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A chance comment in FaceBook led me to think about my dad's garden.
My dad was a doctor who, as a young man, had entertained a dream of becoming a "gentleman farmer." My mom's family had been farmers and she convinced him to start with a garden. When I was very small, there were veggies planted against the back fence in our yard. When my second cousins visited one year, we showed them how you could eat peas raw, right out of the pods. The result of that lesson was that we never did get enough peas to the house to have as a vegetable with dinner - we ate them all out in the sunshine, one pod at a time.
When I was a little older, my dad gardened on an otherwise empty lot a block down the street. It was across the street from my sister's best friend's house. Now and then, on a hot summer day, her friend's mother would bring us something cold to drink.
He didn't have that garden long, because he decided to build a new doctor's office there. The garden moved one more block over, on a lot directly across from the county hospital. Like all the town's doctors, he was always on-call for his patients. Whenever we went anywhere he left a message with the hospital's emergency room so they'd know where to find him, should the need arise. The garden was no exception. There were times when we'd see a nurse walking across the parking lot to come get him. If we didn't have our bikes, we'd walk home instead of waiting for him.
It was a sizable lot and we shared the space with another guy who lived in the neighborhood. In the spring, the other man and my dad would rototill the whole plot. After that, my dad pounded in stakes to mark the ends of rows, then he tied string to one end and then the other, so that when we helped him plant the rows would be straight.
Planting was one of the first things we helped with. Radish seeds were very forgiving, but the lettuce seeds were tiny and flew away in the lightest breeze. The corn was easy for our little hands to grip, and we planted it two or three together, about a hand-span apart. Planting corn and peas and green beans seemed like burying food, dried though it was. We planted beets and okra and kohlrabi and spinach and cabbage and zucchini and pumpkins. We planted onions and scallions. Later on, Daddy would transplant bell pepper and tomato plants.
We learned to use a rake and a hoe in that garden, mostly to cover up the seeds (but just a little!). When we started getting weeds in between the rows, we put down handfuls of straw to walk on. If it got really muddy, we put down wide boards between the rows and tried very hard not to slip off them until it dried out.
Lettuce and radishes were the first harvests. Some of the lettuce was a little small, but the rows usually needed thinning out anyway. Radishes were the first things I was allows to use a sharp knife on. I would put the red or white orbs down on a solid surface and then (while being closely supervised) I used the knife to cut off the root and the tops.
Peas also came on early, we'd pick bags or baskets full, trying to keep up with the crop, so that there would be more blossoms and more peas. Once it got too hot, the vines would dry up. We'd take the peas home and share the chore of shelling them, peas in one bowl, pods in another. We'd eat a few as we worked, but most made it to the table, or were frozen in plastic containers of water.
I remember hot, hot, humid summer days, when I'd be sent to the garden to pick green beans. And other days when I'd pedal my bike down the street to pull ripe ears of corn from the tall stalks. I'd bring home a paper bag full. Mom would put them in the pressure cooker and 15 minutes later we'd eat them.
The parts of the plants we didn't eat were left in the garden, to be turned under and feed the ground. The only exception were corn cobs. When the corn stalks came down in the fall, we'll pull off any remaining cobs and eat the handful of raw kernels from them right there in the garden.
As we worked in the garden, people would stop as they passed by. They'd ask how things were, and my dad would usually end up giving them produce. He kept extra sacks and boxes in his car.
Eventually Daddy put in red raspberry canes along one side of the garden. And some years we planted potatoes. One year he tried peanuts; another year he planted fennel for the seeds that Mom put in spaghetti sauce. Some years we'd have turnips. And he was always experimenting with squash: green zucchini, yellow summer squash, little white patty pans. He tried eggplants. I remember cucumbers.
Some experiments worked, some didn't. We learned to cook almost everything that came out of that garden. We learned about patience, and about getting your hands dirty. We learned that sometimes things ripen, and sometimes they rot. We learned about generosity.
I might have complained about working in that garden sometimes, but today I smile when I think about it.
It was an early spring day in 1967, so early in the season that the leaves were barely buds on the trees. The sun was warm but the breeze was cool. We joined another doctor's family and headed into the woods to hunt mushrooms.
With directions from a trusted friend, we hoped to find lots of morels. The locations with the biggest mushrooms would never be shared, but we might find some small-to-medium ones. And besides, it was a nice day to be outside.
My fifth birthday was not until later that year, and yet this was not my first, nor would it be my last, mushroom hunt. I enjoyed being outside, and I loved looking down at the ground as we walked along, spread out across the area, I decided that being closer to the ground was an advantage and I found a lot of them. I had learned to pick them carefully, so that they snapped close to the ground. They were then placed carefully in the brown paper bag I had with us.
The only difference between this hunt and others is the photographic evidence. (I'm the littlest one with the pale blue sweatshirt.)
Once we got them home, the morels were inspected to make sure any insects were removed, then well-rinsed, drained, then tossed gently in flour or fine cornmeal and fried in a large skillet. It had to be large because we always ate them all. I don't remember anything we had with them, though I'm sure there was other food. But when we ate morels, they are all I remember.
The areas we used to hunt mushrooms was gradually lost to us, developed for housing, or changing hands to someone we didn't know (and therefore couldn't get permission from). By the time I was in junior high school the only morels I saw were gifts to my dad from one or another of his patients.
After college I stayed in Massachusetts (where I once thought I saw a tiny morel by the back steps of a building, but only once and it was a many years ago). I never see morels in the grocery stores here, and I have given up looking for them there.
So I was surprised a few years ago to find a package of dried morels in the store. They were expensive, but I couldn't resist them. I brought them home and put them in the cabinet because I had no idea what to do with them. With their water-weight gone they were as light as air. I knew they had to be reconstituted, but was pretty sure I wouldn't want to fry them the way my mom had "back when."
