Sunday, September 26, 2010

Talking it Out

I have a solution for every time I misplace something, be it keys, cell phone or a book. I have found that if I tell someone about it then I seem to find it soon after. I am not sure why this works but perhaps in some deep recess of the mind an electrical impulse is triggered and you are led to where the item is. At any rate I use this method of locating lost items. I even called my sister Ruth in Ohio once to tell her I had lost something. She just laughed. But really, one morning I was ready to leave for an appointment and I could not find my keys. I was getting desperate. I called my friend Bob and told him not to leave his house until I found my keys, as I had locked myself in. Fortunately it was not necessary for after the call I found the keys and could exit the house and drive to my destination. That was when I had multiple keys made. One was kept in my purse and the other near my door.

This habit of telling someone has some merit, I believe. Here is a twist on the idea. Yesterday I made a peach cobbler to take to a church dinner. I had offered to do this and it was expected. After I had put it in the oven, I had a mental tugging of the brain and went back to look at the recipe to be sure I had put in all of the ingredients. I know it sounds really crazy, but I did look and my inner warning was correct. I had left out the leavening for the topping. Oh dear, what to do. I called my neighbor and told her what had happened. She was not much help, but while talking to her I began to wonder if I could use a slotted spoon and remove the topping which had no leavening and replace it with a new topping. I had never done that sort of thing before but I could not let my friends down on the cobbler. So, out of the oven came the cobbler. I quickly mixed a new topping of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and butter. The trick is to add 1/4 cup of boiling water, mix and spoon it over the hot peaches. Being in a hurry I used my hands and applied the batter in blobs all over the peaches. As per the instructions I added sugar and cinnamon over the top. Then back into the over for 35 minutes, not 30 as instructed. I wanted to be sure the batter had fully baked.

Well, let me tell you that this peach cobbler was a definite favorite at the dinner. People came over to my table to tell me how wonderful it was. I just smiled and said thank you. No need to go into the saga of the missing ingredient, especially when it had been corrected.

I learn from my mistakes. The next time I follow a recipe I will be absolutely sure that I am wearing my glasses. Before I started to make this dish, I told myself I needed to go upstairs, retrieve my glasses to wear while cooking. That way I would be seeing very clearly what I needed to be doing.

Just in case you are wondering where this great recipe came from, I found it on allrecipes.com.,

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Church Fathers

This morning as I sat reading at breakfast, I was reminded of an incident many years ago in my home town church. It seems incomprehensible in this day and time that this could have happened.

A lady came into our town riding a motorcycle. The year was around 1039 or 1940. She stopped at our house of worship to join us in morning services. She was properly attired for riding a motorcycle, in jodhpurs. The ushers for this service met her at the door and seeing how she was dressed asked her to leave. Seventy years later we are dismayed that she would be barred from worshiping because of her clothing.

This same lady about two years after this incident was instrumental in saving my sister's life. She had become a friends with my mother and had stopped by our home to tell my mother good-bye. She and her husband, a doctor in this town were on their way to South America for how long I do not know but I think permanently. When she arrived at our home she soon learned that my sister Ruth, was seriously ill. She called her husband and told him he needed to come to see her right away. My father had asked that she be seen but apparently he did not emphasize the seriousness of her problem.

The good doctor did come immediately and realized that she had appendicitis. She was taken to the hospital and he removed the offending and badly infected appendix. Peritonitis had set in. Antibiotics were not commonly available then. As I recall he put powdered sulfa into the abdominal cavity. I am not certain of this but that is how soldiers with abdominal wounds were treated early in the war years of the 1940's.

The happy ending of this story is that she survived due to this lady's efforts and her husband's skills and timely intervention. Knowing my mother I believe she must have made it known to this lady that she and most of the congregation were not in agreement with what these men of the church did that Sunday morning.

The Bible speaks of repaying evil with good. I think this is what happened in this case. So much has changed since that day and ladies are not only wearing long pants in church but preaching from the pulpit in them. Thank goodness for change and good judgment by those in key positions of authority.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

I Saved a Life Today

My day began with my usual 30 minute walk. Since my driveway circles my house that is where I walk. I am able to take in all the plants and trees and just enjoy the scenery. One thing I noticed as I walked was an aluminum chair which is quite old. The last time I sat in it I heard a loud complaint. The webbing was old and rotting and needed to be replaced.
I had put it where I would remember to take care of that. When I recently cleaned out one of my sheds I saw some nylon webbing I had put in there a long time ago. I had placed it near the chair on my back porch, hoping to get to that chore soon.

