Sisters, Sisters

I journeyed back for a short, sweet visit to my sister in Alabama last week. It was lovely to spend time with my family down there, especially with one of our South Carolina cousins who’d come to stay as well.  In between cooking, talking, and eating, we took some time to clear through a few rooms of my sister’s house.

Sweet Home.

She sent me home with, among numerous other things: our Aunt Sadie’s sewing machine, our grandfather’s cross-cut saw, our grandmother’s rocking chair, our old family ice cream freezer, our father’s Coleman ice chest, some cuttings from a white wisteria I’ve long admired in her front yard, and a brick. Just the one brick. 

Spring comes softly and sweetly that             far south. At least it does most years. So one delicious morning, we decided to drive into the country to the first community I remember as home. Despite the cheerful baby blue sky, sad changes soon became evident. Only last spring, which was far less soft and sweet than this one, storms raged over the area, bringing tornadoes.

It looked as though someone had let slip the dogs of war.  Trees were blasted. Large, old ones-- far too many to count.  Houses were gone, just gone. The double punch of the recession and damage had decided Billy Parker to close his grocery store and garage after what must have been forty years of business in the community. It stood padlocked. Empty. Lifeless.

 At the top of the rise where my childhood church once stood there was, now, just the top of the rise. It was a sobering drive. 

 So we looked for and found a few places that were still as we remembered them, and we remembered them together.  After awhile, we started to re-remember the places that weren't there anymore as well, along with the people and happenings that made them worth recalling.

Black Walnut is a great favorite.

I would have taken a picture
of the whole cake, but it was gone before I could.

Then my sister took us back to her house and baked us a pound cake.  It was delicious.  She makes wonderful pound cakes.  And she gives me her recipes.  She's a very generous woman, my sister.

And so was my other sister, as well.  Among other things, she taught my nine-year-old self how to crochet.  That must have taken patience and sacrifice.

And that one brick?  My nephew picked it up from the remaining rubble of the church mentioned above, the one that mostly blew off the rise.  This would be the nephew who is the only child of the sister who taught me how to crochet when I was a nine, back before she died at the same age my youngest child is now.

L-R: Leann, Brenda, Joan

You, know, I think Thomas Wolfe had a point. You can’t go home again.  At least not to the same home you left.  But I have to wonder if he’d have written that book differently, or at all, if he’d had sisters to help ease his heartache with laughter and pound cake and bricks.

Benefited greatly from being the youngest child.

I hope you spend some time with someone you love today.  Thanks for visiting. Come again soon.  

Kept everybody's toys.

Leann

. . . and you can stay as long as you like . . .

How to Play Saturday Morning Kitten Footie

Looks innocent enough.

Possibly not what immediately comes to mind.  Read on.

What You’ll Need

1)    One kitten, old enough to eat solid foods but young enough still to be curious and active.

2)    One Saturday morning with nothing on the calendar. No projects, no appointments, no chores at all. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Make it happen.

3)    A teammate with an astute appreciation for time-wasting, a sense of fun, and the temperament to withstand numerous tiny bites and scratches.

4)    One fairly indestructible bed covering, or one which is already far beyond further damage.

How to Play   

1)    As the morning light tiptoes into the room, you and your teammate are conscious much earlier than necessary because you have reached an age, now, when you wake up at the same time every day, whether you need to get up or not.

2)    If necessary, wake up the kitten also.

Left-side play.

    3)    Recline comfortably, propped against as many pillows as possible. One person, usually the one on the left, begins play by moving his or her left big toe ever so slightly until the kitten notices and attacks.  Immediately cease movement of that toe.

    4)    While the kitten is still attacking the big toe of the person on the left, the person on the right begins to jiggle his/her right big toe in an alluring fashion until the kitten’s attention is diverted, and with one enormous pounce, the kitten lands on the opposite side of the bed from where she was originally, and begins to shred the bed covering over the right toe of the right side person.  Immediately cease movement of that toe. Continue play in this manner until the kitten loses interest in toes.

Right side play.

    5)    Using the same technique, and keeping all appendages safely under the indestructible bed covering, continue play using hands, alternating from one person to another until the kitten loses interest in hands. Revert to toes.