Soon after I was delighted to read a post by Molly Wizenberg at her blog Orangette in which she swooned over some morels. I bravely asked for her advice in the comments and she suggested sauteing the reconstituted mushrooms with green beans or asparagus.
It took me three more years, but while my wife was out of town, I finally gave it a try. In fact, I ran two parallel food experiments. I played with some short-grained brown rice and some black wild rice, cooked together as a kind of pilaf. While that was going I turned to the morels.
I opened the package dubiously, wondering if they would just crumble to a powder. They survived OK, so I soaked half of the package in hot water while I cleaned and cut the asparagus (on sale that week). I heated up butter in a skillet and sauteed the mushrooms and asparagus. I no longer remember which went in first (I got two phone calls while I was trying to cook) but it certainly looked OK.
I plated it with the rice and remembered to take a picture before diving in.
I want to tell you that it was perfect - that the morels had the same taste I remember from childhood. Alas, I cannot. They were good, and they were entertaining, but the texture was definitely lacking, and the taste muted. I can't blame the poor mushrooms, deprived of their water so long ago that they probably barely remember themselves. But what they mostly did was spark a desire in me to track down fresh morels, somehow. I'll be on the lookout.
And on an up note, the rice was very pleasing to me and I even remember the proportions I used. We'll be having that again.
Back in March I wrote about the trees in my childhood yard. I've been meaning to follow it up with a post about my Grandmother's yard. I finally wrote it!
Grandma's Yard
My grandma lived on the other side of our small town. It was just over a mile away, so we were over there at least once a week. In nice weather, we spent a lot of time in the yard. Grandma's house sat on a corner lot, and she owned the next lot too, so there was a lot of space to play.
The first trees we always saw were the two large cedar trees on the narrow side yard by the street. They kept the east side of the house shaded and kept the grass from growing. Hidden in the shade, beneath a small roof was the "side door" that opened to the landing of the basement stairs. Morning glories climbed up a trellis on each side of that door, white blooms on one side, dark blue-purple ones on the other.
Mom would drive past those trees and park in the small, blacktopped "driveway" next to the back door. That parking place had rosebushes along both sides. My favorite was a shade of pinky-orange that Grandma told me was her favorite too.
We nearly always used the back door, going through the back porch into the kitchen. The only time we used the front door was at Halloween when we pretended to be strangers and thought that we would confuse her with our masks.
A concrete walk ran across the yard from the back door to the garage. We sometimes tried to catch leaves of grass on fire, using a magnifying glass, but never had any luck. There were no trees in the yard between that walk and the street, just a pole where the clothesline hung. With no shade, the sheets and shirts and housedresses fluttered in the sunshine on washday, and dried quickly.
On the other side of the street, the closest tree was a large shade tree. I remember it as a tulip poplar, but I may have that wrong. I think there was an elm tree at one time, but like most elms, it became diseased and had to be cut down. Near the southwest corner of the house was the largest maple that I had ever seen. I loved playing with the maple wing seeds that would flutter down like helicopter rotors.
On the southeast edge of the house were some kind of evergreen bushes, trimmed to stay between the house and the walk. They sometimes had fleshy red fruits on them and since the grownups hadn't said anything about them, we dared each other to eat them, telling each other they were poisonous. They didn't taste like much, so we never ate very many and since they never made us sick they couldn't have been poisonous after all.
To the south of the maple, in a nice sunny spot was where Grandma had rhubarb planted. We were told from an early age not to eat the leaves because they were poisonous. Since all the grownups told us that, we didn't dare to try them.
At the back of the yard, on the south edge along the alley, was a pussy willow that had grown out of control. It was taller than some trees.
On the west edge of the yard, next to the neighbor's back yard, was an olive tree. I liked its soft grayish leaves, and wondered why there were never olives on it. I decided we lived too far north, where it was too cold for it.
Along the west side of Grandma's house, under the dining room windows, were spirea bushes. They bloomed their soft sprays of white just in time to use as filler in our May baskets.
Another spring flower was what Grandma called "nekkid ladies." These flowers sprouted up on fleshy-colored stems, and bloomed a soft pink. Only after that died down did the green leaves come up. We always waited until the greens died back before cleaning them up, so that the flowers would have enough energy stored to come up the next spring.
Grandma had peony bushes at either end of the row of naked ladies. I think they were white or maybe pale pink. And Grandma got help digging them up each fall. She stored them in the basement until spring.
My favorite thing growing in Grandma's yard was the redbud tree growing in the northwest corner of the yard. It was very large – big enough to climb. And Grandma did let us climb it, much to my mother's dismay (she wasn't big on tree-climbing as an activity).
But best of all in Grandma's yard was the swing. When I was little there was an old glider-style swing that had benches facing each other. Four of us could (and did) swing back and forth at the same time. It was wooden and eventually fell apart, but while it lasted it was like flying.
There were tulips and forsythia, daffodils and dandelions. We searched the clover patches for the lucky ones with 4 leaves. And on hot summer afternoons, Grandma's painted metal chairs beckoned us to sit down with a cold glass of lemonade, where we could kick off our shoes and run our toes through the soft grass in the shade.
I seem to have misplaced a month. OK, not really misplaced - I watched it fly by, but I haven't posted here. I haven't written off-line either, stories or poetry. I haven't read any books either (well, I did read one-and-a-half pages the day before yesterday, but I'm going to have to re-read that part when I I next pick up the book.
What have I been up to? Well first there was some heavy-level neatening up of the house in preparation for Passover and guests. Then there was menu-planning and cooking for the same. Then as soon as that was over I (finally!) started and quickly finished our tax returns. And overlapping that my wife's niece and her mother came for a quick visit. That was followed by laundry so that my wife could head off to a conference.