I was enjoying the walk so much I did not want it to end. I extended it for a bit by walking down to the raised beds and turned on a hose to water the last of season tomatoes. Coming back to the house I was thinking of how pleasant it was outside. It was like summer was reluctant to leave but fall was politely reminding summer that it was time to go.

I simply wanted to stay outdoors longer, So I got a screw driver and a pair of scissors to use on the rewebbing of the chair. I was working away and thinking of how I was repairing something that was quite old but was also still very useful. That reminded me of something my brother Gene had said about our mother. He said "she could stretch a dollar to the size of a sheet".
I cannot claim to work that miracle, but this chair is light weight, foldable and handy to set up when an extra seat is needed. It does not rust as it is aluminum. I do not see these chairs in the stores any more. I think they have been replaced by the plastic molded light weight chairs. I have some of them. They are comfortable and come in pretty colors. Also I have a teak adirondack chair which is weathered but still comfortable. It stays at this same spot as it is heavy and difficult to move. Not so this old aluminum relic.

It is not elegant or particulary pretty but still has a lot of life left in it, so why not save it for another summer. As I finished my task I think I felt something of what a surgeon must feel after a successful operation. It is good to see a failing patient brought back to life by your own efforts.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Email, Snail Mail and Family Memories

A few days ago my email program was compromised by some incoming mail and it was harmed in some way that I do not understand. Until my computer guru comes up I am using the old fashioned way of communicating with friends and family. I am using up my supply of stamps posted on the front of my refrigerator . I am also catching up on my reading .


In a recent article from my DAR magazine I was reading of a house in New Hampshire which was built in 1807. It told of the innovative features built into the kitchen. One of them reminded me of my sister's kitchen stove. This house featured a copper set kettle which set was over mortar blocks with an ash pit underneath it. It was located in the scullery where food was prepared, clothes washed and water heated. In my sister's kitchen the stove had a copper water holder built into one side. That was how she could get hot water for bathing and washing dishes. That may have been her first kitchen stove, before electric water heaters were commonly installed in houses.

My brother tells me that our mother had a water heater in her kitchen stove. Maybe that is where I remembered seeing it also. He said it was his job to keep it filled with fresh water and it took a lot of water for all of our family ! People used to use hot water to wash clothes in, but that has changed with the newer soaps.

Visiting my second oldest sister was always so much fun. Her first home was in a coal mining camp. I remember riding my bicycle out there with my friend Marian Weiler. Our mission was to visit the camp store and buy a bottle of chocolate milk. It was in a glass bottle with a metal cap. No doubt it was whole milk for it tasted so good. We may have visited with Frances but mainly we were just out riding our bikes for fun with a little reward midway in our trip.


Frances' next home was more up to date with running water but the stove with the copper water heater still served a purpose. The name of the community where she lived was called Grays Knob. It had a front porch with a swing wide enough to fit about 6 to 8 people. She lived there for many years. We were always welcomed and she made a special effort for us to have fun.

When I was around 16 I baby sat for her while she went with her husband to campaign for a political position in the county government. Philip was the youngest of her three children and I watched over him . The two older children Brownie and Mary Lynn no doubt were in school. I have a picture of Philip in his little white dress and he is just adorable.

Some of our family pictures were made at Frank's home. Frank was our name for her but her husband, Carlyle always called her Frances. When I was newly married my husband and I lived with her while we were both teaching in the county. We had a large front room upstairs. The house had many rooms both downstairs and upstairs. I used to marvel how she could handle all of the work she had to do to maintain her household. When I mentioned this to her she said, "Well I did not start out doing all of this at once, I worked up to it". I suppose that is the secret of how we all handle many jobs, we work up to them.

Frank could make wonderful peanut butter fudge. She would make it when we went camping with her. She had a little portable cooker. It was put on a picnic table and while everyone was swimming in the lake she was busy making fudge for us when we came up dripping wet. That is a priceless memory. She also made great pimento cheese spread. Grated cheese was not available in the groceries then so she grated it herself. Possibly she made her own mayonnaise, for it was a memorable treat.


