My father’s tomatoes were sweet and juicy and my mother’s zinnias, as you can see from the photograph, a botanical fiesta!

I don’t remember ever socializing quite so much with my parents’ and sisters’ friends, and it was delightful: a luncheon, happy hour at “the club,” dinner and fireworks the next night, and cocktail parties at a couple of their friends’ homes, one a beautiful contemporary on 40 acres in the country. My best friend since childhood still lives in Laurel and we did 4 mile walks every day. Years ago, we devised this efficient approach to catching up with each other’s lives and getting a heck of a workout.

My mother is a genius at seeking out the best “Ms. Sippy” has to offer. The first day, she had me chauffer her and two friends to Simply TeaVine in Hattiesburg, MS, for one of lady’s birthday luncheon. I told them I was “Driving Miss Daisy, Miss Petunia and Miss Tulip”! The destination was truly divine, located in a log cabin that had been in one of the owner’s families for generations. They had stripped it down to its original bones and updated areas like the detached kitchen, adding a rustic-glam bathroom for guests of their B&B. I fell in love with little touches like the back lit milk bottles of hydrangea blossoms on our table and a real bird’s nest with a tiny abandoned egg in a piece of furniture on the porch.

The meal was lovely. Mine, made specially for me because of my dietary preferences, consisted of wild rice with sauteed summer veggies, sweet and sour green beans, fresh-picked fruit salad and peach cobbler which they had made with non-dairy butter and no egg.

Mama is an adventurous cook and very supportive of my diet, as she has been since I first spurned meat in my teen years. She had devised a list of dishes she wanted to try which included, but wasn’t limited to, a new gazpacho recipe (a hit!), eggplant roll-ups with vegan ricotta (another hit, even with my sister and father who, as he says, doesn’t “wake up screamin’ for eggplant”), a veganized version of a peach cobbler made from peaches she got at the new local Farmer’s Market (and shhh!) white bread–you’d never know it thanks to plenty of Earth Balance, sugar and such–(it was delicious) and a veganized version of her favorite lemon ice cream to inaugurate the Cuisinart ice cream maker I had given them. We made it the last night and I didn’t get to try it, but Mama reports by phone that it was a big thumb’s up. Despite all of the home cooking, she even worked in lunch at a Thai restaurant she had sniffed out also in Hattiesburg where she needed to go for a doctor’s appointment. There are too many of those these days, but nothing much slows her or my dad down. He’s still working at age 82!

The final unexpected treat was running into a long-lost high school friend at the Jackson airport where I fly in and out of. As the barrista was handing me my green tea soy frappucino, I heard a male voice say, “Will you bake me a pie?” My response to the handsome man about my age was, “Sure…but who are you?” It was Lee Fuller, one of the best guys in high school and who, after we had chatted for 45 minutes, evidently still is. The pie question was in reference to him frequently, as my mother recalls, “standing on the front porch with a cake mix” needing something for his Phi Kappa bake sales (I was one of the fraternity’s “Little Sisters”).

Here’s to wonderful families and friends and to fresh food in the deep fried Deep South!

Almost as soon as school was out on June 21, I left for a much anticipated hiking trip to the Shendandoah National Park with my beloved soul mate cousin, Earl III. (Almost immediately afterward, I went to my hometown of Laurel, MS, for a week. See my next post.)

Earl comes the closest to a Renaissance Man of anyone I know: he is a very ethical attorney for Shell Oil in Houston (we had some interesting mountaintop discussions about BP), a musician, a writer, a fairly serious art collector, a great cook, and an intrepid hiker to boot. Oh, and an avid reader. In the car on the way home, he read selections from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s new book, Flow. When we couldn’t take it any more, we stopped for a low-brow moment at the Citgo station: a box of fried potato wedges we ate in the car.

One full day of hiking was sandwiched between half-day hikes on our arrival and departure days. At night, we roughed it in a 2-bedroom/2-bath suite at the brand new Marriott Residence Inn in Waynesboro, no more than 10 minutes from the southern entrance to the Park at Fish Gap. (Earl said he didn’t want insects crawling on him in the middle of the night, so no cabins for us.)

At the local market, we stocked our room with cashews, wine, soymilk and the like for before-dinner gnoshing. Breakfasts were complimentary and quite impressive. Dinner on the patio of the South River Grill & Wine Shop in Waynesboro the first night was very respectable. (The bottle of wine we brought home was even better: Stone Mountain Vineyards 2008 Pinot Grigio.) Dinner the second night at Emilio’s in historic and quaint Staunton (just about 10-15 minutes away) was exceptional (I lapped up a scrumptious bowl of vegan minestrone with some of Earl’s crunchy-juicy bruschetta). Lunch going and coming was the aforementioned potatoes (hardly balanced, but we made up for it at other meals). And in the middle of our full day of hiking, we stopped at a “wayside” located in the park where I enjoyed a very satisfying veggie burger.

Summer is a terrific time to visit the Park, as it’s the shoulder season, so there are few fellow hikers and campers. It is perhaps most beautiful in fall, but lines of cars to get into the Park can be a mile long or more. Fortunately, we’re having a reasonably cool summer, often in the 80s, so we were very happy to be outdoors. Though, there are few people, there are apparently plenty of bears. The people we did run into all had a bear story. And ever since we began planning this trip, our mothers, who are sisters, have spoken of nothing but bears. When I told Earl that this trip was a kind of spiritual quest for me (both the destination and the opportunity for he and I to travel together), he said, “Oh, you mean like J.R.R. Tolkien only with bears?!” Alas, we saw no bears, just fresh bear scat (with, as Earl likes to add, a human finger in it), a deer, a turtle, some birds and an utterly spectacular snake.

It was also an utterly spectacular trip. It’s always good to come back, though I’m looking forward to exploring the upper reaches of the Park, entering from the D.C. side where Earl sometimes goes on business.