6)    Laugh with your teammate like idiots at every pounce as though you haven’t played this game hundreds of times and have never, ever, before watched a kitten rip all over your shredded bedspread.

7)    Repeat steps  3-6 in a pseudo-infinite loop.

8)    While repeating steps 3-6, muse aimlessly about how many cats and kittens have lived with you over the years and how they’ve added to your enjoyment of life.

9)    As you notice out of the corner of your eye how the morning sun lights up his face, shift your attention to your teammate.  Be reminded of how he laughs with his eyes more than any other part of his body. Marvel at how, just at this moment, he still looks like the 17-year-old you fell in love with. Think of how he’s made your life so much richer than you ever could have imagined. How when you were young and breathlessly silly over the boy, you thought you couldn’t possibly love anyone in the world as much as you did him.  Now you know it.

Fifteen bottles and counting.

   10) It occurs to you that you could measure your life together by the cats you’ve known, and also, you think oddly, by the number of those little bottles of Tabasco sauce that you’ve gone through together. It also occurs to you to wonder how many more kittens and bottles of Tabasco sauce the two of you have left to share.

   11) Notice abruptly that you can vaguely make out the shape of your mother-in-law standing slightly past your teammate's right shoulder. She looks exactly like she did just after your father-in-law died, a few months before she followed him.  She has the same sweet, sad look on her face as the morning she told you in a broken whisper how hard it was after nearly fifty years together, to wake up every morning, every single one, without her high-school sweetheart there anymore.

Patsy loves Jerry forever, and vice versa.

   12) In an unsuccessful attempt to ease the painful little catch in your chest that that the last step produced, take in a sharp breath. Remember to breathe out.

   13) Now turn your attention to the door as the dog pushes it open and walks in to snort disgustedly at you for giving too much attention to the kitten again. She gives the three of you a hard stare.  For a moment you all stare back at her.  Suddenly, she passes an explosive parcel of gas and twists quickly around to face her own bottom as if trying to catch it.  Then she turns back to you with a look that says, “Where on earth did that come from?”

Our Scout is a long-suffering dog.

14) Laugh. A lot. Rolling all over each other and the tatty bed covering, completely routing the kitten.  Laugh as though this morning, and the both of you, will go on forever.

Not always quite as idyllic as they appear here,
 but not bad for thirty years, three kids, one dog, nine cats,
and fifteen little bottles of Tabasco sauce.

The thing to remember about Saturday Morning Kitten Footie is that there are no losers in this game.  Only winners.  Including the dog.

Hope you find laughter in your day. Thanks for visiting.  Come again soon.

Will grow up to be luckier than she deserves.

Leann

No kittens, dogs, or husbands were harmed in the writing of this blog.

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Pepper in My Coffee

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Look what the Dirty-Dish Fairy brought me

It’s sunny and cold this morning. Sunflower seeds dangle off the deck in a feeder that’s supposed to be squirrel-proof but isn’t quite.  One cardinal and a group of chickadees peck at it with enough gusto to keep it turning like a carousel.

The dirty-dish fairy visited me in the night, as he often does now that my adult children have moved back home to live.  God bless their little cotton socks.

After my first dishwasher-load of the day, I’ve got my coffee and Pandora going.  Love me some Pandora.  It’s a Leon Redbone kind of day today.

Starr, aka, Lizzie Borden

The coffee is thick, black, sweet, and spicy, just the way I like it, and I’m having it in the company of Scout and Starr, my daily household companions.  I’m the only coffee drinker in the house.

Scout the Wonder Dog

My best coffee companion was my mother.  She taught me to like it by the time I turned three.  Yes.  I guess now that would raise some eyebrows.  But I don’t think it’s done me any harm and it’s certainly brought me many happy memories of time with Mama.

Of course she didn’t just pour me a big, hot mug of Red Diamond and tell me to have at it.  No. 

In the mornings, in the farmhouse we lived in when I was tiny, our family started the day with a cooked breakfast—eggs, sausage, biscuits, jelly or preserves—and there was a great bustle as my brother and sisters ate and ran for the county bus that took them to the local high school. My father would have been out and gone for some time by then.

