Monday, July 20, 2009

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Critters in the corn!

We've noticed ears of corn having been torn open and bites taken out. It tickles me that Mike has twice asked me if I have been peeling back the corn husks to see if the corn is ready to harvest. I told him no, both times. But tonight, I went out to the garden and broke off four of the fatter ears and we had them for dinner. They were good, but I believe in another few days they'll be amazingly delicious and completely filled out. Basically, both the squirrels (or racoons) and I jumped the gun on the corn.

I was on the Somerville square yesterday and went into the Square Hardware store and they had corn cutters. I've lost mine in the move, so was thrilled that they had one almost just like it. So some of our corn, or some we buy from a local organic farmer, will be cut and put in the freezer already seasoned with butter salt and freshly ground pepper to be eaten this winter.
I love Square Hardware. The old man who owns the place is there everyday and it's his family who take care of customers. He has a shiny brass National Cash Register AND the wooden crate it was shipped to the store in. It's the last working one in the country. He LOVES talking about it, and one day I took the time to listen to the whole story. So yesterday I looked for him just to say hello, and his face lit up.
Square Hardware has an adjoining store that sells furniture, and decorative pieces. Most of what they carry is not my taste, but I have my eye on a 'booksellers bookshelf' unit for my bedroom. My bed is usually covered with books and magazines as if I were an invalid needing constant reading material to occupy my mind. My bedroom is where I do my reading, unless I'm on a train or a plane. I need it to be quiet and no dogs whining for attention. I've been reading a lot lately and getting the greatest pleasure from it. A friend just finished the latest Wally Lamb book and since I'd already bought it I've moved it to the top of my 'stack' to begin after I finish two by Kate Chopin that were written in the late 1800's. They are about life on Louisiana plantations and so well written, it's no wonder they have stood the test of time.
Dover Thrift Additions was having a sale, and I got a somewhere around 20 books for a bit over $50. They're naturally all paperback, but I am treasuring them as if they were bound in leather with gold endpapers.
I feel the same way about the Jane Austin books I got at Barnes & Noble for $8 each a few months back. This was to be "My Summer with Jane", but I've also been watching every version of movie that Netflix carries of her work as well. Now, since the Dover books are shorter, my plan is to read the Austin books after watching the DVD's. I'll probably begin them in September, since this summer is flying by.
Well, this blog entry began as a few comments on the garden, but as you can see I have gotten caught up in literature again recently, and am having a high time with it.

Oh, one other bit of news, about local things. There's a Mr. Tucker who has an antique/junk store that's located just off the town square a bit.
I've bought some small things from him, but have been eyeing a dry sink he first acted like he didn't want to sell. I asked him yesterday if he cold rethink selling it, and what was his best price. He told me he'd already told prices to two ladies who were interested in it, but since he and I had discussed it and I already knew what he paid for it he gave me a price of $25 more than he paid for it. I told him it was SOLD!
Now I'm going to reintroduce 'country' (but not the tacky '80's stuff) into my homes personality, and this dry sink (with a copper liner in the sink part!) will be perfect in front of the kitchen windows holding plants. I'm moving the kitchen table into the corner of the family room, since the four chairs are on casters and can be moved around for seating when people come over. Besides, no one sits there to eat because the couch is closer to the TV. Yes, I am admitting the rule I made when we first moved here is broken and I fear not fixable. One reason I like having company is because I insist on using the dining room. I can seat 10 people in there and theres no TV to interrupt polite conversation.

I'm tickled to have found Mr Tucker. He tells the greatest stories, and he even knows my uncle Louis, and graduated HS with my aunt Peggy (Louis' wife) and knows other members of my family. I told him he and I had to accept now being as close as family without being family since he's been friends with my uncle and aunt most of his life. And he didn't disagree. He likes having an audience for his stories, and I love listening to a good one, so we're a good fit for someone who always has something new an unusual to sell, and someone else who loves to look at old things.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Screen Doors, Doggie Doors, Tree Frogs and Roller Skates

We went shopping for screen doors the other day. I want one for the front door and another for the back that has a doggy door built into it. Unfortunately the back door will not be an old fashioned screen door, but a storm door. As my husband says, he'd rather not come home to find I've been air-conditioning the entire neighborhood all day. So, the screen doors will be used in the spring and fall, but the storm door on the back will be during the heat of summer, and cold of winter so the dogs can go outside to take care of their bathroom business and stop using the mudroom for a potty.
My mother would be rolling over in her grave if she knew I was purchasing potty pads to lay about the mudroom floor for the dogs. But hey, the room is already scented from the two former owners' dogs use of that room as a toilet. Removing those marble tiles will be a job for sometime in the future and hopefully removing them will remove the latent smell of doggie markings. But til then we will make do.

