Fiction: The Elder

I don’t know. It seems to me that people are all the time getting harder to live with. I’m not even talking about the younger generations, though some of them seem as far from me and my experience as an eel at the bottom of the sea. Of course we still breathe the same air and all, but that’s about as far as the similarities go.

Sure, I know. You think, “There goes old Sam, one of them typical get-off-my-lawn old fellers yelling at the clouds and falling far, far behind the times.” Well, that may be right to a degree, but it ain’t the whole truth. I know how to bank online. I’ve got a smart phone and use it when I need directions to get from Point A to B. And as chairman of the church cemetery committee at Lotus Creek Baptist Church, I keep the records of every plot on a spreadsheet, backed up on a flash drive. Sam Windlespear may be old, but he’s no fool.

I know we’ve got paper records at the church that go back to the 18^th century, when the open land behind the church served as a mustering ground for the Revolutionary militia. Now the open land is no longer open; where the church graveyard ends, a fence separates it from a subdivision built in the 1980s. Soon will come a day when there’s no more room to bury any soul, especially the way so many take advantage of the free burial for legacy members. There are folks buried in that land that hadn’t stepped foot in the church for years, but they knew the trick to finding a cheap place to get planted, you better believe they did.

The Windlespears were known at Lotus Creek Baptist going back to 1939, when I was five years old and my folks moved into the community to take up farming on land that my mother’s uncle had left. He was a Morrison and a church elder himself (plot 14G, close to many a sad gravestone of a child struck by Spanish flu or a soldier of one of the world wars). His 20-odd acres included a tidy house and a good-sized barn. My mama and dad were proud to have such a good solid-built house, not like these two-story gingerbread houses in the development that get thrown together in no time at all.

Anyway, I know I’m getting away from the point, which is that I believe people are changing for the bad in ways that nobody ever thought of 30, 40 years ago. This past Sunday at church, Lou Goldston—known her all my damn life—got in my face about the way I’d looked at her grandson. I told her I can’t help how I look, but that boy can help the way he looks. Boy’s got a ring in every hole in his head, and punched a few fresh holes that God didn’t give him and put rings in them, too. But what got me was the tattoo he had on his right leg and the fact that I could see it because he wore shorts to church in 30-degree weather.

“He wears shorts all the time,” Lou said. “It ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“Lou Goldston, it’s cold outside. How you expect me to look at somebody when looking at them makes my blood freeze?”

I know she didn’t like it, but she needn’t act like I ought to clean up my act and be a better Christian. She and her family have had their own issues, is all I’ll say, and if excommunication hadn’t been ruled out by the church in the 1950s I doubt her family would still be allowed through the doors, though these days about anybody can come in and no questions asked.

I don’t tell everything I know, and that’s all I’ll say about it. But as the number of open plots in the cemetery dwindle down to a handful, taking into consideration that some are already reserved or have people waiting to move in next to their kin, I’m of a mind to do a little excommunicating myself. “Nope, sorry,” I’ll say, when Lou and her husband ask about reserving a plot, “I don’t have space to put you together, though I reckon I could put one of you in that space beside Willard Ormsby, since it appears his wife won’t be coming back. Then you could be next to Willard, Lou, and Ernest could wedge in there at the end of row 30, with only the foot path between you.”

There are some other members I would fix, assuming I can hang on to my chairmanship for a few more years. Lindsey Beck, for one. I know from two different sources, one of them my daughter, that Lindsey has no more business receiving a free Christian burial than Judas Iscariot. Not a thing against Lindsey that could hold up in a court of law, mind you, but he was relieved of his duties as youth minister. They let him stay in the choir, though, being thin of male voices. I hate his face, and rejoice on those Sundays when he’s not present to remind me of his existence. Forgive? You do it. I can’t and I won’t. I may not have power to throw anybody out of the church, but I can sure keep their rotting flesh from desecrating the sacred ground of which I am chief custodian.

Somebody—I know it was one of the Granger brothers, who think they’re each one a unique comedian—said, “We have to tread careful around Sam, we sure do. After all, he knows where all the bodies are buried.”

Oh, I know where the bodies are buried. You better believe I do.

Image: Childe Hassam, “Colonial Graveyard at Lexington,” circa 1891. Pastel drawing. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of John Gellatly.

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Quilting

Our family quilts were not gently used; they were vigorously loved. … [T]hey became picnic blankets, they were flung over a card table or clothes-drying rack to serve as tents, and they were spread out as landscapes for Matchbox car journeys and doll tea parties. Threads loosened, fabric ripped, and batting leaked out.

“The Art of Quaker Quilts,” Friends Journal, September 2022.

As a person with no sewing skills whatsoever, I will never be able to create a quilt of my own for future generations to love. I know this, because I find it hard to hem a pair of pants or reattach a button without making a mess of it. I like to think, though, that some of us serve a different purpose, as preservers and archivists. That’s why I was thrilled to share my family quilts in Friends Journal. Now two of our family quilts have been immortalized through the magic of print.

The power of creating things on paper is certainly not to be despised, and I’ve decided that my life’s-work quilt will have to be made up of words. Over the years I’ve collected several fantasy quilt materials, things that really could become a quilt in the right hands. There’s the dress my mother wore to her brother’s wedding in the late 1950s, with a small burn hole in the satin bow at the waist where she leaned too close to a hot stove; the strapless sundress she made for me when I was in college; and the blue kimono with pink and gold batik flowers I received during an exchange trip to Japan. Not long ago my mother added another item to my fantasy quilt fabric collection. She had a length of light pink cloth draped over the front of her walker. I saved this for you, she said. She had discovered, in a dark corner of the linen closet, a pink apron with tiny patch pockets that her mother had made for her when she got married in 1953. It looked exactly like the type of apron that ladies wore in 1950s magazine advertisements for aluminum foil.  

Free of the boundaries dictated by needle and thread, my word-quilt will be able to contain all of these fabrics plus many other treasures—my grandmother’s blue willowware plates; the model of a dugout canoe that I made during fourth grade with the help of my dad and his blowtorch; the porcelain doorknob my uncle saved for me before my grandparents’ house was demolished; and the arrowhead I found in the creek behind my parents’ house.

