Texas Lou

Saturday afternoon, I spent the day with a couple of friends at Hill Top Berry Farm and Winery in Nelson County, Virginia.  We did a tasting of the winery’s fruit wines and honey meads.  If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend stopping by as the vineyard was definitely one of the more unique Virginia wineries that I have been to. 

They were sold out of many of the wines that I wanted to buy, but I did find 3 that I settled on:  the Raspberry Melomel, Strawberry Melomel, and the Pyment (made of grapes and honey mead).

After our wine tasting, we had a picnic lunch on the porch and then picked blackberries.  Hill Top offers a better deal on blackberries in both quality and quantity than the farmer’s market or the grocery store.  Plus you get to choose each and every blackberry that you want to buy.

I was hoping to make blackberry wine, but since I just started a batch of concord grap wine, I’ll probably just stick to blackberry preserves.

Texas Lou. It’s one nickname of many: Sissy, Les, Shorty, Junebug, Murloc Princess, Jane You Igorant Slut, Midget in a Bikini. The list goes on and on. But why TexasLou.com and not MidgetInABikini.com you ask? Well for one thing, Midget in a Bikini was never one of my favorite nicknames. I mean, seriously, I’m not a midget, and while I may be just 2 inches short of the legal maximum height to qualify as a midget (and I’m pretty sure they prefer the name “Little People” these days), I don’t even wear bikinis. But now I’m just going off on a tangent.

Texas Lou is a nickname very near and dear to my heart. You’re not really officially a part of the family in my clan unless you have a nickname. Why? Perhaps because calling someone by their real name is too boring…my family tends to crave excitment and humor. Regardless of the reason for all the nickname madness, it’s a tradition that has carried on for many decades now. My mother is Vote. My sister is Cat-Cat. My uncles are both referred to as Bruver or a collective “Tuba Brothers”. My aunt’s nickname, given to her by a former elementary student of hers, is Tiny derived from the originial “Tiny Head”. My boyfriend of more than three years, who shall be referred to as Ben from here on out (not because that is his nickname but because he is legally named Ben), was given his first nickname by the family this past July on a family vacation on a Texas beach. My mom and uncle named him Steve Irwin, after the late, great Crocodile Hunter, because through his fishing obsession, he caught what was first believed to be a Sting Ray but later proved to be a Skate.

“Texas” from the Indian word “teyshas” (meaning “friends” or “allies”), and later named “Tejas” by the Spanish, is my home. Born and raised in this great state, I have come to find it as one of the most important definitions of who I am. I am Texan, and even though I now live in Virginia and have been an official resident of the Commonwealth for 4 years now, I will always be Texan. It is who I am and where I came from. “Lou” is short for “Leslie Lou” or “Leslie Lou Go Tie Your Shoe”, two nicknames given to me by my family at a very young age. On a trip home to visit the family, not too long after my dreaded move to Virginia(dreaded at the time but no longer dreaded), my uncle and cousin began to call me “Virginia Lou”. I answered back in protest, deeply afraid of forming any kind of roots in Virginia, “I’m not Virginia Lou. I’m Texas Lou!” And there you have it, the complicated origins of my nickname and this blog.