side of the turnpike, north even from the access road, sat a small house, perhaps a mobile home. Either way, it was a rundown property, old rusty cars parked on a gravel driveway, an appliance or two listing in the front yard. A creek jaggedly zigzagged along one side. It’s hard to think of a Kansas location as being gothic or having what could be called a holler or a crick, but it had that sort of vibe, a cross between “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the first season of “True Dectetive” and the energy emanating from the Clutter house in Holcomb (for fan’s of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”)

Why? It was the stunted tree just outside the rusty, chain-link fence, covered in skulls. This tree was not close to the highway and we were always traveling at a high rate of speed, so there was always a “what the hell was that?” sort of head-whipping reaction. At first, each sighting reminded us we had forgotten about the Skull Tree, but over time, we came to look for it, commenting and wondering on it, using it as a milepost for knowing we were 17 minutes out from the Lawerence city limits.

One time, we even exited the turnpike a mile or more away, then drove our Mazda RX-7 along the access road to get a closer look, And, yep, those were skulls, maybe a dozen or so, nailed to the tree like some sort of cautionary totem. We dared not slow down too much or turn toward the property, lest we find out own skulls on this old, rugged crucifix.

But why? went unanswered. Our imaginations went to dark places. We were reminded of a grandfather’s story about someone (it may have been our grandfather, though we hoped not, or it may have been an acquaintance) with a dog that needed to be “unlearned” of raiding the nearby chicken coop. As the story went, the dog’s owner caught the dog with a chicken in its mouth. He extricated the chicken and proceeded to whip the dog with the carcass. Then he tied the dead chicken to the dog’s collar and left it there until it rotted off. “As a reminder,” the grandfather would intone, “So he would learn the lesson.”

Of course, this was conveyed as a success story for how to train a dog to refrain from stealing chickens. The story reeked of being a tall folktale, an apocryphal anecdote. It might have been a story cut from “The Foxfire Book” or perhaps included in the bawdy “Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales,” a tome we read in high school. This story, sadly, revealed more about the teller (or even worse, the re-teller) than the story itself. To say nothing of the ignorance of canine psychology.

Nonetheless, we unconsciously conflated the dog story and the Skull Tree. We weren’t sure what type of animal skulls were nailed to the tree, though we knew they weren’t squirrel or rabbit, dog or cat. We conjectured fish, but couldn’t be certain. And still, “But Why?” remained unanswered. A warning about what, to what? A warning to wayward catfish? And did Kansas even have catfish?

As the years progressed, the skulls slowly disintegrated on the tree. In our memories, spines initially hung from the skulls, then fell away, but that is probably just overactive misremembering. The skulls were neither removed (from weather or otherwise) nor added to. Did the crick run out? By the time we no longer made the trip to Lawrence, the memory of Skull Tree receded to the brain lobe were latent thoughts languish.

Until today, miles and years away, sitting on Snob Hill, reading The Potlikker Papers, and instantly exclaiming a knowing “OH!” A flash of now-knowing. Mystery solved in an instant.

Most truths are simple truths that shouldn’t be trussed with our imaginations. But somehow, knowing what we know now about the purpose of the Skull Tree, we kinda, sorta prefer the embroidered imaginings better.

Life On Snob Hill: Wrenching Our Way Toward Bethlehem (Steel, That Is)

We are not mechanical.

But we are cheap-ass bastards.

These two attributes collide from time to time. We can either open our wallets (not easy when your patron saint is John Elwes, said to be the frugal inspiration for Ebeneezer Scrooge) and hire someone to fix our mechanical issues or we can take on the task ourselves. For some projects, like a bad air compressor in the AC, there’s no discussion.

But other times, such as this week when the driver’s side door on our 1972 Chevy C-10 won’t open, we search in vain for that mythical old man who toils under his shade tree, resolving old truck issues ‘cause he just likes working on them and thus only charges for parts. Yeah, right.

So, we open the toolbox and log the iPad into Youtube and attempt to “be mechanical.”