I finally realized that I'd feel better if I just dove in an started writing again. So I looked up a bunch of old, old prompts and picked one from the first year of Sunday Scribblings. The prompt, "my shoes" launched this piece. Sorry it's a bit long - but then so are my feet!
When you are very small you don't know what shoes are. The adults around you may ooh-and-aah about how cute they are, but then they are likely doing the same thing over your fingers and ears. Probably the same reason that baby vegetables are popular – the whole tiny and sweet thing.
Then shoes become a struggle. You want them on when your mother wants them off, and vice versa. And for those of us who grew up before Velcro, the laces wouldn't stay tucked into those little "don't bother me" plastic, "childproof," barrels. Or the buckles on the straps were just too small to manage.
Around the time I started kindergarten I tried to learn to tie my own shoes. I wanted to very much to tie the laces, but I just couldn't get it right. We even got oddly-shaped cutouts in school, that laced up and we could practice on. (OK, I think they were supposed to look like a shoe, but the point of view was not what I saw when I looked down at my feet – it was like a snail's eye view of someone else's feet. But I digress…)
Fortunately my older brother came to my rescue. He says now that teaching me to tie my laces was self-defense; that he was tired of doing it. Whatever the reason, his lessons stuck and I moved into a phase of being at peace with my shoes.
I don't remember much about my shoes before I was nine years old. I am sure there were dressy shoes to wear when I needed something to go with a fancy, lacy dress. I'm sure there were sandals for the summer, and boots for the winter. Mostly I remember Keds. I always had white ones – or at least I did for about a day after they came out of the box. They then moved toward gray at a rapid pace that could only be slowed down by occasional trips through the washer and dryer.
Then my feet started growing. No one in my family had tiny feet (at least not after infancy). But I remember outgrowing a pair of dressy sandals I had worn only once or twice. They were simple and not too little-girly so my mom gave them to someone who could use them – my best friend's mother! I couldn't get my brain wrapped around the fact that my feet were bigger than a grown-up's.
Until that time most of my shoes came from the shoe store downtown. There was only one shoe store that was on the "bank corner" (across from the First National Bank and catty-cornered from the Farmer's and Merchant's Bank). The man who owned the store happened to be our next-door-neighbor and his son was a year younger than I was. For a small town, there was a pretty good selection and he was happy to order anything for us to try on. Trips to buy new shoes took longer and often involved that option to order something to try on when it came in a few days later. Mom grumbled about all the multivitamins she had given us when we were little. She also threatened to make us wear the shoeboxes since they were bigger, though we knew she was just teasing.
I was eleven years old when I entered sixth grade. That fall I was tickled to have a new pair of leather penny-loafers. They were pretty simple shoes, but I loved them, especially after Daddy showed me how to put a real penny into the vamp on each one. I was greatly saddened to find I had outgrown them just a month later.
The good news was that by the end of that school year it seemed my shoe size had finally stopped changing. The bad news was that I wore a US size 10, narrow.
Finding shoes in that size was hard enough. It was tougher still finding ones that didn't accentuate the length of my foot or that didn't look like it belonged on someone two or three times my age. Lace-ups were a better bet since they helped keep the shoes on my narrow foot. Straps across my foot seemed to help the illusion that I didn't have canoes on the end of my feet.
And by the time I was in high school I had entered that love/hate phase that I swing through even now. I coveted leather Frye boots like I saw in the magazines, but there was no way to fit my long foot down the shaft of a boot that didn't zip up. I needed tall black boots to wear with my flag-waving outfit for marching band. Getting those boots involved a trip to St. Louis and a huge department store.
I could no longer borrow shoes from my mom. Even the strappy black sandals that seemed a little big on her. I learned to set my expectations low when we went shoe-shopping. I went for whatever fit and had good support. And it helped if it didn't look like it belonged on a drag queen (no offense, ladies). I get away with sneakers at work a lot of the time, and I always have two or three pair of black shoes to wear with my long black choir skirt.
As an adult, I found that trips to try on shoes at warehouse-style stores needed to be a solo expedition for me. While friends could try things on in each aisle, I had to wander a lot further to see out the few pairs that were (supposedly) in my size.
It was with great delight that I discovered a shoe store for hard-to-fit sizes. It is not so easy to get to (you have to know where you are going or you'll never find it). But the man who runs it is patient and knowledgeable. He will order anything for you and sends out e-mail with a picture of each new style that comes in. My (now) size-11 average width-with-a-narrow-heel feet don't phase him and I can try on box after box of shoes in MY SIZE.
The only problem I now have is learning to balance the "it fits!" feeling in the store with a clear-eyed evaluation of how comfortable it will really be later. Does it have enough support? And occasionally I have purchased a pair of shoes that is so truly comfortable that I don't realize until a couple of weeks later how unattractive they are.
So I still hate that it takes a special trip to find shoes for me. I don't like that I have to try shoes on to know if they are really going to fit or not. But I do love the pair of grey suede flats I have (though I can't wear then for too long – not enough support). And I like the red sneakers I have nearly worn out – they are so cheerful! And I love the brown microfiber pumps I got for our wedding that I now wear with some dressier slacks at work. And I love it when I'm not the one with the hardest-to-fit-feet in the shoe store.
We had a lot of trees in our yard when I was a girl. Daddy believed we should have a large variety so that if a disease infected one type we would still have shade. He and Mom started from scratch. The lot had been a field before they built the house, but I only know that from pictures.
I remember the locust tree out front. It had tiny little leaves grouped together in fronds. It was not a honey-locust or a black locust, but I don't know exactly what variety it was. I do remember that the cicadas liked the bark of that tree. They would anchor tight and then shed their old shells, flying away and leaving behind fragile empty cases. We would gingerly pull them off the tree and anchor the ghosts onto our sweaters. All the neighborhood boys loved it, but very few of the girls. Most shied away and some even shrieked.
