GOOD NEIGHBOR

On what I imagine to be the Southern equivalent of tonight’s weather, I TRIED to be a good neighbor. I’d heard at work that a friend’s Dad had died that day, and of course, my GCL genes kicked in---go home and COOK something.

So I did---a Chocolate Cake. It was a really good cake, moist and rich, with the two round fluffy layers stacked with a cooked fudge frosting between, the swirls on sides and top just so, as befits taking to a home during a sad time. By the time I got it baked and almost-cooled and frosted, it was getting late in the day, with a crisp darkness coming on. My two sons and I wrapped up warm and started out in my wagon, Son #1 driving and me beside him in the passenger seat, holding the cake---I even imagined I could feel a little of the residual warmth coming through the plate.

Just as we made the turn from our long drive onto the blacktop, we heard the unmistakable thwhop-thwhop of a flattening tire. Gloom, Despair, and Misery on me. We got out and the boys got the wheel all jacked up and pulled out the spare. And on this day of all days, in the cold and dark, it was WAY too loose and soggy not to be flat, as well.

SO, we all walked home---before we had cell phones---and I called the owner of the little tire store we used. He agreed to meet us at the store as soon as we could get there. So Son 2 stayed home and we took the boys’ new pickup two-towns-over, where the man was waiting to sell me two new tires. After the usual time-a-day passing and business transacting, we got the two new tires loaded into the truck, and headed home--at least an hour-and-a-half since we had started out. Son #1 got out at the wagon to get a new tire on, while I ran back home to get Son #2.

We all were shivering in the cold, hands numb and noses reddened, while the boys changed the tire and I held the flashlight. They got all the bits and pieces back into the wagon , and we all took our places again, Son 2 in the back seat. And just as we all got buckled in and Son put the car in gear, there was one of those moments which take a fraction of a second, and you view them down a long tunnel, while time moves like syrup.

I watched, just frozen, as the big ole flashlight, which I’d laid up on the dash as I secured my seatbelt and picked up the cake, rolled toward me, going airborne and landing PLOP in the top of the cake. That thing bisected that cake as neatly as an ax---I’ve seen weddin’-cake servers who couldn’t do that good a job.

And we all burst out laughing---from the tension and the cold and the sheer absurdity of it---that one moment of thoughtless misplacement which caused the whole evening to come to naught, and the absolute NOTHING WE COULD DO. We couldn’t go into a house of mourning with a battered offering; the cake was WAY beyond repairing, and there was enough still-soft frosting down the front of my coat to serve two or three sweet-teeth. Plus, we were all about to wet our pants from the cold and from all that laughing.

So we turned around, went home, made a pot of coffee, washed up, and ate cake. And I never DID tell my friend about that silly attempt to be a Good Neighbor. It just never seemed to be the right time.

LIFTINGS

I received a set of new journals as a Christmas gift, and, as every year, I've looked back through the old, finding thoughts and jottings and recipes and little snippets that I wanted to keep. Some of them are so hen-scratched, so uphill and down dale amongst the lines that I have to really read my scribbling carefully---those are usually lines I heard on TV, and I reached quickly in the dim room for the book, scratching down the thought or quote before I lost it entirely.

Some of the ones I found recently as I thumbed through the tattery tomes of yesterdays:


Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.
~Louisa May Alcott~

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
~Andrew Wyeth~

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person. If I was just one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable but then it wouldn't be half so interesting." ~Anne Shirley~


The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line. ~Alexander Pope~

The return to the seasonal and local is lesson number 1: food is remembering. What’s new is old. You may have arrived late, but welcome to the table.
~Jane of Little Compton Mornings~

Morning Song for a baby girl

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue,
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night long your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ears.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
~Sylvia Plath~

~A young woman named Chartreuse, on her armor for RenFaire:~
Plastic armor means I get to clank off, sounding like Tupperware in a dryer.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
~James Nicoll~

HOOP CHEESE,~ my own words~:

The cheese is made of no natural product known to man---it has the texture of Play-Doh and comes in a box. The box is round and pale, made of thinly-shaved wood, which over the days of its residence atop the butcher case grows greasily stained and takes on the appearance of a harlot's hatbox, roughly handled and none too clean.

