Just in time for the new year, my mom painted the new sign for my parents’ bakery, The Grasslands, in Sonoita, AZ:
I was visiting for Christmas; and it was quite cold, nightly lows in the low 20s: however, the pansies on the patio (my mom has a very green thumb) survived just fine:
It’s always hard to predict business when tourists and day-trippers make up most of your clientele; I was planning on having a nice sedate lunch when about 50 different people came in to eat at the same time. This is the dining room once most everyone had left; I would’ve taken a shot while the dining room was full, but, I was too busy in the kitchen!
Here’s a photo taken by India, who works for my parent’s part-time; she’s just a great help. This photo is my folks, me, and my brother Frank, who’s visiting for the holidays from Madison, WI; this is how we looked after taking care of the lunch-rush:
We look so energetic. Not bad.
The drive back to Tucson is very scenic, in my opinion; though I’m always surprised by folks who visit from the East Coast or Midwest and complain about the lack of….green. This is the desert after all; what are they thinking? The drive is an hour. The view from the almost-highest point of the drive looks like this to the east:
I just love the space and in the 20 years I’ve been driving on this road I never get tired of it. Even though it’s an illusion, and we all are all bound to a less-than-free-wheeling life thanks to this-mortal-coil, whenever I drive and have this view I have at least a small, short-lived sense of possibility and potential.
From roughly the same part of the road, if you look the opposite direction you see the Rosemont Junction area east of the Santa Ritas:
This area is very possibly going to be the sight of a huge open-pit copper mine, though efforts are being made to stop such a catastrophe; a guard rail on the side of the row has this to say:
The last two words look to be “pit mine” but they’ve been scratched off, presumably by someone who doesn’t like the current view of things.