Next to the locust was a clump of paper birch. The white bark was always shaggy and oh so tempting to pull. The branches hung down like a beaded curtain. My favorite memory of the birch is when a flock of goldfinches converged on the trees, feasting on the seeds and creating a flickering riot of golden yellow.
On the west side of the house were two gum trees. I didn't know if there were any other gum trees in town. I had never heard of gum trees. When I became a Girl Scout I learned the song about the Kookaburra bird from Australia, "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree..." I was delighted to discover that maybe gum trees weren't so unusual after all. They were a pretty tree, but I must say I didn't like them much. That was because of the seed balls that were prickly. Once the birds had their way, what was left was a stickery round skeleton that hurt to step on. That was only one of the reasons Mom didn't let us go barefoot in the yard.
There was a red maple on the west side of the house too. I loved the burgundy color of its leaves, standing out from all the other trees.
In one corner of the yard was a dwarf sour cherry tree. It was originally in another location but was moved when my parents added an in-ground pool. The sour cherry tree didn't seem to mind. It was quite prolific, giving us gallons and gallons of cherries, even after the birds got some. Daddy tried all kinds of things to keep the birds from eating the bulk of the crop. I think what he finally settled on most years was lengths of cheesecloth draped over large sections, and several aluminum pie pans spinning and dangling from branches to scare away the critters. Even though it was a dwarf tree, we still needed a ladder to pick most of the cherries. A fair number went directly into our mouths, but there were still plenty left to cook with, as long as we helped to pit them. Mom would give us each an old, large, worn-out shirt to wear as a smock and we would sit on the back porch with the buckets and bowls lined up on the picnic table. Mom didn't make pies, but Daddy made jam. Yum! And some would be saved for later by freezing them in square plastic boxes.
In the back of the house, next to the dog run, was a tulip poplar tree. Its leaves were such a pretty shape, but the flowers were a bit showy for me. And the bits that remained from the flowers included a kind of spiky bit that was another thing to avoid with bare feet. The shade from that tree was terrific and I know the dogs we had loved to lie in its shade when the temperature soared in the summer.
At the north-east corner of the house was a pinoak. Mom kept cutting off the lower limbs to keep the view clear. I remember how straight its trunk was.
To the east of the pool was another cherry tree, though I don't remember getting more than two or three cherries off of it. I don't know what variety of cherry it was supposed to be, but I always called it a "weeping cherry tree" because its branches drooped. It was never really happy in our yard, but my parents seemed to want to give it more time.
In the north-east corner of the yard were three pine trees. I remember when they were planted, in a triangle in the corner of the yard. They were slightly different sizes so I thought of them as papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear trees. They grew quickly. Before long, they were big enough to hide in. My brother and I took bricks left from the house remodel and used them as pavers to create a floor in the space between the trees. It was a great area, like an out-door playhouse. I can still smell the pine.
In the south-east corner of the yard was an apple tree. Daddy bought it because it was a Jonathan Apple tree, but when it finally got big enough to have fruit we discovered that it wasn't a Jonathan after all. I don't know what he decided it was. He didn't like to the spray the trees and the apples always ended up buggy. More landed on the ground to rot or go into the compost pile than made it into the kitchen.
In front of our carport and shed was a copper beech tree. Mom loved seeing the giant beech trees when we vacationed in Massachusetts and decided they should plant one. Beech trees grow so slowly that it always seemed like a small tree to me. For years it was small enough for me to put my hands around. I think that by the time I was in college it was finally big enough my hands could not span the trunk. I would like to think that beech tree will be there for decades to come, but I can only hope it is still there.
Between the shed and the house was a sycamore tree. The bark on this tree seem to flake off, but that's what it is supposed to do. The seed balls were the same size as the gum tree's balls, but the sycamore ones were not stickery and didn't hurt. I now know that sycamores like to have "damp feet" and there are some gorgeous specimens along the Charles River near Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was another tree that no one else in my hometown seemed to have. When I was little the only other place I'd heard of one was in the Presbyterian church. They taught us a song about Zaccheus sitting in a sycamore tree (the savior for to see), and something about "come down" from the tree.
There were other trees in my childhood, but these are the trees of my yard. I hope you enjoyed the tour. Maybe another day I'll tell you about the other trees, the ones in Gramma's yard, or in the park next door, or the other handful of special ones around my childhood town.
[This is more-or-less the way I remember this Winter's Tale. See others at Sunday Scribblings.]
I did not attend a lot of dances when I was a teenager. I think there was one or two a year in junior high school, one formal and usually another was a "sock-hop." In high school there were no more than two each year: homecoming in the fall for all classes and the junior-senior prom in the spring.
So I didn't have a lot of experience with dances when I got to college in New England. I went to a few parties in the fall, one on campus to celebrate the new college president, the rest were at frats in town. My dorm planned a semi-formal dance for February. While I was home for winter break, I made sure to pack a fancy dress to take back with me.
We planned food for the party, and had someone coming from Boston or Cambridge to be DJ. We had people signed up to arrange the furniture in the living room so there would be plenty of dance space. And there were dates coming (mostly from Boston and Cambridge). Not all of us had dates, but practically everyone in the dorm was going to attend anyway.
So, early in the day of the dance it started snowing – hard. In fact, it snowed so hard that we soon got a call from the D.J. telling us there was no way he could make it. But we rolled with the punches: a search of the dorm turned up some pretty decent stereo equipment and everyone chipped in records and tapes.
The food was already in the building (nothing for that was last-minute) but the roads were terrible. Soon we heard that no one was going to make it out to the suburbs that night. We were on our own.
