comfort foods

i really enjoyed this piece by mark bittman about comfort foods, which includes this line:

"Every family, every ethnic group and every person can talk about their cravings. The comfort food of others rarely appeals to us; it’s our own that matters."

the comfort foods i grew up on?  my mama's gingerbread cookies, made-from-scratch yeast rolls, fettuccine alfredo (made with angel hair pasta, of course), and a huge block of cheddar cheese sitting on the top shelf of the fridge and carved up bit by bit.  probably nothing special to anyone else, but they scream of home to me.

belated happy mother's day to my mama!  i love you!

my treasure

around christmas, mom and dad and the dogs and i went for a walk on a new route along the creek near our house.  dad had seen an old house in this area on a 1960s map he saw recently, so we went in search of it.  no house, but we found walls built around two old springs that still have water - see the wet leaves - so that was pretty cool.

we also found stones built into a hill - might have been where a house was, might have just been to keep the hill from sliding down.  but i spotted a treasure leaning up against the stones!  it is an old saw blade leaning up against the wall - like the guy who owned it left it there when he moved away.  i tried to get it out, to no avail.  then dad tried - still couldn't get it to move.  about a foot and a half was visible above the ground.  we would have to come back with a shovel to dig it out.

fast forward to saturday: it was 60 degrees and dad and i brought a shovel to the spot and tried to get the blade out.  but it went REALLY far underground.  after 20 minutes of digging and not being successful, we went back for an axe to chop the roots that were in our way.  15 minutes after that, we got the blade free.  um, it is at least 4 feet long.

dad helped show me how to clean it off with a wire brush.  it is a two man crosscut saw, and the curve that you see is on purpose - to give it a better edge for cutting through a log, apparently.

i love it because the blades are irregular - i think they're really pretty.  the part that was below ground for...oh...who knows how long (50 years?) is pretty rusted and degraded, but the part that was above ground it in okay shape.  internet research by dad has informed us that this is a lance tooth felling saw ("lance tooth" refers to the pattern of the teeth; felling saws are for cutting down trees, as opposed to heavier and stiffer bucking saws which are for cutting trees when they are already on the ground).  thanks to dad + the internet.

note: i have no idea what i will do with my treasure now, but it is pretty cool.

more census fun

i found my other grandma!

things we learned: my great-grandparents (her parents) were RICH.  my grandma norma's family had lost their home in the depression and were living in a rented apartment - not uncommon.  my mom's mom's parents still owned their home, worth $30,000 - and had a live-in servant.  CRAZINESS.

then i went on a census expedition to find who lived in the house i grew up in.  (pause: i promise i do have a life.  this is just consuming SOME of it.)  my dad knew the name of the people who lived there at the time, which was CRUCIAL.  for my grandma in minnesota and my grandma in new york, knowing the address would have been enough to find the record.  in rural north carolina, the records were divided into "east of highway 18" and "west of highway 18," with no attempt being made to list any addresses.

looking through the census records in rural north carolina was a SAD adventure.  in the box marked "rent per month or value of house," i saw this many times

if that's hard to read, it says "share crops."  ugh.  as a history teacher, of course i know there were sharecroppers in 1940.  but to see it in black and white near where you grew up - that makes it real.

in the box for "highest grade of school completed," if was not uncommon to see this for an adult man:

UGH.

here are the people who owned our house:

our house was about 5 years old at the point, dad says, and the census says it was worth $800 - so they were doing much better than probably half the people around them, who rented or were sharecroppers.  the highest level of education completed by our house's first occupants: 3rd grade.  they were farmers.  the "amount of money wages or salary received" in the previous year:

that is a blank box - again, not uncommon as i looked through the records.  dad says that they would have traded for everything they needed.  UGH again.

the census is INCREDIBLY cool.

my grandfathers are up next in my census adventures, but i am having trouble finding their addresses, and as one lived in greenwich, connecticut and the other in omaha, nebraska, i'm going to need some addresses.  there are too many records to just page through without some guidance.  this census adventure is to be continued...

from mcgrady

when i was home in north carolina in june i helped my mom plant three rows of corn in the garden.  little dried corn seedlings, dyed red so you don't lose them in the dirt.  abby the dog "helped" us.  i mourned the fact that i'm never at home in august when the corn is ready to eat, and fresh corn on the cob is a religious experience.  i made my parents promise to mail me some corn in august.

today i received that corn in the mail.

