Month: July 2018

Biking the Hill

Grandma’s Hill

My family lived on a farm at the foot of Grandma’s hill. My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma’s. These were ordinary girl’s bikes with back-pedal brakes and no gears. We rode down our north lane to the gravel and looked a half-mile west, all of it hill—steep hill. Undaunted, we would start pedaling. Within a few yards, we stood on the pedals, pumping as hard as our legs would pump. I don’t remember ever riding all the way to the top.

But, oh what rides we had going home!

A Man or a Mouse

Years later, my oldest son was a little boy when he stood at the top of that hill with his bike. Grandma saw him before he hopped on, but not soon enough to stop him. He wiped out about halfway down. When she got to him, she asked what he was thinking.

“Well,” he said, “I thought ‘am I a man or am I a mouse.’ I guess I’m a mouse,” he said, lip quivering.

And yet, like Grandma said, he did it even when he was scared.

Sandwiches

My sister and I used to ride our bikes to Grandma Hazel’s house almost every day. When we got there, we were always hungry. (That was a really big hill.) We went immediately to the ‘fridge and built sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American cheese, some lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a few cucumber slices, mortared together with Miracle Whip sandwich spread. We tried a few other ingredients such as carrot slices and a bit of zucchini, but the carrots fell out and the zucchini didn’t add any flavor to our concoctions.

Sandburs

Grandma’s place, like ours, was a farmstead and a lot of sandburs grew there—the kind with the hard seed set off by a stiff spear, like a unicorn’s horn. Sis and I called them puncture vine because we often found them in our feet. We found them in our flat bike tires, too. We’d pull out the sandburs, but we had to walk our bikes home down that wonderful hill that gave us such thrilling rides when our tires were round.

My Aunt Nina, who lived with Grandma, declared war on those sandburs. In about two years, she’d pulled and burned every sandbur on the place and we never got a flat tire at Grandma’s house. I wish we could have persuaded her to repeat the performance at our house.

Categories: Curiosities

Out of Touch

“Ella Mae, what’s wrong?”

My mother had not heard from her own mother for ten years. Not one word. She didn’t know where Grandma Mae lived. Still in Chicago, she thought, but how would she know? She had no address and no ‘phone number. Grandma had moved and left no forwarding address, but the night my father suddenly died of a massive coronary, Grandma called. She didn’t wait for “hello,” didn’t waste time on small talk. Her first words went right to the heart of the devastation in our household.

“Ella Mae. What’s wrong?”

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Review: A Pig in Provence

Since I write memoirs and historical fiction, and since I have a passion for stories about and by regular people; since I’m the granddaughter of restaurateurs and gardeners, I found all of those interests joined in A Pig in Provence: Good Food and Simple Pleasures in the South of France by cooking instructor Georgeanne Brennan.

The book begins with a chapter on Goat Cheese—making it from scratch. From scratch in each of Brennan’s chapters means beginning with buying and/or breeding the animal—or plant. While I’ve never made goat cheese, I have welcomed a goat into the family. Mine was a nurse goat who took care of my bum lambs. In the tradition of Brennan’s Provence, a friend loaned her to me.

The second chapter came even closer to home for me as it introduces the pig and a butcher who makes house calls. On our farm, when I was a small child, we did our own and I can remember the hog hanging on a single-tree, the smell of singeing hair, and my dad and granddad scraping the hide. I don’t believe the people of Provence render their lard quite the same way as we did, but I remember vats of animal fat boiling on the stove and, in our age of innocence about animal fats, eating cracklings warm.

Further chapters focus on mushrooms and truffles; bouillabaisse, long summer meals, garlic, sheep, and wedding tarts. And here’s what’s wonderful about all of those chapters. Brennan writes something about production of the raw materials and how it fits into the local culture and ends each chapter, not with a simple recipe, but with pages of instruction on how to prepare a featured dish.

This lush chronicle of food, from farm to table, brought me back to my own time growing up on a farm in south-central Nebraska and working that farm as an adult. I could remember practically lying on the floor of the sheep stall trying to get a little colostrum from a ewe that couldn’t seem to make up her mind to live, and hauling wheelbarrow-loads of used bedding from my sheep barn to the garden to mulch my tomatoes and squash.

Do you have any favorite food memoirs you’d like to share? I’d love to read them.

Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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The Long Walk Home

Charlie Mills at the Carrot Ranch Literary Community posts flash fiction challenges a couple of times every month. The current challenge was to write a story that includes buttons and uses 99 words, no more no less, to do it. I remembered one of my mother’s mother’s stories. Here are my 99 words:

“When my grandma Mae was a young wife, living in Akron, elastic had not yet been invented. She said she was walking home from buying groceries, past the local tavern, both arms loaded with groceries, when the buttons on her underwear popped. She said she hesitated for only a brief moment, glancing at the men lounging against the light poles and stumbling on the street. She never knew if her buttons came unbuttoned or if they popped off—because she simply stepped out of her underpants and walked the rest of the way home, leaving them on the sidewalk.”

How about you? Have you got a special grandma story? Does it have buttons in it? How about an old technology?

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Categories: Families

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I Just Can’t Hep Myself

I can’t seem to help myself. Maybe this happens to you. You go outside in the morning to water some special plants. You’ll only be out there for 10 minutes, 15 at the maximum. Then, two hours later, you get back in the house—sunburned maybe—but you’ve probably done it so many times your skin has already turned dark. Sunscreen? You’re only going to be outside 10 minutes and the sun hasn’t even cleared the neighbor’s treetops.

If that sounds at all familiar, you can probably picture my morning. Among the things I’m passionate about is prairie. I live in town now, not altogether willingly, but I grew up on a farm in mid-grass prairie.  So I’ve been gradually turning my large lot back into short-grass species.  I love that I don’t have to water except maybe once or twice a season—and mow not at all. That means I can allow wildflowers to grow . . .

See. That’s how I end up outside for hours rather than minutes. I distract myself.

Prairie Coneflower

Back to this morning, it proceeded like many others. I watered the new grass I planted last month. Buffalo and gramma grasses are doing well. Then I popped around to the other side of the shed to pick raspberries. There were some woody canes from last year’s crop growing in the “patch,” so I stepped inside the shed for my pruners and leather gloves to cut a few of them. Well, I kept cutting. When I’d finally cut all the canes and picked all the raspberries, I noticed I had some snow peas ready to pick. So I picked them.

That took me through the shed to the vegetable garden where I noticed I had some suckers growing on my pumpkin vines. I still had the pruners with me, so I cut them. And then, of course, I had to check the tomatoes. I have a calcium deficiency in my soil here and I remembered I hadn’t given the ‘maties their calcium nitrate, so I went back in the shed and got the calcium to spread. That reminded me I needed to spread some micro-nutrients to all the food plants. I went back in the shed and got the pellets to scatter.

I have a piece of roof gutter in the garden. It has holes drilled in it and end caps. Since I have an artesian well in the middle of my basement, I pump water for months. I’ve routed it to the garden where I run it into the gutter to control the flow onto my veggies. Well, I had to move the apparatus to a new location. Then the morning was pretty well gone.

Does this ever happen to you? Do you have a distraction story?

Categories: Our Prairie Habitat

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