I don't think it crossed our minds to cancel or postpone the party – there was too much going on at school to move it. So we threw a party for ourselves. We got dressed up and danced by ourselves in the living room. We had the curtains open so we could watch it continue to snow through the wall-sized windows.
A bunch of us finally couldn't stand it anymore. We went back to our rooms and traded semi-formal dresses for snow clothes. We slid down the snow from the dorm slightly uphill from ours toward the living room. We threw snowballs and chased each other and totally wore ourselves out.
When our fingers started to get numb, we went back inside and bundled into snuggly nightclothes. We took handfuls of party food up to our common room and settled in to play cards. One person taught most of the rest of us how to play Hearts. She whupped us completely, but we had a blast. We adopted the game completely and continued to play frequently all the way through college.
There were other semi-formals, at our dorm and at others. But that first was one of a kind.
[This was written in response to a prompt from Cafe Writing's Jewels Project. For Option 1 I used the following words: landscape, paper, museum, touch. ]
I was anxious to leave my hometown, something that might have been in my genes.
My great-grandparents left the area, taking their children west to homestead in Oklahoma. That didn't work out for them and so they came back to the area of southern Illinois that eventually gave birth to my mom.
She, in turn, wanted to leave and finally managed o do so, though not until her husband retired.
I left sooner, happy to be from there – it is a great place to be from – and happier to be living elsewhere.
But since I left small pieces of the landscape of my youth have followed me east. Some are quite concrete like my baby blanket or the folder of stories and artwork I created on lined paper in the first grade, and some other tidbits of my own creation – old in my life but new in the timeline of my family's history.
I have my mother's high school ring. She gave it to me years ago. Although I finished high school and college I never had a class ring of my own. Hers has three colors of gold and an element of age about it – it doesn't look like the most modern school rings. I wear it on my pinkie from time to time.
But the pieces that drag people and places out of the past belonged to my grandma and great-aunt. They are mostly kitchen things – hardly museum pieces.
There are some old brown crockery bowls – nothing special. I don't use them much, but I love seeing them every time I open the cabinet my measuring spoons are in.
The old, once-white, oval plates, one small and one medium, send me down memory lane when I use them. The small one is perfect as a spoon rest, though I don't remember what it was used it for before. But I can't touch the medium one without seeing it piled with chicken-fried steak, sitting on Grandma's dining room table.
[Cafe Writing prompted me to write some fiction about a night when the moon is howling... ]
Judgment of the Moon
I was cold. Not shivery-fun cold, like when the snow crunches under your feet and you know cocoa is waiting at home. This cold was damp and ran right through me as I stood in the woods and listened.
Or tried to listen. It was hard to listen to nothing. No breeze moved one branch against another. Not a single mouse scurried. The dead, wet leaves had compressed into a spongy mat that swallowed the sound of my boots. This was a night when even the trees held their breath in fearful expectation and only the clear, empty sky rang aloud with the howl of the moon.
The giant, yellow eye unblinkingly spied me cringing in the shadows. Passion-full it searched my soul and judged me wanting. I held my breath in dread at the sentence, unable to image the payment it would demand.
Then the wind sighed and the moon shed a tear, and the howl was in my own throat and I was sentenced to live.
[Sunday Scribblings prompts us this week with "Somewhere..." And since my mind has been on stories of my life, I thought of a time my parents took us to Massachusetts.]
Cousin Jonathan Gets Married
My cousin Jonathan was getting married. My dad had only one brother, and my uncle had three sons. The cousins were from New York, from Brooklyn, and they were significantly older than I was, closer to the ages of my older sister and brother. I know they had visited us in the Midwest, but I mostly recalled the trips from pictures, not from my own memories. And I know we had visited them in New York, but all I remember are vague memories of a hotel room and a day-trip to a distant relative's house (also in Brooklyn).
I had been to weddings before, usually pretty close to home. We'd dress up and were reminded to mind our manners. We'd go to a church and most of the time the reception was in the church fellowship hall, decorated for the occasion. Once we left the party, we'd be home in less than 10 minutes.
But I didn't remember ever having traveled to go to a wedding before. Jonathan and Jean were getting married in Massachusetts. We had been to Massachusetts before, driving two days to get to Cape Cod for vacation. But by the time of this wedding, we had stopped going there for vacation. I think I was about 9 years old.
We flew to Boston and rented a car. I remember following along on a road map as we headed west to the center of the state. I thought the arrangement of towns was funny. Northampton was north of Southampton, and Westhampton largely west of Easthampton, but Easthampton was kind of in the middle (north to south) between Northampton and Southampton. I thought if some place were going to be in the middle of all that it should be just plan "Hampton." It made me think the people who named the places weren't very original.
I don't remember which town we stayed in, but I know we spent two or three nights in a motel, along with a lot of other people with our last name. My dad was a doctor and so were several of the other guests. And some fool phoned the motel and asked to speak to Dr. Lastname and didn't even know the first name of his doctor. Since I heard about it they must have called all the rooms to try to track down someone who knew the patient!
My aunt, mother of the groom, was a bit on edge, wanting everything to be perfect and being in control of very little. I had learned a song in Girl Scouts that had words that sounded like a native-American chant, and it had hand movements that went with it. While my younger brother and I were trying to keep ourselves amused (and knowing we'd get in trouble for playing in the parking lot) we started doing this chant and hand-movement thing. When my aunt asked what we were doing, my mom teased her by saying it was a kind of rain dance. My aunt had a fit! We were banned from singing that song until after the wedding.
As for the wedding itself, I remember very little. I had never been to a wedding with that many people at it. We were quite a ways back and I really couldn't see over people's heads. I don't know what my younger brother did to entertain himself – he must have been about 7. He might have been entertained by the yarmulkes that they had given out – he got to wear one just like the grown-up men.