Right now, since it's a nice evening I have the back door open a bit just to listen to the tree frogs.
There must be hundreds of them singing their tiny little hearts out. I think it's the sounds of summer that bring so many childhood memories to the front of my mind.

Did you use clothespins to attach baseball cards to the spokes of your bicycle wheels to hear a clicking noise as you rode your bike around the neighborhood? We did. My brother didn't mind at all sharing his baseball cards with us since, back then, little boys primarily bought them for the bubble gum that came in the wax pack with the cards.

I remember playing jacks with the girls on our street. I wasn't the best with the eye hand coordination, but I did enjoy playing anyway. And an even more trying game was Pick-Up Sticks. Did you play with them? If I recall correctly one player would hold the sticks loosely in her hand in a vertical position, with the bottoms of the sticks resting gently on the floor and then release her hand so the sticks fell in a kind of pattern. The object of the game was to remove the sticks, one at a time without moving another stick in doing so. It was fun and didn't require bouncing a ball and throwing jacks at the same time so I was a bit better at it than other games.

Another game that required a bit more grace than I was blessed with was jumping rope. But, on the playground at school when there was a long rope and two girls throwing it I could, at times, manage to go a few jumps before loosing my turn.
I WAS reasonably good at kick ball because the ball was a large one, and much easier to kick than hitting a baseball with a bat, which I could never do. And, I eventually got pretty good at roller skating on the sidewalk. I saved my own money for a while to buy my own skates. They were $5.00 and I got many good years use out of them. I guess it was games using feet, that were my forte'.

But, as long as people didn't mind my lack of skill, I was always included in one way or another in the neighborhood games. Kids were better behaved back when I was a kid, all the mamas were watching and would let your mama know if you'd not behaved well when with the other chidren.

The only person who had less skill or grace than I, was my sister. Since she was more popular than I was her clumsiness was my saving grace for being included with the girls who lived on our street. Eventually, though, we parted ways and had our own groups of friends from school. And to this day, since she and I have nothing in common, we have not one friend in common, and that suits me just fine.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

I Heard My First Cicada Today

I heard my first cicada today. It seems early in the summer for them, but, as I've gotten older time slips by much faster than it did when I was a child. When I saw my first Junebug this year I knew they'd not be around long, relatively speaking, and that the cicadas weren't far behind.
It's strange how, as children, summer seemed to go on forever, I remember sitting outside at night with friends and watching junebugs cling to the screen doors, trying their best to get inside the house.
But this year the junebugs seemed to come and go faster than I could turn around. Things just moved slower when we were children, or they seemed to. Now, as adults each season seems to rush by faster than we can tend to all the things we are attempting to fit into it. There's no time to sit and think, mull things over, we have to strike while the iron is hot as they used to say.

It seems like just days ago that the cucumber seeds were planted in the garden, and today I have a large pile of them awaiting pickling jars. This must be done tomorrow or they'll be inedible. Then there will be the tomatos to can, and the peas and beans will follow. I just don't know how my grandmother did it all with nine children during the depression. But she did, and with that knowing smile on her face that I always loved.
At least these days we have freezers and that's such a blessing, now because I also have a large pile of squash calling my name.
Tomorrow I'll cut it into slices, cook it with some black pepper and butter, and let it simmer until the squash is limp. We'll save some of it for Sunday dinner, but the rest will be divided into portions for two, and put into the freezer for winter.

I remember when we'd go visit grandmama and the uncles and aunts when we were kids in the summertime. We'd always come home with bushels of black-eyed peas, or butterbeans, or corn.
We'd spend the next few days shelling peas, or beans, or shucking that corn, then mama would put it all in the freezer. The corn she'd cut off the cob and cook a bit with some butter, like I do my squash, and then it'd go into the freezer.
My sister and brother ALWAYS complained about helping with this, but I enjoyed it, although I never told anyone that I did. It's the repetition...the flow of the process that I enjoyed. It was fun to get a black eyed pea pod open enough so that I could stick my thumb into the end and just zip down and have a dozen peas fall into the pie pan I had in my lap. When my pan was full I liked to stick my fingers into the peas and feel their coolness on my hands, then let them fall, once again, back into the pan. Butter beans took a little longer to get the rhythm going but once I did I was a bean shellin' fool!