!!!!!!

my parents are awesome.

8 ears of corn still in their husks, in ziploc bags and protected by some shredded paper.  yessssssssss.

and a bonus!  one (dead) green bug in an ear of corn.  i didn't get a photo of that.

i made enchiladas verdes (with black beans, not chicken) and they were DELISH.  the corn was sweet and crisp and i was (am) happy.  the rest of the corn is off the cob and in the freezer for another day.

life is good.

cherries!

mom and i picked a couple gallons from the cherry bushes in the backyard - this is half of the amount we picked - and tonight we'll pit them.  i am a little bit skittish around cherries - one sour one negates all the delicious sweet ones you eat - but add enough sugar and all is well (cherry pie is pretty yummy).

i'm home in north carolina for the weekend, where it is warm during the day but oh-so-lovely in the morning and at night.  this was the view from our front porch this morning - dad working hard, me having a bagel and reading my book and watching:

there are birds!  there are stars!  there are cherries to be picked and made into a pie!  i love home.

oh, and my dad joined facebook.  omg is right.

it snowed

white christmas = awesome, especially since i watched the bing crosby movie white christmas on christmas eve.  we're basically at general waverly's hotel in vermont, minus the song and dance numbers.

becky and the dogs:

looking down the driveway:

horses do not like snow, but they do like the hay they get when it snows:

not a great photo, but i wanted to show the scale - this is the christmas tree from my first christmas - my parents bought a tree with the root ball intact and then planted it after christmas.  28 years later, it is enormous...as in, twice the height of our house.

hope no one got stuck in the snow!

layover

last night a good friend - my first friend - from mcgrady who now lives in seattle texted me to say that he had a layover in atlanta, and would i want to meet him at the airport and have dinner?  so we did, and it was so nice to catch up.  this is us when we were little.  joe is exactly 11 months older than me (i remember thinking that this was SO COOL when i was little - november 7th and december 7th!), which i will blame for the reason that i'm chock full of baby fat in this picture and he is not.

in this picture i am thinking, "blowing bubbles is AWESOME.  but you have to try really hard not to drop the bubble container."  i also remember that blowing bubbles sometimes meant you got soap in your mouth and that was about the worst thing ever.

in the course of our conversation over dinner last night, catching up on work and family and life, i said to him, "i forgot about the rockin' scar on your forehead - is that from when you fell off the trampoline or when you got cut on that rusty metal?"  it was the rusty metal, he said - roofing or siding or something.  we were little - in elementary school.  it's special to have had a friend for that long, to remember him getting a cool scar.  even if the GETTING of the cool scar wasn't exactly fun for him.  he says he remembers holding a kitchen pot under his head and letting the blood drip into it on the way to the hospital to get stitches.  he's tough.

some insight into me as a child

when i was little i didn't understand the phrase, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."  i was around pigs occasionally.  i can't remember if we ever had a pig, but we certainly had friends who did.  i thought their ears were kind of soft.  i thought, "why can't you make a purse out of their ears?"

as you're growing up, you reach a point in life where you realize you aren't normal or your experiences haven't been normal.  when you're very little, of course they're normal - they are all you know.  and then you meet the real world and you find out that other people don't do things the way you and your family do them.  i'm sure this happens to everyone, not just to people who grow up on a farm in a country with not very many farms.  [there were 3 times as many farms in the united states in 1935 than there are now, and there are 2.5 times as many people in the us today. (from here.)]  everybody is weird, right?  just weird in different ways.

my moment came - and i have a vivid memory of this - when i was in preschool and i was playing over at a friend's house.  maybe i was even spending the night?  it came time to change clothes (to go swimming?  go to bed?), and we went into the bathroom to change clothes, me and this little girl who was my friend.  i was like, "people change their clothes in the bathroom?"  in my house becky and i got dressed in the kitchen in front of the heater.  that was the first moment i can remember where i thought, "oh.  not everyone gets dressed in the kitchen.  we do things differently at my house."

different AWESOME, obviously.  but different.

in kindergarden i also once made a girl cry at lunch because she had a white bread sandwich and i told her that my mom said that white bread is bad for you.  but that is a story for another day.