~Tabris~, re: The theory that "I'll apologize when SHE apologizes."
It's these little gestures, where closeness could have been fostered and instead distance was formed, that are life's great tragedies because no one mourns them.


My friend ~Marty Kittrell~, of the magical lens and photographic eye:
I am a succinct writer. I just get to the point and move on. But you linger and savor the moments... stirring them like you do a glass of sweet tea, perfectly happy to wait for the sugar at the bottom to swirl around and dissolve.

And a song from years ago, when I took all those years and years of piano lessons. Our teacher, Mrs. Carpenter, was a town institution, and the Spring and Christmas recitals a social occasion. She sat at the piano with her beige lace Mother-of-the-Bride dress straining over her vast prow of bosom, playing as we always closed the Spring recital with the same song.

We were an amalgam of stage fright and absolute joy at the end of the ordeal, the end of school. We were all sopranos, I think, for the one or two boys were still young enough not to rebel against "taking piano." Every year, the program ended with our chirpy little voices floating past the fading, dusty maroon velvet of the stage curtains:

When you come to the end of a perfect day,
And you sit alone with your thought,
While the chimes ring out with a carol gay,
For the joy that the day has brought,

Do you think what the end of a perfect day
Can mean to tired heart,
When the sun goes down with a flaming ray,
And the dear hearts have to part?


Well, this is the end of a perfect day,
Near the end of a journey, too,
But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
With a wish that is kind and true.


For mem'ry has painted this perfect day
With colors that never fade,
And we find at the end of a perfect day,
The soul of a friend we've made.
~Carrie Jacobs-Bond ~


Here's to all the different Annes in us, and to many, many perfect days in the year to come.

TOURTIERE

My friend Maggie in Illinois is a Canada girl, raised in the Wonderland of snow and sparkling Christmas lights. We exchange little conversations, confidences, recipes, and my heart leaps when I see her name on the mailbox. She is a woman of expert wordsmithery, owner of a bountiful vocabulary and wielder of a verbal arsenal which delights and amazes, with a wit and an exquisite turn of paragraph which linger and haunt.

We discuss our childhoods---not too dissimilar considering our far-apart raisings, though few of our own Winters offered snow, and hers seemed to be lived in a white-sculpted Kingdom of Chill. She mentioned her childhood quest for just the right Christmas cards, chosen lovingly to fit recipient and a child’s budget. She, too, coveted the glitter-sparkled snowflakes and stars and bright ornaments which graced the covers of the "good" cards. We both readjusted our sights to the plainer cards which our small allowances could afford.

She also sent me the recipe for her Tourtiere, a lovely double-crust meat pie, traditionally baked for Christmas Eve, and eaten after Midnight Mass, after the trek home through the snow and the twinkling stars. It’s very much like our family’s Shepherd’s pie, rich and redolent of onion and good gravy, and has a shiny top crust that is brushed with an egg wash to make it gleam. A Tourtiere pan even has a special little stand-on-feet to give it the proper elevation and to hold it in the place of honor on the table.

Our usual meat-pie pan is of a humbler, more Southern sort:

The usual accompaniments to a majestic Tourtiere are baked beans, a spicy relish similar to our family recipe for ChowChow, and pickled beets, which we always have in the fridge.

And so I replied:

What a lovely taste of far-away Canada, especially for a Hot-Christmas Southern child who also spent the days before Christmas in swaying, knee-knock hours in Woolworth's, gazing longingly at the too-expensive glitter-stars of unattainable glory. Closer to our level were the cards with Braillish sprigs of pine, pressed a little higher than the paper, with the bleed of the green not-quite-hitting the marks. Year after year we sighed and settled for the lesser ones for parents, Grands, teacher.