My imaginary quilt of fragments has the potential to grow large enough to span several counties. A road of stitches can connect our little farm to my parents’. The stitching will become a creek, down which the little dugout canoe navigates. The creek will connect the pond to a tree-circled back field where many holiday dinners have been walked off. The field will be appliqued with round hay bales and deer and the ghosts of beagles past. A length of pink cotton is embroidered with bluebirds and bob-whites, and the blue of my kimono swims with bass and bream.

Working toward the center of my quilt, distance will magically contract. My parents’ land will connect to my grandparents’ farm and the nearby grove where my grandfather’s grandparents once lived beside the Up River Friends Meetinghouse. A zig-zag pattern of tall pines will link these smaller squares to vast expanses of open fields and shaded lots where pigs bang the metal lids of their feeders and scrabble their feet to flee to a far corner when a child comes to hang on the fence and see what they’re doing.

That’s the crazy quilt that I’m in the process of patching together. And though it isn’t done and probably never will be, I’d like to spread it before you—humbly, in keeping with its nature—and invite you to join me and all those who came before me to a tea party on the grass.

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Fiction: American Mistletoe

She had always loved hanging clothes to dry on the clothesline, so when her old electric dryer died she had never bothered to replace it. Winters were mild enough that she could hang clothes any time of year, as long as she kept an eye on the weather forecast and planned accordingly.

Thus it was on a cool, sunny morning in late December she hung up a week’s worth of clothes on the line. The high temperature was expected to be 55, and the clothes should dry in a few hours.

Around midday, she glanced out the front window and saw a sight that stopped her breath. Some creature—a squirrel, or a crow?—had snatched a pair of her white underpants off the clothesline and dropped them high in the hickory tree. They hung on a stob and fluttered there like a half-hearted flag of sad surrender.

The rake was nowhere near long enough to reach, and she was deathly afraid of ladders, hating even to go up the narrow folding stairs to the attic. She stood in the yard craning to see the underpants, but every time a car went by she began raking frantically so as not to draw more attention to the spectacle in the tree.

Squinting up at the sun tangled in the branches of the hickory, she recollected a winter day like this one on her grandparents’ farm, which had been surrounded by large trees like this one. Her grandfather had pointed out a nearly perfect ball of greenery up in the bare branches, so high up that she had to throw her head all the way back to see it. “That’s mistletoe. Should we get some for Grandma to hang up for Christmas?”

Ever the cautious sort, she had said, “How? You can’t climb up that high.”

“No. There’s a trick to bringing down a mess of mistletoe.”

***

Fearful of ladders, she had no similar qualms about firearms. After studying the matter from several angles (surreptitiously, raking as needed), she went inside, loaded the old .22, then went back out and shot her underpants out of the tree.

END

Illustration: “American Mistletoe,” Mary Vaux Walcott (1923). Smithsonian American Art Museum

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Little Gallery of Mighty Fine Arts, Part the Second

This post is a follow-up to one from 2020, in which I used the pandemic as an excuse to offer up my tiny home as an art museum alternative and describe some of the treasures that comprise our permanent collection. As mentioned at that time, I chose the name the Little Gallery of Mighty Fine Arts (LGMFA) because in rural North Carolina, there are two levels of superior quality: fine, and mighty fine.

Today, I bring you a sampling from the gallery’s Mighty Fine Pottery Collection and a few select pieces from Textiles & Fiber Arts.

Horse Hair Pottery (Turn & Burn Pottery, Undated)

Here in central North Carolina, the Seagrove area is known for its potteries, and it’s easy to spend a full day driving through the countryside, following signs to different potters’ studios. This piece of horse hair raku pottery is one of our largest specimens. It is inscribed on the bottom “Turn & Burn, Seagrove, NC, John 14:1.” That’s the “Let not your heart be troubled” verse, in case you’re wondering.

The LGMFA also has in its collection two pieces of crystalline pottery, which is one of my favorite of all the Seagrove pottery styles. The crystal configurations on the glaze are beautiful.

Crystalline Vase (Dover Pottery, 2002)

This piece and another by Phil Morgan were gifts from my sister. And how was she repaid? See Snowy Owl, part of the Textiles & Fiber Arts collection referenced below. (Hint: She got the short end of the stick.)

But first we must visit the intersection of Pottery and Textiles & Fiber Arts, where we find this thing.

A Fairy Garden Teacup (V. Winslow, work in progress, mixed media)

What started out as a large Styrofoam Easter egg covered in green needle-felted wool became a hillock in a teacup that had belonged to my grandmother. After finding that the egg could be jammed neatly into the cup (pointy end down), I added a tiny cottage with a metal button roof, a couple of trees, and shrubs. My wooly tree needs work, and I think I should add a tiny stone pathway up to the front door before calling it done.

And now the long-anticipated owl!

Snowy Owl (V. Winslow, 2020, wool roving)

On permanent loan from the LGoMFA, the snowy owl is part of a lovely tableau in my sister’s home. Last summer she made the mistake of sending me a photo of a mighty fine needle-felted owl she saw in an antique shop. Smelling a challenge and with nothing much else going on, I surprised her with her own snowy owl perched on a stump. While I think I managed to capture a taste of the original owl’s baleful expression, my version is otherwise not so very fine. The stump, styled around a wool dryer ball, looks more realistic and less like it has toes when it’s turned to the other side. Next time I visit I’ll reposition it.

Quilt (Mary Pleasant Winslow, early 20^th century)

This quilt was made by my late grandmother, Mary Winslow of Perquimans County, NC. I photographed it after a gentle hand-washing in the bathtub with Ivory Snow. Even though I took a lot of care (and slopped a ton of water through the house while rushing it outside), I don’t imagine this was the best way to conserve a handmade American quilt from the 1930s/40s. But it looked mighty fine as it dried over the course of three full sunny days. Yes, I know—fading. But it needed washing and is now protected from direct light.

