Hello friends and visitors. I’ve been remiss in posting a notice here that the Sixburnersue blog is now a Substack newsletter (as of January 2023!). It comes out every Sunday morning, so if you’d like to subscribe, I’d welcome your support. Thank you! Susie Subscribe to Sixburnersue. Visit Susiemiddleton.substack.com ..read more

I TURNED 60 week before last and suddenly my multi-tasking skills have deteriorated. Only kidding – they’ve been going downhill for a while. If I look a little closer at why, I realize it may have less to do with brain function and more to do with heart function – I don’t really want to multitask anymore. It’s been a long and restless 60 years. I think I started setting goals as a toddler; I certainly started moving around frenetically as a young child (you’ve heard the Romper Room story), and this past year I caught myself doing it all over again – still pushing, looking for the next bright ..read more

BY SOME MIRACLE, I have a summer intern. A really good one. Work life has taken a turn for the better. I can’t truthfully call it a miracle. (Though you know me and the God thing – I’m pretty sure this is an answered prayer because I certainly put my work fatigue out into the universe. In other words, not only did I pray about it, but I told everyone who would listen that I was wearing down.) My boss and I talked about this a few months ago, and she, being the supremely practical person that she is, suggested that giving me my own summer intern might be at least a partial solution. In the pa ..read more

IN THE MORNING, I slip out of bed, pad down the carpeted stairs in my pjs, open the living room shades to let the sun in, and head for the kitchen to hit the coffee go-button. It is early. Not sunrise-and-birdsong early (that was 4:47 a.m. today) but Susie-early, meaning I have borrowed a few hours from my preferred pre-8 a.m. activity (sleep) to do a garden check. I am full of Christmas-morning glee, anticipating the joy of finding something new, something sparkly, something captivating. I love this garden check so much that I do it every morning now on repeat. Farmer joins me. I throw a fl ..read more

ALL IT TOOK was this: I got a haircut. I climbed a tree. I lay down at the end of a dock in the middle of a pond on a warm sunny day and stared up into the blue and white accordion sky. An osprey flew over, then another. I walked on the beach. I crouched in the lee of a tall dune, closed my eyes, and listened only to the surf rolling in and rolling out. My best friend and her husband came to visit us for the weekend. We walked for miles. We climbed to the top of a big rock. We climbed to the bottom of a rickety beach stair. We ate extravagant pastries and freshly baked bagels and charcuterie ..read more

The Journey One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice‚ though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations‚ though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of ..read more

I AM PUSHING a rickety garden cart through Pepper’s Greenhouses in Milton, Delaware, following behind my 91-year-old father as I have done in plant nurseries and gardens my entire life. (Once when I was six, I tagged along on a fancy garden tour, shadowing my Dad so closely that I caught the wrath of a bee’s nest he awakened as he forged ahead of me through a narrow gap in a privet hedge. One sting on my tummy under a loose-fitting summer sleeveless blouse and one on my bare freckled arm earned me a place in his arms for the trip back to the car.) Today it is cold and drizzly, a maddening ..read more

My grandmother Nana (seated), with her three daughters – Barbara (standing, left), Ann, and Pauletta (my mother) MY GRANDMOTHER NANA DIED on Good Friday, 1964, after a week in the hospital suffering from burns over much of her body. What I know of that week and of the day of her accident is a trickle of details filtered through my Dad and my sister years later; no one (most especially not my mother) told the toddler in the highchair what had happened that night, even when the toddler grew into a rambler. But Nana left me a legacy, one I would unwittingly embrace years later. This is as much a ..read more

JUST CALL ME CLOUSEAU. Like the inspector, I’ve been bumbling around, searching for clues of spring. Yesterday I got down on my hands and knees in the cold, black, barely defrosted soil and rooted around amidst piles of sodden leafy detritus and tangles of winter-bleached-blond grasses, looking for bits of green. Ah ha! A chive! I found one, then two. This one no bigger than a pencil tip, another barely a speck of emerald dust in a leprechaun’s eye. I suspect that little Irish trickster has been mischievously dancing in my garden, spreading false hope. I did notice a tiny rainbow the other d ..read more

BETWEEN OMICRON and Oh-My-God-It’s-Freezing-Out, there is some serious winter-itis going on around here. Turns out hibernation is not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m getting restless. Frankly, stir-crazy. I have no right to complain – I am warm and cozy in my house, and I can take a nice walk (in the 30 mph wind and zero windchill) any time. And it’s not like I don’t have plenty of work to do. But there’s just something equilibrium-swallowing about Covid winters. Winters plural – that in itself says it all. Plus, we are, um, on an Island. Which is never exactly hopping in the wintertime ..read more