I've always loved the IDEA of the late-night church-going, the Reveillon---the long-drawn "yohhnn" on the end repeated with my mind's fish-lips and nasal inflection of an imaginary tres chic French accent. Just the thought of the return from Mass to a festive table, the candle-lit crunch through the midnight snow---try conjuring any of THAT from a sixty-degree, adamantly-green, WAY-Baptist small town, whose sidewalks were barely extant in the daytime, and whose parental insistence on just-dark bedtime on Christmas Eve precluded anything but the most brief of suppers. Midnight awakenings, perhaps, but only for breath-held listenings and the squinting for that first chink of releasing daylight.

And I love the recipe, the reasons, the history---I've been meaning to make one for months, since I read the article on the how-to and commentary, and have also been murmuring the name from time to time, “Tourtiere, Tourtiere,” tasting the savory syllables on my lips in lieu of the actual WORK of the thing. I have the squatty pan, the recipe, the several alternatives for the pastry.

Plus, any good Southern cook can take a couple of pounds of ground beef/pork/veal/lamb and work miracles, even sans Cream of anything.

Our short Christmas season was reserved for almost every moment, with guests, meals, celebrations, more guests, a whirlwind trip for visits down South. Iron-cold January will be the season to visit the local mercado for lard, to sift the flour, measure the salt, and get my chilly fingers into that malleable mass. I’ve not the “hand for pie-crust,” but still I try.

Pickled beets, I have. Showboat beans will need to suffice, though they fall far from the mark of your deep-crock, long-simmered beans with their hunk of pork and the hours in the oven; ours will be laced with onion, peppers, brown sugar, growing tender and sweet beneath their lattice of bacon in the wide baking pan.

There will be chowchow, as much a staple on our tables coffee and salt, and beet pickles---both relishes put up in the heat of last-Summer’s kitchen. And some snowfly night, Chris will come home to a Maggie-meal, I promise---more to myself than to you, I think. Thank you for the precious gift of a family recipe.

'SNOW EXCUSE

The snow is piling up, hour by hour, drifting like immense cornflakes past the windows. We watched in fascination, ooh-ing and aah-ing for the longest time; then our enthusiasm for the sameness lulled into the feeling of watching something like static on TV, and we moved on.

It’s COLD and will be colder, with forecasts and dire predictions of chill; this morning’s WeatherChip looked all clear and beautiful, til I realized the outlines of the state and all the surrounding edges of others were just black lines on a SOLID BLUE field---indicator of heavy snow from here to yonder.

The fact that other people, other states, other countries have housetop drifts and covered (as in to the tops from the ground up) cars, and their chimneys are two feet down inside the thick mass, possibly keeping the smoke from emerging at all and clumpy bits clopping down the chimneys to hiss SPAT upon the stoves and sizzle out the fires---all these things we are aware of, and we still do our share of complaining over our own plight. It’s messy and drippy and cold and uncomfortable and wet and yukky at this stage, the stage of almost-dusk and fog and the sheer FACT of it and its ramifications clouding over the beautiful.

And I LOVE snow. Always have. I remember the little bubble of joy that would form just above my waistband, the anticipation of those first few flakes, the outright jubilation when the hundredth flake brought school bells and the go-home whistle in the middle of the day. We'd watch and beg and finally be allowed out into the flurries, in our usual coats and the gloves which immediately absorbed snowmelt and froze our fingers and our oldest school shoes which let in whole flakes, let alone seepage from the damp.

The kids across the street have a Snow Fort---a real, live honest-to-goodness FORT, packed and planed and carved into neat walls and blocks, shining white, as smooth and true as if by plumb bob and trowel. I've never known anyone who HAD a Snow Fort---we hadn't enough to waste trying anything so lofty. Why, by the time we got way close to the house to get enough for a pan of Snow Cream---from a pristine spot so that no cinders had drifted down from the trains or dogs lifted or cats walked, there was only a little skimming left, and that melting fast. But we cared not a bit that every bit of snow we scooped was cluttered with leaf bits and old pecan hulls and acorns and twigs---we scooped and packed, not wasting a minute or a flake, and glad for the filler, dirty though it was. I think every snowman ever built in our neighborhood looked as if it had been sculpted out of gallons of Dairy Queen Oreo Blizzards.