Our Most Recent Acquisition

Jane Austen (V. Winslow, 2021, wool roving and a scrap of lace)

I wasn’t going to include this piece, completed on this very day, because Jane is… unrecognizable. She looks concerned, and who can blame her? Perhaps I should add her to the category of Mighty Fine Primitives and pretend that she was meant to look crude. Or maybe Jane is simply suffering from the summer heat, as I am. I understand that she wrote in one of her letters, “What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.”

On that note I shall softly close the doors of the LGMFA and go on about my usual business—yes, in a continual state of inelegance, but ever appreciative of the mighty fine things that surround us. 

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Remembering French Carols, Russian Tea, and Ronni Lundy

Russian tea. Bavarian china.

I once tried to explain to someone how my mind works. “I’m constantly making associations,” I said. “Something will trigger a memory and remind me of something else, and that connects to other associations, and more popping.” The upshot is that I’m often living my life while simultaneously reviewing old footage. The bits and pieces playing on the screen inside my head may not be always historically accurate, but they help me preserve the color and flavor of my days.

The holiday season is rich with color and flavor. I associate decorating the Christmas tree with Ruffles potato chips and Sealtest French onion dip. Christmas morning always makes me think of my grandfather’s cardboard box filled with brown bags of candy (chocolate drops, peach bud candy, orange slices, and chocolate-covered peanuts) and the gleam of firelight on the clear plastic window of the box a Mary Poppins doll came in.

And Christmas songs remind me of my high school French teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson. Under her eagle eye and dramatically raised left eyebrow, country children like myself learned French carols: “Il Est Né,” “Un Flambeau, Jeannette Isabella,” and “Sainte Nuit,” among others. Each year we spent one class period before the holiday break visiting students in other classrooms and singing our French carols, a blessing they no doubt recall to this day with great fondness.

Ever since high school, I have continued to sing “Un Flambeau” during the holidays. When Mannheim Steamroller did an instrumental version on one of their Christmas albums, I sang it so much that I am convinced it is written in my bones. I admit I’ve gotten the words badly scrambled over the years. No doubt the phrase “courons au berceau” belongs in only one verse, but I stick it in all the verses when singing my personal rendition. It has such a nice ring to it, and is so active: “Let’s run to the cradle!” Yeah!

From France to Russia

The French word for Monday is lundi and today being Wednesday, I declared it to be Ronni Lundy Day. That happened because of another memory connection involving Russian tea.

You see, my sister Holli let slip that she was dropping off Russian tea mix for my parents for Christmas. I rudely elbowed my way into a piece of that action and wangled a jar of it for myself. I hadn’t had Russian tea in ages. The closest I’ve come was years ago in St. Louis, when for one winter season I drank yuzu tea because I read about it in a memoir whose author drank yuzu tea all the time. I decided I had to try it, so I visited one of the Asian food markets near our home in the University City area and bought a jar of what looked like grapefruit marmalade. The beauty of yuzu tea was all I had to do was stir a spoonful of the marmalade into hot water. Watered-down citrus marmalade may not sound like much, but it is mighty fine. I drank it until the jar of marmalade was empty then forgot about it entirely until right this minute.

But we’re talking about Russian tea, not yuzu, and as soon as my jar of Holli’s special blend came into my house I thought about Ronni Lundy again. I discovered her when I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, because she was a writer and editor for Louisville magazine. Her column, “Omnivore,” always featured a recipe embedded in a wonderful, perfectly written story. I have three of her columns saved in my three-ring binder of recipes, and the first one I saved (July 1994) was about a trip to Colorado she’d taken in her youth with a friend. Young Ronni and Cindy crossed the Great Divide in a Plymouth Valiant station wagon, a hair-raising experience. When they stopped just over the summit at a log cabin with a sign declaring it to be a store, they were entertained by the 80-year-old shopkeeper who served them cheddar cheese and crackers with Russian tea. The column ended with a recipe for a Jamaican-style tea cake to be served with “aged cheddar, hot tea and good stories.”

Side note: While checking on the ingredients for Russian tea mix, I came across a wonderful piece on myrecipes.com called “Russian Tea Is Not from Russia It’s from Church Cookbooks.” If I didn’t have ethics I’d have used that title for this post.

Anyway, even though I often breezed past her columns when flipping through my recipe binder, Ronni Lundy sifted down to the murkier depths of my memory for eight years. Then, 13 years ago while living in St. Louis and probably drinking yuzu tea, I discovered her book, Crafts for the Spirit. Can’t remember how I came across it, but I was delighted to learn from it that Ronni had moved to my home state of North Carolina. This made her practically family. Then I forgot her again until Holli’s Russian tea brought her back to the front of my mind, and I have spent a nice afternoon rereading her three columns from 1994 and ordering two of her award-winning cookbooks, which promise more of her excellent stories and recipes when they arrive.

I regret having let Ronni Lundy lapse for such a long time, but isn’t it wonderful that my sister’s Russian tea brought her back? Today I drank a cup of the tea in her honor, with a thin slice of fruitcake, while “Un Flambeau, Jeannette Isabella” played on a loop in my head.   

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The Little Gallery of Mighty Fine Arts

Cecil Honeychurch, 2020. Wool.

Museums are closed, and there’s time to fill here at home. Inspired by John Simmons and his 26 Fruits blog, I have devised my own gallery of treasures from around the house. I believe they were grateful to be dusted and fussed over.

I chose the name the Little Gallery of Mighty Fine Arts (LGMFA) because in rural North Carolina, there are two levels of superior quality: fine, and mighty fine. Featured first are works from the gallery’s Folk Art Collection:

Artist unknown: White Goat, circa 2014. Painted tin.
A gift commemorating the LGMFA’s acquisition of three goats in spring 2014.

Virginia Woolf wrote: “If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.” Today, Iris is the only one of our three goats left standing; we lost Lily in 2015 and Rose in July. Given the way the year is going, I am tempted to take Virginia’s advice and pull Iris’s beard in hopes of halting the downward slide toward becoming daily more faded, fatalistic, and aged.

Artist unknown: Mexican Cherub, circa 2012. Painted wood.
Acquired in Webster Grove, Missouri in a shop next to a Thai restaurant.