We managed to remove the door panel with almost as much ease as the two videos we watched. We carefully saved the screws and other parts, including the “jesus spring,” named because folks yell the lord’s name when they pop the part and it flies away. We jiggled. We lubricated. We moved the parts that move. We read random pages of “Zen the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Then we let things sit a while.

Still, the door won’t budge. We are undeterred. For now. We’re going to drive this beater for a few days in the hopes that something will break loose (not break!). If nothing else, we have a new-found appreciation for the inner workings of a truck door.

And maybe we’ll just learn to enter and exit the vehicle from the passenger side from now on. Cheap is as cheap does.

Life On Snob Hill - A Poke Or A Pat

We are, despite some smirky smirks from some of our younger relatives, pretty tech savvy for two people born before the digital age. Being able to type texts with both thumbs does not count. We believe technology is like hot sauce; use sparingly with just the right amount to make something better without being overwhelmed by its use. We also believe that whenever possible we like to be present for our activities — even daily activities like cooking. As time allows, we like the tactility of doing as much as possible by hand (not handcrafted, god forbid), to really feel the movements of preparing food, from mincing and macerating to slicing and dicing.

But open a cabinet and you’ll see plenty of machines to help us when we need to prepare bigger and faster. We often cook with an iPad propped on the counter where the cookbook used to be. We also eschew waste (it’s that ole Frugal Gourmet mindset). Good food can be expensive, especially meat. We marvel at the some of the BBQ folks with their grills that are as much about sensors as about smoke. Can ultra-sounding one’s meat be far away?

Like you, we want success each and every time we cook — from a new recipe we read about with relish, to the ones written on card in our mother’s or grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s faded, hard-to-read curlicues. Many recipes are touted as “tested” and “foolproof.” We’ve fallen for that many times, shaking our heads as the failed pile on the counter, even though we know — we swear — we followed the instructions to the “T.”

We’ve learned the hard way to never serve a personally untested recipe to company. Yes, that has sometimes meant eating something two weekends in a row — the first to test it ourselves and the second to share with others.

This leads us to last night and the 5-pount sirloin tip roast we found in the deep freeze, the last of a quarter of a cow we purchased late last winter. This is not an unknown cut of meat for us, but it had been a long time since we roasted one. So we looked online for some guidance. We were encouraged with “Sirloin Tip Roast {Juicy And Tender Every Single Time!}” from The Big Man’s World site and “Sirloin Tip Roast (Easy & Tender!)” from the Wholesome Yum.

One of the key pieces of guidance involved roasting the mean to the correct internal temperature, which we understood to be about 135 degree F. And the best way to hit that number was to use a digital thermometer. We have one. It’s several years told, the kind with an small device that attaches to a probe so you can leave it in the meat while it’s in the oven. We’ve seen the handheld type, and even want one, but the cost for the best rated models seemed high to us. Plus, we don’t use one all that often.

We prepped the roast. We closed the door and set oven at the recommended 350 and the thermometer for 135. Eight and a half minutes later, the dinger went off and showed an internal temperature of 135. Clearly, something was amiss. We tried turning it off, reinserting the probe, etc. And still said our still-raw roast was ready.

Well, we thought, it’s not like we’ve never roasted before so we decided on the look-and-push method. That felt risky because this cut of meat can become tough and dry when overcooked by even the least amount. We worried we had lost our ability to cook by sight and touch and intuition.

We monitored the roast, and there came a moment when a small amount of moisture pooled at the bottom and the beef itself seemed to draw tighter. We each took a turn poking and decided it was done correctly. It was gratifying knowing we could draw upon our experience. Sure, that experience was gained from feeling meat that was over- or under-cooked, but we hadn’t lost it.

Technology, even at the thermometer level, can assist in the kitchen. But it’s also a safety net. We actively choose not to use the calculator app on our phone for simple equations because we believe there’s a brain benefit from doing it “in our heads.” We like the notion that “Cooking is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.” The quote, of course, came a professional chef — French, of course — Marcel Boulestin. The focus on the creative and intuitive aspects of cooking appeals to us.

But we’re still getting that top-rated probe, just in case.

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.