That left just Mama and me.  When the door slammed behind the last departing teenager, Mama tidied the table and sank the dishes into the sudsy pan. Then she got a cup and saucer out of the cupboard and poured a thimbleful of coffee in, filling the rest of the space with milk.  She brought it to me with a spoon and a warning to, “blow on it a bit before you drink it, baby, it’s still a little hot.”

If I close my eyes, I can still see how slim her hands and arms were then, and graceful. How the giving loosened her normally composed expression into the play of a smile around her lips and eyes.

After she poured herself another cup, thick and sweet and black, she sat down next to my high chair, admonishing me to eat “just another tee-niney bite more,” or asking me if I remembered to put on my underwear that morning. 

Yes, I was that young. Sometimes I forgot.  Besides, I hated underwear.  Also socks. And shoes.

But I loved, LOVED, my Mama.  And I felt like I shared the Queenship of the World with her when she sat that little cup and saucer next to my plate.

To this day, my favorite coffee is percolated.  But most days, being as I’m brewing for only myself, I use a French-press.  I sprinkle a little bit of cinnamon on the grind, and in winter I mill a good bit of black pepper on top before adding the water.

Nothing is as warming in the winter as peppered coffee.  Except for mother-love.

Still hates underwear

Good day to you. Thanks for coming.  Come again soon.


      Leann

Why Mama Clark's?

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Come on in. Make yourself comfortable. Let me tell you about my favorite place. 

In the beginning, it was just a back porch on a little house in a small town in northern Alabama, ringed round with tall trees. But later it became a store, lined floor to ceiling with shelves full of fabrics of all thicknesses and colors and patterns. 

On the bosom-fronted counter was a large brown rack of wooden spools of thread and an upright, bronze-colored cash register.  The numbers in its small windows jumped drunkenly up and down with each pushed button and made bright ringing noises like an old pinball machine.

There were drawers layered with zippers and bias tape and ribbons and interfacing. A large glass cabinet displayed buttons of all colors and sizes, with a bank of thin little drawers of more buttons underneath. There were hanging cards of snaps and hooks and eyes.  There were silvery, slivery needles, pins with heads like shoe-button candy, and fat pincushions that looked like overripe beefsteak tomatoes.

In one sunny corner was a table weighed down with pattern books too heavy for a child to lift; McCall’s and Butterick and Simplicity; circled by soft chairs to rest in while paging through them.  Underneath was a basket full of lace ends, fabric scraps, orphaned buttons, empty spools, and tattered magazines for little ones to play with while their mothers browsed and visited. 

At the back of the room was a curtained opening and through it was a small room with a big window with a sewing machine underneath.  Pieces of pinned work in progress lay across the top, and the tiny pinprick of light from the bulb just over and behind the needle glinted off the presser foot. 

Through another curtain just opposite the first, there was a kitchen decorated all around with a border of fat, faded cherries. On the back eye of the stove was a percolator full of thick, bitter Red Diamond coffee.

A tin of teacakes lived in the top right cupboard over the sink, and doughnuts nestled next to cold biscuits in a cherry-fringed metal breadbox below.

On the top wire shelf of the fat, squat old refrigerator was a half-filled pitcher of iced tea. It was brewed and doctored to the color and sweetness of wild honey and stood in a splendor of coolness.

Time, there, was measured by the movement of the sunlight over the lint-dusted wooden floorboards, whether the second or third cup of coffee had gone cold, whether the ice had melted to water in the glasses, or how much there was left, still, to talk about.

That was Mama Clark’s. At least, how I remember it now. Mama Clark’s Kitchen and Back Porch Emporium, I called it.

That was where my mother bought the goods to make our family’s clothes and curtains and bed coverings in my early childhood in the small hours of the sixties. That was where she brought her happiness and worries and ideas to share. And she brought me, her youngest child.

And I brought my curiosity, imagination and memory. 

Then one day it was gone. The whole world of it, gone.  But wherever I went in the rest of the world, I remembered it. And I decided someday I would have a kitchen and back porch emporium to share, of some kind, one way or another. Finally, here it is.

Welcome. Thanks for coming. Come again soon.