We wanted a Guerrero, Mexico cherub, and we found one we loved in a shop on Isla Mujeres. A wall plaque about a yard wide, it featured a wonderful cherub whose cheeks where filled with air and whose lips were blowing a mighty wind. Sadly, we walked away, and by the time we had convinced ourselves that we had to have it we could no longer find the shop. This little guy is smaller, but we are delighted we found him. He hangs in the kitchen where he can supervise the cooking and keep an eye on the White Goat (above).

V. Winslow: Cecil Honeychurch, 2020. Wool.
Artist’s statement: “My needle-felting phase began with a number of small animals, followed by a peaceful yet wildly creative period of crafting Easter eggs and experimenting with wet-felting. In mid-2020, tired of the browns and grays of woodland creatures but running low on the brilliant colors used for my spring line of eggs and fascinators, I decided to branch out and attempt a more complex, humanoid work. It was only after his tiny black eyes were in place that I realized the truth about Cecil: He was meant to have butterfly wings. So now he does.” 

V. Winslow: Fairy House, a Ruin, 2020. Mixed media.
Artist’s statement: “Well, if you think you can do any better, then be my guest.”

♦♦♦

Next, highlights from the LGMFA’s collection of European artists:

Pablo Picasso: Citando Al Toro con la Capa (Provoking the Bull with the Cape) from the series La Tauromaquia, 1957. Print.

Acquired by the LGMFA in 2010 in Barcelona, we purchased this print and another in the same series from a sidewalk vendor across from the Museu Picasso. The title shown above may be incorrect. During our visit to Spain, we also traveled to the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres to view major and minor works by Salvador Dalí. Notes from that excursion read: “The art included very little in the way of explanation—there weren’t even the usual small signs that told the year of the work. Ernesto was able to drift in and out of a Spanish-language school group, and he picked up some info that way. He told me that according to the teacher, Dalí dismissed Picasso as being ‘too Spanish’ (as opposed to universal, I suppose), and after that I was annoyed at Dalí and wanted no more to do with him.”

Vincent van Gogh: Roses, 1890. Poster.
Since 1995, this piece has traveled widely, with extended showings in Kentucky, Florida, and Missouri. The print is now permanently housed in the Little Gallery of Mighty Fine Arts located in central North Carolina. As a tribute to van Gogh and in celebration of one of the gallery’s earliest acquisitions, Ernesto recently enacted van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear in our early-season sunflower patch.

It was 90 degrees outside. We all suffer for our art.

If you haven’t yet seen the animated film Loving Vincent, you really should. All of the music is fabulous, but stay through the credits to hear Don McLean’s “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” sung by Lianne La Havas. Or listen at the link provided, as you enjoy your own home art collection. 

 

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Seven Wonders

Some time back I was making a honey walnut pie, and of course I used my Metric Wonder Cup to measure out the honey. I bought the Wonder Cup at one of those parties where kitchen items are demonstrated and sold. It is a plain thing, but its brash name and elegant simplicity elevate it to a true wonder. As seen in the photo from Etsy (where it’s no longer available, but where at one time it was presented very beautifully with lace and linen), the cup has a solid yellow plastic cylinder that slides into a clear plastic measuring cup to form a moveable bottom. The idea is to push the yellow core down from the top until the proper measure shows on the upper, clear part of the cup. Then you fill the open part with something sticky (peanut butter, honey, molasses) and push the yellow sliding cylinder up. As it slides, it scrapes the sides clean and pushes every molecule of honey into your mixing bowl.  

I know that in the grand scheme of things this is of little consequence. But I will take my wonders where I can get them, and lately I find myself needing them to counterbalance the unwonderful, non-delightful, far-from-enchanting issues that dominate world news. If only I could spread around some of the homey, comforting things that make life tolerable, surely the world would be a slightly better place.

Here are a few random wonders that make me cheerful:

Honey Walnut Pie

Not only is the Wonder Cup itself a wonder, the honey walnut pie that it helped me bake is fairly wonderful, too. It contains no refined sugar; it’s just honey, eggs, butter, nuts, and a little vanilla and nutmeg. Here is the recipe, which I found back in 2012 on a pretty blog called Romancing the Bee.

What makes this pie a wonder is the Miracle of the Eggs that takes place during the making of it. Once you bring the honey to a boil, you pour in the beaten eggs. This immediately causes a reaction similar to combining baking soda and vinegar (though not as violent). But the eggs don’t scramble, which to me qualifies as miraculous. A couple of times some white strands of egg remain ropy and won’t go away. When that happened I took care to strain them out before adding the other ingredients. I lost enough of the filling that my pie ended up a bit shallow.

Still, the pie was popular in my family, so I shared the recipe with a friend who wanted less sugar in her diet, too. She told me afterward that she really enjoyed it. Only then did I confess. “Sometimes I get white strands of egg that won’t incorporate into the honey,” I told her. “Did you have that problem?”

“Yeah,” she said, quite matter-of-factly, “I had a couple of ghosts.”

Now that I think of the white streaks as ghosts, I’m no longer haunted by them.

Family Recipes

My friend Kathy recently sent me a photo of an old recipe for chocolate cake that was her mother’s. We were laughing (via e-mail) about the fact that so many of the old recipes that get handed down don’t have anything like complete instructions. This one was really just a list of ingredients, and the rest she had to muddle through and figure out. She told me that her grandmother used to make a topping for angel food cake, and the recipe called for a “big tub of whipped topping” and a “39-cent Hershey bar with almonds.”

I love this description from another friend, Frieda, who wrote me about her grandmother’s miraculous biscuits: “…the best biscuits in the whole world. She used no recipe and never ever used a measuring spoon or cup. She knew just the right height for flour piles, just the right size for lard globs, and just the right number of buttermilk glugs; voila— perfect biscuits every time.”

I guess we’re all muddling through, most of the time, with only a dim idea of what we should be doing, and in what order, and what size pan we need.

The wonder is that things often do come out perfectly fine in the end. So find an old family recipe and see if you can work through its mysteries.