At the reception, I remember my cousin Michael's wife teaching us to do the Bunny Hop. I remember dancing (the box step) with my dad, and probably with some other relatives. And I remember someone asking me how old I was. When I told them 9, they told me I was 9 going on 30. I remember asking my mom what that meant, though I don't remember what she answered.
I don't remember much else about that trip.
As it turned out, that marriage didn't last. And cousin Michael's didn't either. But I still remember how to do the Bunny Hop, in case you need to invite someone to your wedding.
[My sister out-law inspired me to make a list of "My Life In Stories." I have a long list of titles and from time to time I write out one of the stories. This is one of them.]
Feeding the Piranhas
When I was very small, my family drove two days to get to the ocean for summer vacations. We went to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, back in the early post-Camelot days. The area around Hyannis was not yet built up and congested, but it was heading in that direction. The distance and the diminishing payoff for the long drive made my parents think about alternative ways to take vacations.
My parents had owned some property on Lake Sara, just an empty lot. Once in a while we'd drive over there and spend the day fishing and picnicking. We bought a wooden picnic table to keep there. As my parents were trying to decide what our alternative vacations might be, they turned their attention to the possibility of a vacation house.
They looked into the idea of building a house on that empty lot, but building a house was a large project and they weren't sure that was what they wanted to spend their time doing. They ended up buying a house on another part of Lake Sara. The house had been a full-time home for the previous owners, so it was fully winterized. It had yellow aluminum siding and it sat at the back-end of a cove on three lots of land. The house was on the first lot, the second lot was mostly flat and grassy, and the third lot was grass but with a few trees near the road including one large enough to have a tree swing on it.
We started going to the vacation house on lots of weekends, even before school was out for the summer. We'd pack a small bag (we kept toiletries and towels and even some clothes there, so we didn't have to bring much). We'd head east on Interstate 70 as far as Altamont. We'd exit and go north past the Stuckey's and if it was a Friday night, we might even stop there for the buffet dinner, but that was rare. Usually we tried to get an earlier start so we passed on and turned right onto old 40 toward the fairgrounds. We'd usually pass our turnoff toward the lake and drive through Funkhouser all the way into Effingham where we'd buy groceries.
Across from the grocery store was a pet store and sometimes we'd get to loiter and look in the window there. We had a dog, and Mom certainly wasn't about to let us have another pet, but that didn't stop us from looking. We usually only looked from the outside, but once in a while we got to go in to pick up dog food or something. One summer they had Piranhas in one of the fish tanks. We saw how their jaws looked funny (and strong) and from TV shows we knew they were killers. Once they fed them while we watched and they snapped up whatever it was faster than we could have imagined. The man in the store told us that's how he lost the end of one finger (we could see it was a little shorter than it should have been). He said he forgot to be careful around them. We believed him but we didn't want these dangerous fish for ourselves anyway. They were not at all cuddly, though they were fascinating.
After a quick stop for ice cream or a sandwich from Burger Chef, we'd retrace the path back to the turnoff and head to the lake house. When we got there, we'd first take the groceries in to the kitchen, then the bags to our room. At the beginning my brother and I shared a room when we were there, leaving the 3rd bedroom free for guests. If it was hot, the air conditioner got turned on, but often we were sent to open up all the windows in the place to get the air moving through.
Mom often drove us kids over as soon as she was ready on Friday, leaving Daddy to come once he was done with work. That meant we had two cars there, which was good in case the hospital called him to come fix somebody up.
Sometimes Daddy had some office hours on Saturday morning, so we'd spend some of the early part of the weekend cleaning up the lake house, dusting and sweeping inside and out. Then my brother and I (and the dog) would run in the grass and swing on the tire swing (us kids--not the dog). We'd pick up the mail at the mailbox and run down the gravel driveway to take it to Mom. At home we had a Post Office Box and so the only mailman we knew was at Grandma's house.
Like most lake houses, the living room faced the lake. What you saw from the road was mostly the attached garage (and the wall with the master bedroom and bath). And just toward the road from the garage was a rock garden with a giant boulder. Mom loves rock gardens and boulders too. That big, pale sandstone boulder would heat up in the sun and be a warm spot to sit when the weather wasn't hot yet. We'd sit there and try to catch the lizards that liked playing in the rocks. Someone told us that if the lizard lost its tail, it would grow another one. I new that starfish were supposed to do that, but I wasn't sure I believe them about the lizards.
We had to stay out of the woods because the ground underneath was covered with poison ivy plants. We knew how to identify the plants from the time we were pretty young. I'd never had a rash from them, but since I knew to stay away, we were never sure if I was allergic or not (and I wasn't looking to find out). There were also snakes in the woods but I think they didn't want to scare us by telling us then.
Eventually there would be fishing off the dock or from the rowboat, and swimming in the cove where the water was crystal clear all the way to the sandy bottom. Sometimes there would be neighbor kids (or neighbor grandkids) to play with. If the weather was bad, we would roller-skate in the big empty basement room where Daddy had strung ropes between the support poles, giving us something to hold onto since we hadn't yet learned how to balance ourselves.
And on Sunday morning, Mom always wanted a Sunday newspaper. Sometimes a neighbor would give us a powerboat ride across the lake to the marina. My parents would buy a newspaper and sometimes pick up some other groceries. My brother and I would beg them for coins to buy a slice or two of bread to feed the piranhas. The owner kept a stale loaf next to the cash register by the door. Since it was only a dime or a quarter, Mom or Daddy would let us and we'd be cautioned to be careful to stay dry. Leaving the grownups to talk, we'd scoot out the door and head over to the docks where the first slip or two usually were empty. We'd break off the smallest piece of bread, smaller than a pea, and toss it in the water.
