Rainy Day at the End of May

Who would have thought May could have gone by so quickly! Seems like we were just sitting around the breakfast table talking about what our families did to mark May Day. Mine did nothing, but MyTreasure seems to recall tripping through the woods gathering flowers. Since his family lived above the tree line, they must have been very tiny blooms, and it probably took an entire day to gather up a palmful. His mother was quite creative in finding ways to keep her brood of three occupied, and I'm always surprised that they seemed to go along with these escapades, which would probably have elicited protestation and eye-rolling from today's progeny. However, the month is gone, and June looms.

Our summer seems to be all accounted for, even at this early date: our calendar is booked up. Thank heavens we started early and blanked out a few weekends when we knew we would be travelling. I play substitute church organ, and those diligent folks who were looking forward to their meager Sundays off got themselves together weeks back, and filled in my Sunday mornings a couple of months ago. As a former organist, I can tell you that it was easier to play through your vacation Sundays than to find a substitute. Now, I am happy to fill in, and enjoy going to different churches to see how they do it. There is always something interesting, especially when there is also a substitute pastor, and we are both winging it. Plus, I enjoy the variety.

We have a wedding in the family Labor Day weekend, which will involve several trips to Rochester, where it is being held, plus a big family do here in the middle of July, with overnight guests.

Fourth of July will find us upstate at the traditional family get together, complete with parade and fireworks (if they don't get rained out they way they did last year.) The parade went on as scheduled, and we were all troopers, standing out on the street under drippy umbrellas. It was too cold to go get ice cream cones though, and we were glad to get back to a warm living room, where the conversation continued, with folks we only get to see once a year.
We'll loop around New England in August. Cape Cod is so pretty, and it is a surprise every year to see just how pretty it is. Who would think that there could be so many white picket fences with roses climbing on them, all in bloom, just for us. It really is almost a cliche, with the gray shingles, and the tiny panes in the windows, but so lovely, and somehow reassuring in it's peacefulness. Maybe we'll have time to go to Boston. There is a museum there with the intriguing name "The Museum of Bad Art". What they showed in the pictures doesn't look any worse than most of the stuff hanging on the walls in Manhattan, so we want to go there and check it out.

What a pleasure it is to be able to look over the months, and schedule whatever you want, and go wherever you want. I confess, this is what freedom is all about, and we are enjoying all that it offers us!

The Incredible Shrinking Supermarket

The Shrinking Supermarket--sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? The stores get bigger and bigger, the shelves go up higher--over our heads where we can't even reach, but it seems to me there are fewer choices than ever. Maybe it is just here on Long Island. I confess that when I travel, one of the places I try to visit is the supermarket, and I have been surprised by some of the excellent stores I have been to--not here at home. There is a great store outside Buffalo, a supermarket chain, where they had a whole aisle of dried grains--I never saw so many different kinds of lentils on a grocery shelf. In my store, where there used to be a number of different brands of dried beans, there is now one brand only. Take it or leave it. The variety is pretty basic as well. Nothing out of the ordinary there--kidney, navy, white kidney, pinto, pink, great northern. The baking aisle is just about gone. There used to be all kinds of nuts and coconut there, and now you really have to hunt to locate a can of baking powder. In another store in Rochester, there is an entire aisle just for tea. I do believe our suppliers are letting us down.

I have a wonderful recipe from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) that uses lima beans. I went to the frozen vegetable case, and found that the same is true there. They are down to a couple of different brands of veggies--all pretty much fitting into four of those glass doors in the freezer case. Remember when they took up the whole wall of freezer cases? When I turned around behind me, there was the frozen waffle section, and it was huge.

I am mortified that no one is doing their own food preparation anymore. The store is so full of processed food that those of us who do cook are being squeezed right out of the market. I know that there are many wonderful things being grown and marketed these days--things that were rarely available before, like basmati rice, Greek yogurt and dried cherries. I have to hunt these things down in a "gourmet market" or a health food store. Our food choices should be multiplying, not shrinking

I hate going to the store to stand in front of towers of bright boxes of fake food--because, don't kid yourself--the stuff in those boxes is manufactured, just like pet food. I can't imagine all those extra unpronounceable ingredients are doing anybody any good, especially over the many years of a lifetime. We have been sold a bill of goods that we don't have to cook to eat a healthy diet. It isn't hard to put a basic meal together, if you learn how to do it. Somehow we are skipping that step, and going right to the consumption part, usually involving cardboard boxes, and plastic pouches with resealable tops.