I love to watch the falling of it, to see the shadows and the shapes and the forms it takes; there’s a BLUE to it sometimes, like spilling out the whole bottle of sno-cone syrup onto the landscape. I still get a small gasp of admiration and delight at morning’s first glimpse of shapes and drifts formed in the night.

So I always figure that even though I no longer have to do the daily trek out into it, to shovel or to clear away or to drive to work through a blizzard, white-knuckled and my hindside clenching the seat like desperate fingers on a roller-coaster bar, I AM allowed to like it. I don’t think that my hating the stuff would make anyone else’s morning commute or drift-shoveling or walk-salting or car de-icing more pleasant.

Today Sis called from Texas; she’s using her new-for-Christmas pasta maker to make homemade ravioli for watching the game tonight. She’ll take the oil and flour and eggs and stir it into perfect, pliable dough, with a rest and then several trips through the rollers, with the just-so number for each rolling. She’s making a stuffing of cremini, crabmeat and several cheeses, brushing and cutting and laying the little golden pillows out on the lightly-dusted tray, snugged beneath damp towels for resting. She’s serving it with a garlic butter sauce. They’ll sit down with salads and ciabatta and the wonderful wide bowls of ravioli, redolent of herbs and worthy of Mario’s kitchen.

I, on the other hand, took a baggie out of the freezer; it holds about two cups of Chris’ special pasta sauce, made on November 15, according to the writing on the bag. We’ll microwave it and have it over whichever pasta there’s enough of alike in the canisters. And there’s a little green shaker-jar of Kraft Romano on the top shelf.

I plumb SWANNEE, Y'all!! It's SNOWIN’ to BEAT THE BAND!!

HOMEWORK

A lot of people used to make a living traveling to “do” for other people. The Knife-sharpener and the pot-mender came around from time to time, as did the glasses mender. They all had a way with their craft, and carried the tools of their trade from town to town, and sometimes house to house.

The Grinder’s wagon would pull up, sometimes with things for sale---skillets and pots and spiders and other usefull utensils all a-clank on the wagon, inside and out. He’d wrestle the heavy round slice of stone to the ground, setting it up in the socket, securing its great weight before he took his seat in the saddle, feet on the treadle. Folks would line up with their knives and scissors and slingblades, passing the time of day as they watched the grinder work, his feet pumping fast for the hoes and shovels, more sedately for a prized knife, and more carefully still for the pairs of sewing scissors or shears or barber-snips. The round wheel spun and the sparks flew as he worked, and many a little boy crept close---closer, dared by his cohorts, as he reached out to “catch a spark” from the lively wheel.

A Pot-mender might have kept company with the Grinder on their rounds, with his own stock of potmetals and cooking pans. He had a way with a pan-sprung-a-leak; somehow those callused old hands could polish the edges of the hole, insert the tiniest silvery pin, snug tight the two teensy black rubber washers, one in and one out, and hand back a pan good for another decade’s worth of beans.


 

The Glasses-Mender was a gentler sort---a waist-coated gentleman with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles of his own, polished frame-glint and lens-shine to best advertise his skills. He had the most minutely-crafted little screwdrivers and pliers, with tweezers the size of rosemary leaves, and used them all with consummate skill---bending and splicing and replacing and screwing in microscopic screws no regular man could hold between his fingers, let alone fit into that tiny hole for twisting. It took him several days to revive and revamp the year’s worth of broken and armless and nose-rest-missing specs of all the gathered customers, and since he and the other two artisans were all male, they were seldom offered any hospitality past the use of an outhouse or a quick spigot-wash on somebody’s place or in back of a store.

The women who “traveled around,” however, were usually offered the shelter of a home, as well as their board whilst in the home. The most common of the roomer-and-boarders was the town schoolteacher, given what accommodations were possible---a spare room, or a share-room with the daughters of the house, even a shared bed in the more meager of the homes, whose pride in “doing their part” stretched their budgets and space almost past bearing.