And immediately the surface would boil with fishes competing for that bread. We'd toss the pieces close and far and marvel at the piranhas and be glad that they only lived on this side of the lake, not near our house.
Of course they were not piranhas, not in our climate. And we knew that, we really did. But it was so much more fun to pretend that they were. In truth they were the same bluegills that we caught with our bamboo fishing poles. Little sunfish that were more bone than meat. But when they charged over for those bread crumbs, you would have thought they could tear you apart.
Back on our side of the lake we'd fight over the comics section of the paper before being shooed outside to play. And far too soon we'd have to pack up the dirty laundry and close up the house to return back to our regular house again.
[I was going to put in a picture of piranhas but they are just too scary. Go over to http://images.google.com and type in "piranha" to see what I mean. Then if you need to wipe that out of your mind, you can type in "bluegill" to see some much tamer critters.]
[The Sunday Scribblings prompt of vision send me on a trip down memory lane:]
Vision
The summer before I entered fifth grade brought me new experiences. One of the most significant was that I took up playing the oboe. The fifth grade band comprised all the fifth graders in town who were similarly becoming acquainted with new instruments. That summer we met in small groups with one of the band directors (at that time there were two in town) and we gradually learned to play.
In fourth grade all students were exposed to some music education (see my post on the flutophone episode) so even those who couldn't read music earlier were not looking at music for the very first time. Still, some of us were not learning quickly.
There were three of us learning to play oboe. For a town the size of ours, and a band the size ours would be, this was a ridiculously large number, but that's what we had. For lessons I seem to remember we shared one music stand between the three of us. It was not easy to see the music without getting in the next person's way, or knocking her elbow. Nonetheless, I learned slowly as I squinted at the music.
That same summer I was learning to play tennis. The town's parks department offered classes at multiple levels (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and followed up weeks of lessons with some tournament play. We would be divided into teams with some at each level, then scheduled to play against other teams. But to start with, us beginners had to learn to hit the ball.
I had a terrible time trying to connect. I watched the ball; I swung the racket; I seemed to have the appropriate grip; I didn't seem to be uncoordinated. But I was nearly always just a little off – too early, too late, too close, too far away (whiff!). I was beginning to get frustrated, but was determined to get the knack.
Now when I was a kid, we had to have physical exam before entering fifth grade. My dad was my family physician so my exam was done when a quiet day rolled around mid-summer. The kids needing a physical for summer camps were done, and most of the fifth-grade (and second-grade and older school sports) exams had not yet ramped up. To my surprise, and that of my dad and my mom (the nurse), it appeared that I no longer had perfect vision. They checked it twice, then scheduled a visit to the eye doctor.
The eye doctor had an office downtown in one of the two bank buildings. The entrance was from the sidewalk on the side street, next to where the large plate-glass windows of the Tri-City Grocery store ended. We walked up one flight of stairs to a dim hallway where we turned right and walked nearly to the end (at the rear of the building) to where the office was on the right-hand side. Compared to the dim hallway, the office was quite bright and modern.
After another eye exam, this one sitting in a chair with odd things pulled down in front of my face, the doctor agreed that I needed glasses. This was not really surprising once I thought about it. Daddy wore glasses. Mom wore glasses. My older sister couldn't even find her glasses if they weren't on her head (or so we teased). My grandparents wore glasses (well, grandma didn't wear hers as much as she was supposed to).
So my next stop was all the way across the room to pick out frames. Mom nixed wire-rims as too fragile for an active girl and the doctor pulled out a lot of plastic frames. Some were placed on my face and taken away before I had a chance to look at them, but I did get quite a bit of choice in the matter. I ended up with dark-ish frames that were quite small and oval. The doctor would have the lenses made and he'd call us when we could pick up the glasses.
It must have been a couple of weeks before we got the call, and we went back to the office (through the not-quite-so-intimidating hallway). I put on the glasses and he had me hand them back to him. He bent the earpieces and gave them back. He made sure that the lenses were centered over my eyes, where they would do the most good. And I got a glasses case, which seemed a bit odd to me since I was going to have to wear the glasses all the time. I didn't know when they would be in the case.
And some amazing things happened. Well yes, there was some not-so-amazing teasing and calls of "guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses." But since I wasn't sure what a pass was I didn't worry about it. No, the amazing thing was first discovered at band practice. I could sit farther away from the music stand! And I could see the music even better than when I had sat closer.
But the more amazing thing was in tennis practice. All of a sudden I could hit the ball. Not every time, of course, I was still a beginner. But I had a fighting chance. It turns out that my left eye was significantly weaker than the right eye and it had messed up my depth perception. With the glasses, I now could figure out how fast the ball was moving. It was like magic.
I have worn lenses to correct my vision ever since. I switched to contact lenses when I was in high school and college, then back to glasses when I had to start paying for them myself. Then years later a friend encouraged me to take up downhill skiing again and once I was sure I was going to keep at it, I got contact lenses to cut down on the number of surfaces I had to clean fog off of.
My brothers, who didn't have to wear glasses when we were kids, got their turns, I think when they were in their twenties. Of course by then, my sister and I no longer wanted to tease them the way the boys had teased us. (Not much anyway!)
I have had various glasses frames over the years, though none as small as that first pair. One pair was significantly larger, but it was the 1970's. I once lost a pair – I have NO idea how I did it. It was only a year after I started wearing them. We had to order a replacement pair, and the came in just in time for me to wear them to Girl Scout summer camp. Funny thing is, on the way to camp, I put my hand in the pocket of my windbreaker and found the missing pair! Lucky thing, too! because a week later my glasses accidentally flew from my head – and were stepped on by a very large draft horse. Good thing I had a backup!