Come on people, you can do it! Pick up that ultimate self help book--the COOK BOOK! It will change your life! You'll save money, and you'll eat something delicious that you fixed yourself. Get a little tv for your kitchen counter, put on Rachel Raye, pour yourself a glass of white, and fix dinner. Maybe the supermarket will notice that those boxes are not disappearing off their shelves and stock more of the good stuff.

Looking Back With Dismay

I confess to glazing over when people start to talk about their accomplished "children". (We need to invent a new word to use when our "children" are far into adulthood and starting to develop laugh-lines...) However, my son the DOCTOR is finally finishing his residency, and we are going to go the celebration, which is a dinner put on by the department where he has been working for the last three years. They must put on some kind of show with old pictures, because I got a request to dig out some "cute baby pictures", and I guess they must video them up on a screen for everyone to chuckle over.

When my folks moved, they carted over a half dozen old albums of snapshots, which turned out to be the entire childhoods of their grandchildren--my babies. So, I took a little time travel trip, and spent a couple of sessions hunting up what might be appropriate. Mostly, as the fourth child of five, he was stuck in the front row of a group with Santa, or around a birthday cake--there were a lot of birthday parties, and each kid was entitled to their own each year. That was a lot of parties--my poor relatives...

After a while I started to get depressed. You don't think about time passing, but my goodness, a lot has passed--more than I realized. You never feel any older, but the pictures don't lie. There I was, as young as my niece is now, and just as thin, with all manner of hair styles that have come and gone. All the time that went into curling my straight, straight hair. I cut it all off last year, and no longer curl it. It is so easy to hop out of the shower, and blow it dry, and be on my way. But, it was pretty back then--worth all the effort put into it. And I miss my babies...

Well, my son, I hope you appreciate what it cost me to look through those books. I think I now know why my mother left them with me. I confess to liking my present, and seeing the past in such a large dose was maybe not so good. One snapshot here and there is enough.

Rocky Road

My father used to say that the best toy was an old tin can. I must confess that during the progression of gift opening at Christmas, it was not unusual at some point to look over and find that the toy had been discarded in preference to the box it came in, especially if the box was large enough to climb into.

My daughter Necessity brought the grandkids (one of each persuasion, ages 7 and 5) down on a quiet day during "Turn off TV Week", and they were amusing themselves in my living room. I have a dish of pebbles on a side table that they like to run through their fingers. I like to run my fingers through too--that's why it is there. After a little while, I figured the novelty would have worn off, and I took them two muffin tins. We were presented with muffins, then cookies, then they turned the pan upside down, and put the pebbles around the edges, finally coming back to say that they had rocky road ice cream. Then the grand idea hit--"Hey, we could make a rocky road!" Eventually a Lincoln Log cabin appeared next to the rocky road. I confess, they spent half the day with that dish of pebbles. Batteries not included!

Neglected And Loving It!

I confess that I have a brown thumb. Most of my house plants do not die outright, (which would indicate a black thumb) but suffer a lingering decline that usually ends up with a brown stub centered in a pot of wet sludge--generally indicating overwatering. I had one large escargot rex begonia that was indignant about its move to the dining room, and that was what I ended up with--the brown stub. I left it to sit on the kitchen counter, intending to put it into the garbage when there was a bag with enough room in it, and low and behold, it resurected itself for another year or so. Right now it is headed back in the other direction, and I need to figure out what it would like to pull it out of its latest slump. Probably some of those nifty fertilizer sticks that you just push down into the dirt.