Her husband Carlyle had a large garden in back of their home and she canned green beans as well as tomatoes and other vegetables he grew. My sister Ruth was so fond of her canned green beans that when she visited, Frank sent her back home to Ohio with a box of her canned green beans. Frances was the most generous person I have ever known. She and Carlyle would go camping and take any of the kids in his or her family who wanted to go. We went to Norris Lake in Tennessee. Their large tent would not hold all of us, so we slept in cars or on cots. I very well remember sleeping one night in the back seat of a car with my feet out the window.

This old picture shows Frances and Carlyle on the right with Philip peeking from behind Frances. Gene is the young man second from the left. The other couple are the Howards who were campers at the same site.


It was on one of these camping trips that I witnessed a snake swallowing a frog. I learned to respect animals in nature from my brother-in-law. He had spent a lot of his young life in hunting with his father and walking the mountains. His father had a lot of hunting dogs and I remember seeing them at his home. Carlyle learned a lot from reading his favorite books, an encyclopedia. He would have loved to surf on the computer.


Another talent of my sister was her sewing skills. She made clothes for her family and even for me and our sister Ruth. She would make duplicate dresses for us. She sewed for our mother as well. On the night before my mother's death she was fairly dancing across the room wearing a red dress that Frances had just made for her. That is a happy memory for me as it was told to me. I did not witness the scene as I was many miles away in another state.


Though some of our modern technology does go "out" from time to time, we still have our memories to remind us of the many happy times from the past.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Symbiotic Relationships

I just came in from shopping and there were two men picking grapes in the vineyard. I had told them a few days ago that they could. I do not try to keep track of who is picking but people are very careful to ask if they can. I always say yes as I want to share God's bounty.

Seeing them reminded me that the bow hunters will be here this week-end. They do call me when they are on the property, as I want to know when they are here. It is helpful to have them hunt here. We are between two parks and the deer thrive in this area right on the lake.
Keeping their population in check is a help for the neighborhood gardeners as well. I have a solar powered electric fence to keep them out of my vegetables. They pretty much graze where they want to otherwise. They come when I do not always see them, around dawn and dusk.

I have another visitor here who keeps the voles in check. I first saw him about six months ago. He is a beautiful calico cat. He just walks through and sits on the rock wall waiting for a snack to appear. After my last cats disappeared I noticed a big increase in the voles in my garden. So he is welcome indeed.

In previous years I have always had garden lizards down in my raised beds. I saw them earlier in the year but have not lately. I believe they help to rid the garden of small bugs that are not helping to improve things.

The blue birds do their part in keeping balance in nature. They have certain insects which they find tasty. They are not nesting now. In fact I dropped the door to their house out in front. I noticed a squirrel had started a nest in it. I do not want them to gnaw away at the 1 1/2 inch hole in the door.

The plants growing around here must be pruned or we would gradually be covered in vines and wild shrubs. Jim does that unless I am feeling ambitious. I noticed the purple thistle is helping to feed the butterflies as is the lantana plants. Occasionally we see humming birds on the lantana. It will bloom until we have a hard freeze .

It is nice to have these helpers and it adds interest to life out here.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Back to Reality

After having such a nice visit with family last week-end, I now find myself shifting into home alone mode. I enjoy the physical work of washing, making beds and checking out the mail. It gives me a chance to slide back into my routine and refocus on what I need to be doing the month of September.

We had our first DAR meeting of the fall on Thursday. I had to put on a new hat as the committee chair for the American Heritage Committee. I have a lot to learn. One thing is how to pass on information in a concise, understandable and interesting way. I found myself at the podium trying to encourage our members to participate in the various contests offered to them. I do not think it went well. For too many years I have presented material to six year old children. Since I have been in this group for only one year, I felt very unnecessary standing there telling them about something they have been doing for years. One good outcome is that I am learning more about how the organization works. For our next meeting I will be better prepared and hopefully it will go better, for me at least. We installed 12 new members. We are a growing organization. DAR is a service group and emphasis on the constitution is spread through the schools, media and the duties of the various committees. I am learning and that is a good thing.

What was disturbing to me was the news coming out of our southern state of Florida. For anyone to want to start burning books, no matter what book it is, is an affront to every forward thinking American. Hopefully it can all be resolved soon and the world focus on one individual who decided to make a statement which is hurtful to so many others will be history. Our country is known as a beacon of light, but not light coming from a fire burning sacred books.