Eastern North Carolina Barbecue

I had two servings of Hursey’s barbecue this week—always a good thing. About the only barbecue that compares to it is Eddie’s. Eddie has in the past made barbecue as a fundraiser for my parents’ church, and his was so delicious that I begged a copy of the sauce recipe from him.

“When are you going to make another batch?” I asked him, since I would rather eat his barbecue than go to the trouble of making my own.

“Never,” he vowed. He then described how, after building a roaring fire in a 250-gallon drum, the flames leaped 20 feet into the air, and could be seen by cars as they turned off of Highway 49 some miles away. The heat caused the drum to turn cherry red, and the rebar Eddie had positioned inside to hold up the wood disintegrated. He also blistered his own face.

As my father would say, “Anything worthwhile is hard.” 

Grady Comes Home

Don’t think that every wonder is food-related (though many certainly are). Last winter we lost a dear friend and co-worker, Frances. Her cat, Grady, was an outside cat and it took a little while for Frances’ daughters to find him a good local home. Or really any home at all. Ultimately, Jeanne and Bill accepted Grady into their household, already stocked with two daughters, a dog, and a house cat. When I asked how Grady was settling in, Jeanne told me that he spent a lot of time being nervous, running into their basement when startled. He also crept underneath the house in general, and because he has a large, bushy tail he often emerged with things stuck in it, like moths and cobwebs and dust bunnies.

“Do you know what’s funny?” Jeanne said. “Bill’s grandfather’s name was Grady. Our house once belonged to him.” 

Ice Formations in the Bird Bath

In 2016, we had a small wonder crop up overnight in our bird bath.

2016: Ice vase

As I wrote at the time:

One Sunday morning this winter I glanced outside and saw a bright flash in the birdbath, like a bit of mirror reflecting the first fragments of sunlight, even while the rest of the landscape lay steeped in gloom. I stood at the back door in my pajamas, trying to figure out what the gleam meant. I looked at it through our binoculars, then Ernesto looked.

“It’s ice,” he said.

“It isn’t,” I replied.  

It was. I read about these formations (ours was what some people call an “ice vase”), which are similar and somewhat related to the crystals of ice that sometimes form in the soil. Evidently they require a certain freeze-thaw cycle and specific temperature fluctuations and soft water.

Imagine my delight when, this winter, our bird bath came through a second time, and an ice candle appeared in it one morning. I could hardly believe our great good luck. Unlike the ice vase, the ice candle was solid, but it was wonderful even so and from certain angles resembled a penguin.

2018: Ice candle

Brenda and Frieda

Good neighbors are the 7^th wonder of my collection, and possibly the 7^th wonder of the world in general. Brenda lives a quarter-mile up Redbud Lane from us, and I’ve spoken of her before, noting her nearly magical tendency to stop by the house and leave something I needed (or didn’t know I wanted) each time. Persimmon pulp, black-eyed Susans of unusual size and beauty, fried apple pies—Brenda is an inexhaustible fountain of wonders. She gave us a rose bush not long after we moved in, and it is thriving. This year she appears to have taken our front yard under her wing entirely. She has lavished us with another rose bush, two large hostas, one of her black-eyed Susans, a lavender bush, six or either blackberry plants that are just beginning to produce, and various day lilies. Twice she has come over and just planted things while we were at work, including a mystery flower that she placed in the large and sterile pot beside the garage (the squirrels kept removing my plantings from that pot and replacing them with hickory nuts). Brenda doesn’t remember the name of that one, but says it will have a purple flower. I wouldn’t be surprised if it bloomed extravagantly, opening to reveal a tiny image of Brenda’s face in the center.

Frieda is exactly like Brenda, only she lives farther away and conducts some of her magic more remotely. Knowing that Ernesto and I are without a kitchen as it undergoes a major renovation, she has been tireless in the provision of delicious things to keep us fed: poppy seed chicken casserole, squash casserole, and an aptly named Paradise Salad. Since her husband visits my parents’ house once a week for a church singing group practice, she often sends things to me via Don. I’ll get an e-mail letting me know to expect it, and all I have to do is pass by my parents’ house on my way home from work. (Don’t ask me how I got to be so richly blessed. It’s obviously not deserved, unless the level of my gratitude counts as a virtue. Maybe it does.) Frieda also shared with me this week a copy of a book called Friends at Holly Spring, about the early Quakers in North Carolina and specifically in Randolph County. It includes this tidbit of information about the early Quaker settlers: “For a hundred years and more in many communities, the living room was called “the house” to distinguish it from the kitchen area….” I felt a happy shock when I read that, because my Quaker grandparents in Perquimans County always referred to the living room as “the house.” Probably Grandma just wanted to get us all out of her kitchen when we sat too long around the table after a big meal. “Come on in the house,” she’d say, and we’d walk the six or eight steps from the table to the living room. But what perfect delight to have that memory awakened so unexpectedly.

Homework

I know you must have at least seven things of your own that qualify as wonders. Do this for me: Write them down, and see if you don’t feel miraculously uplifted. Then, while you’re still feeling uplifted, think of something special that you can share with someone else. It will help make the world a more wonderful place.

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A Celebration of the Pig

A ginger pig from Cane Creek Farm

Some years back I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s book, Cross Creek Cookery. Rawlings is most famous for her book The Yearling, a coming-of-age story about a Florida boy and the fawn he tames. Rawlings also wrote a memoirish sort of book called Cross Creek, named for her home in central Florida (now a state park). She talked so much in that book about food, that she was compelled by her fans to follow it up with a cookbook, and that (obviously) is Cross Creek Cookery. Anyway, it included a recipe for Baked Peanut Ham with Sherry. Your first thought, like mine, may be that peanuts don’t have hams, and if they did have them they would be tiny.  Reading further, though, it seems that Rawlings was talking about a ham from a pig that had been fed peanuts. But before she got to the point of explaining how she prepared her ham with sherry, she talked about ham in general. She confessed that she is not addicted to the aged Kentucky and Virginia hams that some people love, adding:

Moreover, the choice old country hams are so valuable and valued that one feels guilty in eating as much as one wishes, and is expected to nibble daintily on wafer-thin wisps. This convention once ended a friendship of long standing. A friend had an old Kentucky ham as the pièce de résistance at a Christmas buffet supper. She was horrified to discover a respectable lawyer standing at the buffet board, hacking off half-pound wedges of the sacred ham, and eating as fast as he hacked.