My living room is another story. I bought an orchid at Home Depot, that was marked down to $5, since it had finished blooming, and was probably one step away from the trash bin. It was very happy in my kitchen window, and when the next blooming season came around it sent up new flower stems, and had lovely white flowers on it. This is now about the fifth year that it has bloomed, and it keeps sending out new stems, even off the old stems from previous years. Last year it started blooming in mid-January, and didn't finish until October. This year started a little later--late February, and looks very pretty. However, it has gotten bigger and bigger, and no longer fits in the kitchen, so is living in the living room year round. It is raising up out of the pot, but since it is always in bloom, I have been reluctant to mess with it, since my past record with houseplants is so poor. I chuckle when I hear people looking at the orchids at an orchid show, remarking on how hard they must be to grow. I water mine with about a cup and a half of water once a week on Mondays (that's how I keep track) and it doesn't really mind if I skip a week. I haven't given it any fertilizer in a really long time. The flowers are 4 3/4" across, and I confess, I can't take my eyes off it when I'm in the living room.

Updating Tradition

There are some unwritten rules that seem to be changing these days, and I confess that I am able to adjust to most of them, but some things should be left alone. We no longer wear white gloves, or hats with veils, and the "no white before Memorial Day or after Labor Day" rule seems to have gone the way of the lace hankie.

We have just come back from a very elegant wedding in Pennsylvania--black tie optional. The bride was graceful in her designer gown, the groom and his men handsome in their tuxes. Here's where my problem lies. The bridesmaids were all in black, as well as the mothers of the aforementioned bride and groom. Also, many of the ladies who were guests had on their little black dresses. Black to me is still a mourning color, and while evening gowns in black are classy, a whole roomful of people in black is pretty drab. There are pictures in travel books of weddings in Greece and Turkey, and Italy where everyone in the village turns out for a local wedding, and they are all in black. I really love to see all the dresses in different colors. It is an expression of each woman's personality when she chooses a color, and these colors shine like jewels when they are interspersed with the black suits out on the dance floor. It is a celebration after all, and it should be colorful.

I always remember back to hearing stories about bride's or groom's mothers who were so unhappy about their children's spousal choices that they wore black to the wedding, and what a little scandal THAT created! I confess I was a little taken aback seeing the mothers wearing black at this wedding, but I know it was not meant as a statement. I myself wore a lovely spring print chiffon two-piece designer (that would be me...) creation, and felt as light as the lovely flower-filled gardens where the pictures were taken.

Call me Immelda

I confess that I get a little nervous when Oprah does those shows about Hoarders. I do seem to have inherited the clutter gene down my paternal side, and I have tried to deal with it, and for most part am fairly successful. However, in my house, wherever there is a shelf, it is generally holding about as much as I can balance on it. I always look at those magazine homes that have lovely bookcases with one objet d'art carefully placed at the center of each shelf, and wonder if people actually live like that. My bookcases have books--and papers, and dolls, and assorted odds and ends. However, they are not crammed--just well-used.

One place that is momentarily out of control is my closet, specifically the floor where some of the shoes are. That would be the overflow shoes, since my tiny closet has a wall rack on each side for shoes, each side holding 21 pairs. Some shoes do not fit on the racks, because they are boots that won't go on, or ankle high lace-ups that won't go on, so they are on the floor legitimately. The problem occurs when the weather changes, and I am going between summer sandals, and then back to the shoes I wear with socks, because my feet get cold as the temperatures swing between seasons. I have winter shoes, and summer shoes, but they do not all fit on the racks at the same time. MyTreasure has a problem with someone owning this many pairs of shoes, since he has his sneakers, and one pair of all-purpose brown Clarks that serve for everything. He has some dress shoes, but claims that they are not comfortable, and pulls out his browns for all but the most formal of occasions. He recently broke all precedents by ordering a pair of the Clarks in black, so that now he actually has two pairs of regular use shoes. Oh, and one pair of flipflops.

Now, being a woman, I know how important it is to have exactly the right shoes to go with any outfit. A higher or lower heel makes all the difference to any skirt, depending on the knee length, and it is necessary to be able to have black or brown or colors, according to the other accessories. This can total up to quite a large number of shoes, all of them necessary. Compound this by the fact that I almost never wear out a pair of shoes, you can see how they could accumulate. I still have the first pair of shoes that I purchased after we were married--a lovely pair of black suede mid-high heels with a strap, and a button on the side. Those shoes are so well made, and since they are only worn for dress, they look like new. Well, I still don't know how to download the pictures off the camera, which is just as well, because there is a big pile of sandals in front of the closet, that I would be forced to post on this blog, and I confess it would not be a pretty picture.