Tomorrow we will be remembering a shocking and hurtful time in the history of our country. Enough senseless killing has already taken place. Too many wars have already been fought to secure our freedom. We should be about healing and not tearing down. That is the kind of reality I want to perpetuate.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Cousins Mini Reunion






The initial plans morphed into a different group, but the final edition was perfect. It was to have been my brother Bill, and his two daughters, Ann and Jane. Bill's health prevented him from making the trip but Ann and Jane came and brought a delightful friend ,Ruthie , along with them. Ann came from Alton, Ill. Jane and Ruthie from Phoenix, Arizona. Another cousin, Charlotte from Pelzer, S.C. brought her daughter Amelia with her. The Atlanta cousin, Bonnie, came laden with all kinds of wonderful foods. The cousins who flew in were met at the airport by cousin Bruce from near Atlanta. All of this took place on Saturday. On labor day Bruce came back up and brought his two sons, Reed and Grant for the afternoon and supper. Reed is a new student at Ga. Tech but left campus to see his cousins. His last reunion was when he was a baby. Grant had not met any of them and he was the youngest cousin here.

Not all of the cousins could make the trip. Since it was hastily put together and my home was limited in space and accommodations, it was not as large as it could have been. This is how it went down. On Friday Bonnie arrived first straight from her job in Atlanta. She had four totes and one huge cooler filled with foods. She got right to work slicing and dicing and put together two huge dishes to be used the next day. Also she had one casserole to be cooked later. All of the gourmet snacks and drinks kept us well fed for the week-end. Charlotte arrived with her daughter around 6:30. By 9:00 we were all ready to call it a day. Charlotte said she could not sleep on my soft beds so she found her place on a long cargo couch in the very open living room area. Amelia had her own bed upstairs and Bonnie and I shared a room and bed in the upper north west room. Not unexpectedly we all slept until 8:00 the next morning. Jane, Ann and Ruthie came the next day when Bruce picked them up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

Much was done and shared this past week-end, but here are some of the highlights. We had several big meals in the sun room and by adding a small bistro table to the end of the glass top table we got eight of us around it all quite comfortably. The weather was perfect to be in the sun room. Another day, some of us went down to the dock to swim . My neighbor, Skip had offered to take us for a boat ride on Lake Lanier. Four of us went out for an hour.

While we were gone, Jane got out the two boxes of family records. They were sent down by Jane Ellen from Abingdon, Va. Uncle Gene had collected these letters, diaries and pictures from over the years, some as far back as the 1800's. Jane had agreed to head up this endeavor to organize the family records. When we began to drift back from the lake she had a plan to present to us.

We planned how to preserve these papers for future generations. Rose took the job of going through the letters of Rose Gamp, putting them in chronological order. Bonnie offered to scan them and put it all together in printable form. Bonnie will take the diaries, glean the important events and get them in printable form. Jane will take all of the old pictures, get them in order along with helpful explanations and scan them for printable application.

Ann, Jane and Ruthie got to ride in my work horse (golf cart) up to the vineyard. It gave me a big thrill to be able to show my kiwi vines to the girls and to have them pick their own kiwi. Of course the kiwi will have to ripen for a few weeks but it was all great fun.

On two evenings we all gathered up on the deck where we could look out on the top parts of the trees. We took out extra chairs along with drinks and snacks and shared a lot of good stories and a lot of good laughs.

The one blip on the screen of this trip was when Ann, Char and Bonnie walked up to the vineyard and stepped on a yellow jackets ground nest. The yellow jackets responded in their usual way. I was not there having prudently gone to bed early, but am told that clothes began flying off in every direction. I am sure the walk back to the house was not leisurely. They put soda on their stings and then headed into town for benedryl.

Char has taken on the job of enlisting another cousin not here to help with planning for a larger reunion in a centrally located state park or perhaps a place on the Atlantic beach. Hopefully with planning ahead we can have more cousins in on the fun along with their families.

I think we all agreed that this was a great reconnection with family members that we do not often get to see. I certainly did enjoy hosting the group. It was so easy to have my daughter take over the kitchen and my son being the chauffeur for the cousins flying into Atlanta. I look forward to seeing them all again next summer, somewhere, sometime.