“I never, ” he said fatuously, “ate such delicious ham.”

He was never invited to her house again.

Ernesto and I have had our share of delicious ham, especially choice bits that we ate during our travels in Spain and Portugal. But I must say that I don’t like wafer-thin wisps, either. I like large portions.

Recently, Ernesto—who has long wished to purchase half a hog from a local, reputable farm that he can process as he wishes—found that a class on butchering was being offered this weekend by the Left Bank Butchery in Saxapahaw. The notice read:

A Celebration of the Pig.

Join us for a ride all the way down the rabbit hole with a full day of hands-on butchery, curing meats, and making sausages, followed by an in-depth farm tour at Cane Creek Farm.

Because the day included breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a bonfire by the river, I was happy to sign on. Besides, if there is going to be a celebration of the pig, you can always count me in. I love pigs. Maybe it’s wrong, but I love them alive and I love to eat them, too.

But as the weekend approached, the weather turned nasty. We saw it coming, and on Thursday we got an e-mail saying that the day would go forward almost as planned, but the bonfire and riverside cookout were no longer on the agenda. Also, we should bring an extra pair of boots for the farm tour.

I don’t have the right pair of boots for a muddy farm tour, so I stopped at my mom and dad’s Friday afternoon to see if they had some I could borrow. I was in luck. Daddy said, “I think there’s a pair in the closet of the laundry room.” I went to check it out, and sure enough, there was a tidy little pair of black Totes rain boots, with fur lining. They were not only perfect, they were adorable. I tried them on, and they were just a tiny bit big. I could not have been more pleased.

“Let’s just hope they haven’t dry-rotted,” Daddy said, “or your feet will get wet.” But the boots were perfect in every way.

Yesterday morning, we packed up our boots, extra socks, rain gear, hats, and a cooler and headed to Saxapahaw. With my bonfire hopes dashed, I have to say I set off with more determination than enthusiasm, but I did look forward to wearing my super-cute little boots. And eating ham.

The day started off beautifully. We drank coffee and ate enormous sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits from the Saxapahaw General Store. Then we gathered around a half of a butchered hog (slightly more than half, since the head was still on) and Ross Flynn, our teacher, gave an overview of the day’s events and then divided us into two groups. One group of six left with Logan, the master sausage maker, to make sausage in another classroom. Ernesto, three other students, and I stayed with Ross and began to dismantle the hog. Ernesto did some sawing and cutting, but I mostly just observed and took a few photos as the others brandished their knives.

Ross Flynn of Left Bank Butchery instructs Ernesto on sawing off a hog’s leg.

For lunch we had delicious schnitzel sandwiches and homemade pineapple coconut soda from Haw River Farmhouse Ales, then we switched, and our group made sausage with Logan while the other group dismantled the second (headless) half of the hog. (Eventually, all of us divvied up the pork chops and bacon and sausage and various other bits that we carved and took it home.)

It had been drizzling rain off and on all day, and when we arrived (stylishly booted) at Cane Creek Farm, the rain was coming down pretty steady. Eliza MacLean, the owner, gave an introduction to the farm under the shelter of her carport, where she had thoughtfully provided hot chocolate. Then we went on a walking tour of the farm, beginning with the farrowing house, where three sows and thirty piglets sent any lingering regrets over the loss of the bonfire flying off and forgotten. I would rather see piglets any day, and these were little and spotted and sweet.

Then, as Eliza described the property and how the hogs were used to clear and fertilize the land,  we walked down to see the pigs that lived among the woods, further from the house. Midway to the pig pens, I heard a flapping noise and noticed that the left sole of my Totes boot had come loose at the heel. Ernesto thought that was the funniest thing ever, as I tried to walk through the wet grass with one sole flopping. Then the right sole commenced to flap. “Oh, crap,” I said, “now they’re both loose.” About that time, the left one detached completely, so I picked it up.

The first sole falls off.

“Give me your phone, give me your phone,” Ernesto said, and stopped laughing long enough to get a shot of me holding my left boot sole. He then insisted that I share it with my parents right away. While the rest of our group heard what I’m sure was excellent information about the humane treatment of livestock, we hung back and I sent the message. Then we walked on, and my right boot sole fell off. I was four yards away before I realized I’d left it behind. I went back and fetched it.

By then I had a reply from Daddy: “So sorry about the boot but Mom can’t stop laughing.”

I soldiered on through the farm tour, walking on cardboard insoles. They were surprisingly sturdy but naturally failed to keep my feet dry. We saw pigs, farm-stay campsites (including a yurt, where a beautiful black cat slept on the queen-sized bed), then walked through the stickiest red mud you ever saw to visit the sheep barns and the baby lambs. At one point I considered just going back to the car to get my dry socks and shoes, but I did want to see the lambs, and they were very sweet and well worth seeing.

Back at the Haw River Ballroom, Ross brought in platters of the most delicious charcuterie and bottles of wine, then we had a wonderful dinner of copa with risotto and salad, followed by a muscadine doughnut. It was such a great day, one in which the pig was well and fully celebrated as we learned more than we ever hoped to know about processing our own food and the community connections that sustain us all.

And while it was all memorable and nourishing, nothing—not ham, not doughnuts, not even wee spotted piglets—is as truly divine as dry socks when you really need them.

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Loose Change

Last weekend I spent some time cleaning out the guest bedroom and the three-drawer oak dresser that’s in it. Both were in bad shape, because during the holidays the guest room becomes my Christmas gift staging area, and I hide the clutter in the dresser. There was also a large plastic bin in the room that I’d been using to collect stuff to take to Goodwill, and because we’re short of shelf space there were stacks of books on the floor. I found space for the books in different places, mainly the linen closet (which has more books than linens in it). During the process, a “Loose Change” envelope from Wachovia Bank fell out of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin.