Most families “took in the teacher” for a few weeks or perhaps a month of the term; she would move on to live with another family as the year progressed, taking her meals with the family, carrying the same biscuit-and-butter lunch in her own box or wrap as did the children of the house. I would imagine that having an educated young woman to visit for several weeks would have brought out the home-pride best in those housekeepers, with much cleaning and turning out of bedrooms and parlors and a closet, if there happened to be one to spare.

And how did the teachers take to such itinerant living, living out of a suitcase, as it were, all the school year, and learning that “potluck” has many meanings---manners and form dictated that a guest accept and be obliged by the hospitality of the house, so you slept where they put you and ate what was put in front of you.

By the time I was in school, most of the teachers were older women who had their own homes, or others who roomed with a wonderful older woman a few blocks from the school. They lived there, about eight or so of them, quite amicably for years---I try now to imagine the bright chatter and the meals together. In my working years, I could not have fathomed going home, sitting down with the newspaper or a novel or a cup of tea, and then just freshening up to await the gong’s summons to a supper cooked by someone else. Still sounds like a great thing.

There were also traveling Singing Teachers---their stints in other folks’ homes usually limited to a week, all through the school year, and to arbor-gatherings and Singing Schools and campground choruses in pleasant months. They taught shape-notes and tones and carried a little pitch-pipe to set the tune; the usual fare was hymns and the melodious sing-along songs of the day, as well as all the patriotic numbers sung with fervor and enthusiasm.

Deportment Teachers were secured for teaching the daughters of the more affluent---they lived with the family for several weeks, keeping day-to-day and moment-by-moment lessons, from sitting like a lady to walking properly to dress and grooming to speech and table manners. They seldom returned to the same family save for those with daughters of greatly-varying ages, and the younger group grew to their own age of manners-training.

Other women, whether they’d had nurses’ training or not, would do “maternity sitting” or “maternity staying” for new mothers the several weeks it took to “get back on their feet.” They tended child and mother, as they both took lots of naps and rested the clock around.
They might do a little “light cooking” but they did no laundry or housekeeping during their stay.

Laundry women did go house-to-house on “their” day of the week, washing and hanging out and ironing dawn to dusk, using the households’ appliances and detergents and clotheslines, though quite a few others did call for the baskets of clothes, washed them in their own homes, then delivered them back, clean, fresh-smelling and neatly folded.

Seamstresses would go live in other people’s houses for several weeks a season, to get the ladies of the house into their new wardrobes, especially for travels or off to college or a wedding. The scent of fresh-snipped cotton and silk and organza and of chalk and an ever-hot seam-iron would fill the allotted sewing room; the tables and bed and counters will be covered in patterns and lace and fabric and ribbon, and the floor would receive a snowfall of snipped thread and pinked edgings. A good “sempstress” was a prize, much as hairdressers came to be in later decades, to be coveted and claimed and almost-owned by their jealous employers.

But the one traveling worker I remember most lived right out of town; she’d make the rounds of almost the entire county, riding her bike for many years to those who needed her attentions. She had a unique and useful talent: she was a Knot Smoother. She could take your string, your variegated crochet-thread with its un-manageable snarl right there in the purple part, your fishing line that had knitted itself into tangles around a threatening hook, your big snarl of rubber bands---even a bird's nest of ten different colors of embroidery thread from the bottom of the basket, and sit down with them like petting a cat.

She’d smack her gum a little, adjust her glasses on her nose from time to time, and hand you back a neat skein or bundle or length or rolled-on-a-toilet-paper-roll hank of ribbon, as smooth and shining as new. When she'd finished all the untangling, she'd take all the ribbon into the house, remove the shade from a lamp, and "iron" the ribbon across the top of the lightbulb, running it gently back and forth like a shoeshine boy's rag. Way later, when I was in my teens, I and all my girlfriends took up wearing ponytails, and I taught them the lightbulb-iron trick.

And what that woman could do with a jewelry-box full of granny-knotted chains as delicate and stubborn as tangled hair! She just Knew How. And she was one of a kind---I don’t believe I’ve ever met or heard of anyone with that particular talent before or since. That’s too bad; we could use more knot-smoothing these days, I think. Of all kinds.