And now I find that I need to replace my glasses again. I wear contacts most of the time, but in the late evenings and at night, I wear the glasses. Unfortunately I sometimes wear the glasses to bed where I bend them slightly out of shape when I lie on my side while I read a book. These are not the bend-back kind of frames so although the prescription is fine, they are ever-so-slightly askew and don't properly correct my astigmatism anymore.
And what a miracle it seems that such small pieces of plastic can make the world come into focus!
[Sunday Scribblings prompted us with the word guide. See what other folks came up with here. For me, it brought to mind one particular person on a special trip.]
In 2004 Chelle and I went on a vacation to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Most of the trip was spent in or around the pool, or next to the beach at the all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. But there were a couple of side trips, one notably to see Chichen Itza.
Departure time was early (at least as far as vacation schedules go), and there were two buses lined up for those of us heading inland for the all-day trip. We were a long way from Chichen Itza, long enough we would be stopping for lunch on the way there. The guide on our bus was Jesus (pronounced in with a "hey" sound in front). Since he wasn't the driver, he could pay attention to us, the paying customers.
Jesus made it his business to tell us about Mexico today, passed around some old coins, talked about the current political and economic situation. He told us about the plant life we saw outside the bus as well as how he had learned about it on excursions into the jungle with a botanist friend, where he came across small groups of people who still spoke Mayan as a language. As a kind of party game he asked for our birthdays and told us what saint-names we would have likely been given had we been born in Mexico. He told us about his family and told us that he was studying German so that he would be able to lead tours for German-speaking tourists, increasing his marketability.
Our bus passed first through the downtown area of Playa del Carmen, where we saw trees being re-planted in the median strip, the former ones having been damaged in Hurricane Ivan. We saw a building going up along the road where workers were lifting concrete into place one bucket at a time; an honest-to-goodness bucket brigade getting the job done two stories above ground. And we passed startlingly-familiar shops like McDonalds and WalMart.
Our road went on highways and byways. In one town we passed through, Jesus pointed out that the church was built on the site of a native temple, and that it was, in fact, built of the very stones of the former place. The conquerors had torn down one holy building in order to put up their own.
Jesus pointed out the kinds of trees we could see over the walled yards in town. Many were faster-growing varieties that recovered quickly from the winds of the hurricane. Once we were out of the town, we passed onto smaller roads and eventually into areas where a few houses were immediately at the side of the road. A small naked toddler walked out of the front of the house to pee in the tiny front yard. Since there was no indoor plumbing, Jesus pointed out, this was probably a good place for him to do it, since it kept him away from the vegetables that were likely planted in the back.
Jesus taught us about the geology of the Yucatan Peninsula, that it was made of limestone and so porous that water doesn't stay on top. There are no above-ground rivers in the Yucatan, all are below ground. After seeing Chichen Itza, we would get to visit a cenote (pronounced say-NO-tay) which is an underground water hole.
Lunch was at a tourist-trap buffet with entertainment provided by bored dancers, but we were at least sure that it was clean. Onward we went into the jungle, the temperature and humidity rising with every mile.
When we finally arrived at the ruins of Chichen Itza, we were each handed two bottles of water and cautioned to stay hydrated since we would be sweating a lot in the heat. Jesus, himself, acted as our guide at the ruins. We saw the ancient observatory from a distance, closed to the public now since so many people had been carrying parts of it away.
We saw steps that were a funny proportion, with tall risers and short treads, tough for my size-11 feet to navigate. Round and square pillars stood upright in an area believed to have been a marketplace. Further along other pillars, all round this time, stood in a long line into the trees, the original cement still holding the stones together. We were told that local contractors all claimed to use the same centuries-old recipe in their own construction. We saw the entrance to an ancient bathhouse/sauna. Jesus pointed out the original wood at the base of a Mayan arch, made from the chicle tree. He told us contractors working on a new porch at his own house were waiting for the right time of the month to cut chicle trees for supports; that when the chicle's sap is drawn up into the tree, it helps to act as a preservative.
We saw stones laid out in an archeologist's attempt at a giant jigsaw puzzle. We passed enormous buildings that had housed warriors, some of their images carved into the rectangular pillars in the front (each image different from each other one).
Jesus told us about the number of steps on the four sides of the largest building, how with the top platform, they total 365. He told us about the magic of the equinoxes, spring and fall, when the sun is in just the right place to cause a jagged shadow to crawl down to complete a "body" for the representation of the serpent-god, Kukulkan.
He explained the ball-court game. He helped us interpret the carved images along the side of the biggest court at Chichen Itza. He pointed out the raised area at the end where royalty would have sat to watch, so as not to favor one side or the other. The top galleries, Jesus told us, would have been covered to keep the citizens cool in the heat of the sometimes days-long games.
After the tour at Chichen Itza, and somewhat revived by the air conditioning in the bus, we went to the cenote. We walked down steps carved into rock, down into the cave, where the air grew cooler as the light dimmed. Jesus pointed out the tree at the opening of the cenote, how it wasn't much to look at, but to hold our judgement. Chelle actually joined a few other folks for a swim. I decided to let her tell me how cold it was (and then decided it was going to be too cold for me). From where I stood looking around, I could see the roots of the tree Jesus pointed out. They reached down and down and down for stories, all the way down to reach the water of the cenote. The roots were pretty impressive.
As we finally headed back to the resort, with the sun going down and most of us wiped out from the heat and excitement of the day, Jesus finally stopped teaching and let us watch some movies or fall asleep.
That night we compared notes with the folks on the other bus. Our bus was full of people who ranked the day and the whole trip quite highly. The other bus was full of people who were much more indifferent. Since we went to the same places, saw the same treasures, the difference had to have been our guide. And we were quite glad we had lucked into a day with Jesus.
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