“Loose change” seemed like a pretty good sum-up of the stuff I discovered as I tidied the room and cleared out the dresser. I came across many long-forgotten and mildly interesting items in the drawers: a box of old letters and cards; a stained-glass star with the tip of one arm broken off; a decorative round box that held an orphaned earring, a pearl button, several red beads, and a safety pin; and a basket about the size of a baseball. Oh! I also found my two autographed baseballs! I am forever putting them away where the sun can’t fade the signatures and then forgetting where they are. It’s always a lovely surprise when I come across them. One was signed by Pee Wee Reese, and the other by Jim “Catfish” Hunter.

The letters and cards I found—from my friends Kathy and Ruby, and two from my grandmother—got me interested in seeing what I had written to them, so I checked my old computer files to re-read my side of the conversations. Here’s some of the loose change I found there (edited for clarity and loosely organized):

Fine Dining I

Jeanne and I decided we wanted to go to a lowbrow place for lunch, so we picked the Waffle House. When the waitress came over to take our orders, she looked down at her pen and clicked it a couple of times experimentally.

“There’s grits on my pen,” she said. “But I reckon it’ll still write.” 

We ordered, the pen worked fine, and while we waited for our food Jeanne took two dollar bills to play some songs on the juke box. She played “When I’m 64” by the Beatles and two of the Waffle House songs, including “Special Lady at the Waffle House.” That got all the waitresses riled up, and the oldest one—a tiny woman with a fierce expression—came to our table, brandishing a mop. She looked straight at me and said, “Hold my arm.”

I clamped my hand on her free arm. She turned to Jeanne and shook the mop at her. “You better be glad she’s holding my arm,” she said, “else I’d come after you for playing that dang Waffle House song!” 

Fine Dining II

Ernesto and I went out to dinner with my parents this weekend. We had finished our meal and paid the bill, and finally we got up to go. Ernesto and I went first, and my dad came along behind with Mama. She didn’t have her walker with her, so she was holding tight to Daddy’s arm. We made it to the door of the restaurant well before they did, and Ernesto held it open for them to come through. As they approached, Daddy noticed that Mama still had a grip on her extra-large cloth dinner napkin, which was nearly dragging the ground. He said, “Virginia, you’re about to walk out with your napkin.” At that moment, our waitress came up behind them, said, “I’ll take it,” and whisked it away. Daddy proceeded outside with Mama, and Ernesto let the restaurant door close behind them. At that point Daddy said, “Well, you’ll never get a whole set like that.”

The Church Bake Sale

I was working the church baked goods table at our annual craft fair and hot dog sale a few years back when two sisters, a short, pretty one with short dark hair, and a tall, pretty one with long red hair came at the end of the day. I had just put up a sign declaring that everything was half price. Each sister had a baby in a stroller, and as they chatted I learned that the red-haired sister was visiting the dark-haired sister for the weekend and both were concerned about having plenty of food for their combined families. They bought an apple pie, all of the muffins and sausage biscuits on the table, loaves of bread, and assorted cookies. Since they still wanted to go look at some of the craft tables, once they’d paid for the baked goods I helped them tuck it in the shade underneath the table for safekeeping.

Later, when the sisters returned, I started pulling everything out and placing it on the table. The last baked good to come up was the apple pie, with a tinfoil lid. When I put it on the white-clothed table I noticed a few tiny ants. “Oh, no,” I said, “I’m afraid the ants found the pie while it was under the table.”

The tall, red-haired sister removed the foil and examined the top crust carefully. “There are only two, or maybe five,” she said. She blew lightly across the surface of that pie, sending flakes of top crust sailing onto the grass. Then she blew again, a little harder, and a larger piece of crust broke off and flew. “There,” she said. She slapped the foil back on top and started stacking muffins onto the stroller.

Spiders…

Earlier in the day, a lady came by the bake sale with a sort of dark blue medical device on her right foot, one of those cushiony things with two Velcro straps across the top of the foot.

“How’s your foot?” I asked. I figured she had sprained her ankle.

“It’s feeling pretty good,” she said, looking down at it. “I got bit by a brown recluse spider. It was hiding in the toe of the shoes I keep in my carport, so I can just slip them on when I want to run outside.” She looked up, and shook her head. “That spider bit me to the bone,” she said. “I lost a toe!”

I was horrified, but she added calmly, “You can bet that when I see a spider now, I stomp it good and hard.”

…and Snakes

My nephew, Will, has been in school in Idaho, and he came home this summer wearing a rattlesnake rattle on a leather cord around his neck. It wasn’t store-bought; he had actually killed the owner of the rattle. My sister told him that she did not wish him to tangle with rattlesnakes, and she told him about a colleague whose father was bitten by a rattlesnake while reaching into some brush to retrieve a bird he’d shot. “He nearly lost his hand!” she said. “He had to take anti-venom treatment for weeks.”

Will acknowledged the truth of this. The director of the school had already told him, “Whatever a rattlesnake bites, you should be prepared to lose.”

That same summer my dad found a black snake on the back porch steps, so he decided to relocate it. The snake attempted to flee, and slithered into a crack as if it planned to enter the crawl space (and from there the basement). Daddy was quick enough to grab the snake by the tail, but he said that a snake is surprisingly resistant to being dragged out of a crack, and he thinks he sprained the snake’s tail. He successfully relocated it to the woods, though.

Engineered Potato Salad

Daddy not only wrangles snakes when he has to, he also makes a mean potato salad. He printed the recipe in extra-large type from a site on the Internet. And because he is at heart an engineer and a craftsman, he is a stickler for precision.

“He would kill you, making potato salad,” Mama told me. “He gets his recipe out, and it calls for two pounds of potatoes. So he puts his potatoes in a bowl, and then he carries them down the hall to the bathroom. He weighs himself first, and then he gets back on the scale holding the bowl of potatoes.”

It’s good potato salad, too.

I Avoid Making a Pun (Until Now)   

Our minister has two granddaughters who were visiting this weekend. They are 4 and 3 years old, I would guess, and just as cute as they can be. They announced that they would like for the congregation to sing “Zacchaeus,” so he brought them up to the front of the church, and they led the singing. Both girls wore very pretty little butterfly clips in their hair. When I commented on the clips, their grandmother said, “The girls found them yesterday. They used to belong to their aunt.”