I remember one summer when daddy had brought home a pick up truck load of corn. We weren't as young that summer and we all had other things we'd rather be doing. But I still liked working with them to get the food put up, so while my sister and brother acted like babies about having to help, I kept quiet and shucked ear after ear trying to clean as much of the cornsilks off as I could. Mama was working the hardest, standing over a hot stove and watching several pots at one time. She had the knack for cutting the corn off the cobs and wouldn't let any of us try for fear we'd cut too deeply and get cob into the corn. When I grew up and had my own kitchen I found a gadget in a hardware store that was made for cutting the corn off the cob and thought I'd struck gold! I sort of wished I could go back in time and give one to my mama.
I'm looking forward to using it again this summer.

Next summer we're going to have double the size of garden we have now. The raised beds just didn't get started on soon enough to be assembled this year. Life kind of has a way of stalling us on projects like that. But thankfully we're both determined to grow enough organic food for the two of us, as we're doing our best to help both the planet and our own health.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

"Something The Lord Made"

The title of this post is also the title of a movie that stars Mos Def as Vivien Thomas, and Alan Rickman as Dr. Alfred Blaylock. The subject of the movie is the early days of heart surgery, in a time when suspicions about it being the home of the soul and off limits to medicine are still discussed. It also takes place in the 1940's when the dividing line between white and black americans is still as wide and deep as a chasm.
While you can rent the movie and see the amazing and true story it tells, the reason I wanted to post about it is the depiction of the two different worlds in which the two main characters live in the deep south of the time.

One would expect at least some changes between the '40's and the '50's, but I wanted to write that, while growing up in the fifties (I was born in 1952) I observed how the paths crossed and the unspoken demands of expressions of humility by the whites of the blacks was evident everywhere.
There is one scene in the movie, when Vivien Thomas is walking a sidewalk on the teaching hospital campus and having a converstation with another black man. They are dressed as nicely if not moreso that any of the white people in the film. But, when white people are coming down the same sidewalk, these men step aside, and bow their heads to assure they have no intent of making eye contact with these people - especially the women.

Vivien Thomas is the first and only lab assistant ever hired at this school. And allowing him to perform surgery on dogs causes trouble for Dr Blaylock, who is revealed to be a rebel who stands up to all his superiors.

In those days in was unheard of for a white man to defend a black man. The black community was expected to 'know their place' and stay there. And this is 100 years or so following the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a child I saw signs telling blacks that their entrance to a building was in the back.
I saw two water fountains in the JC Penny store where my mother took us to shop. I once asked her why two were needed. Was their water different that ours? Was it dirty? Why did they have to drink dirty water? She just told me to be quiet.

My daddy used to steal eggs from his mama's hens to give to the elderly black woman who lived on their farm. I'm sure she helped, over the years with raising babies, or doing laundry, which was a nice way for her to make some money or be given food from their farm. This was during the Great Depression, afterall. But, even though he got spanked, for some reason, my daddy had a soft place in his heart for her and continued to sneak eggs to her. I love that story, but it was quite unusual for the times. Later in his life his feelings changed and be became a bitter old man, but that's another post.

I cannot imagine having to live the way African American's were expected to live in the south in those days. It's no wonder that entire families uprooted and went north to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York.
These days I enjoy films made by people like Spike Lee who told the true story of the 9th Ward in New Orleans. Why? Because, people like him showed me, that we've not made much progress since the 1950's. Only now, the children of the southern African American community are starting to get angry and demand the respect they deserve as citizens of this country.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Summer Nights

I've been sleeping with the vents on the AC closed, the ceiling fan turning, and my windows open. This brings on the best sleep - the kind that babies enjoy. In fact I remember tent camping when our sons were babies and seeing the happy look on their faces as they crawled out of their tangle of blankets eager for the buckwheat pancakes their daddy was already preparing over the old rusty campstove.
The delicious sleep I will be enjoying til the summer heat starts to invade my dreams is reminding me of spending summers with my grandmother. We'd arise early in the morning to find clouds of morning mist floating above the groud in her front yard and in the fields across the road. By the time we'd finished breakfast and were heading outside to either plant some peas in her garden, or to harvest something else there, the mist was but a memory.
My grandmother always had the most kind smile on her face, and time I got to spend alone with her was so precious to me. Afterall she had, I think 17 grandchildren, and more great grandchildren than I can recall. I didn't even like sharing her with my brother and sister.
But dear sweet Emma, had a heart big enough for all of us, and I doubt that we realized how blessed we were to have had her in our lives.

I don't have much else to add to this post, honestly, I just have my grandmother on my mind lately and wanted to share this memory of her before it slipped my mind.
I hope those of you who read here are enjoying my memories, and my opinions, because I have plenty of both, that's for sure.