I started to say, “Ah, hairlooms,” but I was afraid that no one would get my joke and it really wasn’t good enough to survive a long explanation.

Adding It All Up

Pablo Neruda wrote a poem called “Ode to Things,” and I think that it is a decent sum-up of what it means when you revisit the bits and pieces that you’ve collected in your life, whether they are solid as a glass star or as light as a bake-sale memory. Here’s a fragment of his poem:

…these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures….
…
all bear
the trace
of someone’s fingers
on their handles or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.
…
O irrevocable
river
of things…
…
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.

 

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The St. Swithun Award for Outstanding Achievement in Egg Loss

I won a trophy! Well, a consolation prize. My sister found it at an antiques mall and presented it to me at Thanksgiving, soon after Ernesto and I went from married, with chickens, to empty nesters.

It was like this:

At the end of the summer we removed the fence around the chicken coop and allowed the hens to roam free. It seemed sensible, since they were able to find ways out of their pen pretty much any time they wanted, and having the fence down made it easier to mow inside the pen. Plus, I loved having the hens out and about, running with the goats or hanging out under the bird feeders. They always went back to the coop to lay eggs and sleep. Life was peaceful and good.

Until Halloween weekend. We went off to work that Friday the owners of two goats and 10 chickens. When we got home on Friday evening, I collected the eggs and noticed that one of the hens was missing. Ernesto said he had spotted a feathery pile across the road and up a bit that morning on his way to the office, and we imagined that some critter had gotten a hen and carried it away. It was a shame, but it does happen from time to time. I didn’t fret about it much.

The next morning we awoke to find that our white goat, Iris, had escaped from the corral and was standing outside the fence, looking as if she very much wanted back in. I went out to open the gate for her and found four chickens dead between the coop and the garden, and two more dead inside the coop. I report that quite calmly, don’t I? At the time, I was not calm. I didn’t scream or faint or anything, but it was a terrible shock, the kind where you walk back and forth and look at the poor limp hens and imagine that in another few seconds they will perk up and live again.

Two hens were actually still alive, though seriously rattled, and another was unaccounted for. I believe that whatever savaged the chickens had spooked poor Iris so badly that she leapt (hard to imagine) out of the corral. She has such stumpy legs, it actually cheered me up to think of her jumping.

We spent a sizable chunk of Saturday afternoon trying to catch the two surviving chickens to put them into the nursery coop, which is smaller and in a high-security pen. It used to be a dog pen, so it has a chain-link fence and the stable forms one wall. When the chickens were young, Ernesto added a layer of chicken wire across the top to discourage attacks from the air. We use it as a halfway point for new chicks. Once they’re sturdy enough to move out from beneath a heat lamp, they live in the nursery pen until they’re old enough to go free-range.

But after surviving the Night of Horror, our last two chickens would not allow us near them. They were Ameracaunas, one of them golden and the other mostly charcoal gray with touches of gold. They may have been shell-shocked, but they were still having nothing to do with us and were much spryer than Ernesto and I. That being the case, I waited for them to go into the coop for the night and then went out and reinforced the little chicken entry door with a heavy piece of wood. (Note: It was actually the sign that Ernesto had made when we had too many eggs to keep. It read “Fresh Eggs” on the first line and “Free Range” on the second line above our phone number. One afternoon a guy called to ask about the free range; he thought we were giving away an oven.)

I also took the wood-and-chicken-wire gate that used to be part of the hens’ enclosure and put that against the heavier piece of wood for extra protection.

Alas, the next morning I found both of those barricades pushed aside, and no sign of the hens. Inside the coop, a terrible struggle had caused the framing of one of the nests to be knocked completely askew. The Ameracaunas evidently fought to the bitter end.

We still don’t know what exactly went after the chickens. Possibly a fox or weasel, maybe even a coyote. Whatever it was, it took the goats several days to get over their uneasiness. The Wednesday after the massacre, Ernesto was working from home and looked up from his computer to see Iris and Rose walking up the driveway side by side. He led them back to the corral with little fuss, but we believe they were patrolling the property to make sure all was well. Either that or they were so psychologically damaged from the things they had witnessed that they were running away from home.

At about the same time that we lost our chickens and (therefore) our source of fresh eggs, I came across a bit of information about St. Swithun. It was almost as if the dear saint were reaching out to give me comfort in my chickenless and (therefore) eggless state:

He was, say the chroniclers, a diligent builder of churches in places where there were none before and a repairer of those that had been destroyed or ruined. He also built a bridge on the east side of the city and, during the work he made a practice of sitting there to watch the workmen, that his presence might stimulate their industry. One of his most edifying miracles is said to have been performed at this bridge where he restored an old woman’s basket of eggs, which the workmen had maliciously broken. – David Nash Ford’s “Early British Kingdoms”

Apparently the egg miracle was St. Swithun’s greatest claim to sainthood, though the diligent building of churches probably didn’t hurt. He also gets credit for the weather during the summer, but I never did understand that part, something about if it’s raining on St. Swithun’s day it will rain for another 40 days. Moving on to more interesting tidbits, I found a charming photo of his skull, which looks rather egg-like itself, all tied up with a crimson ribbon and resting on a red cushion. St. Swithun’s bones seem to have been sent around to several different places, as his skull is in one place while his shins and various other parts are someplace else and possibly not together. Kinda like some of our chickens, poor things. It seems appropriate but sad that he is himself a broken Humpty-Dumpty of a saint, unable to put himself back together again.

 

St. Swithun’s egg-like skull

Anyway, now we have a participation trophy for chicken farming. I am trying to decide what to have engraved on it, maybe “Remembering the Eggsistential Crisis of 2017,” or “We tried.”

But perhaps leaving it blank is the best memorial to our poor hens.

Remember: May 4 is International Respect for Chickens Day. It’s not too early to plan how you intend to celebrate and/or “protest the bleakness of chickens’ lives.”

 

 

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