Grandma's house

I believe this is the first picture ever taken of me, when I was eight days old. It was taken in the yard at Grandma's house. It shows me in the rocking chair she sat in to crochet, write letters, read her daily chapter from the Bible, and listen to her soap opera on the radio. She never owned a television.

It's no wonder I have such sharp recollections of her house: We had family gatherings there every Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Her house was a small one, and there were lots of children and grandchildren around on these holidays. Somehow, there was room for us all.

When I was old enough to be away from my parents for any length of time, I would spend a week with Grandma during the summer. I would follow her to the chicken house to gather eggs and to the barn to milk Patsy. She was often in the garden, and in summer, of course, she was canning fruits and vegetables. Grandma was never idle; even if she was sitting in her rocking chair, she was crocheting or writing letters.

I loved to roam in the woods across the road from her house, and wade in the creek; it was there that I had my one and only experience with leeches. When I got out of the creek and saw those slimy things hanging onto my legs, I went running to Grandma, yelling, and she held a match to the nasty things one by one until they let go.

Her life was very orderly. She read a chapter from the New Testament every night; she went upstairs to her quilt frame every afternoon, Monday through Friday, and turned out beautiful quilts. Sunday afternoons or evenings, she wrote letters. Lots of letters, because she had lots of friends.

Uncle Leo, Aunt Mary, and their four kids lived about a quarter-mile up the road,so when I was at Grandma's I always had somebody to play with. Carolyn, the oldest, wasn't much for child's play; I think she was born an adult. The others, though, were always ready to join in my silly pretend games.

Because they lived so close to Grandma, Uncle Leo and Aunt Mary were the ones to see that she got her weekly "trading" done in Bethany. They took her to doctor's appointments and mowed her yard. It was because of them that she got to stay in her own home until very close to her time of dying.

This is the last picture I ever took of Grandma; she had just fed Tippy (not the original Tippy; it was just too hard for her to remember a new name for a dog, so she stuck with "Tippy"). The date on this picture is 1963, and that's the year she died.

She had intestinal problems throughout the last years of her life; she'd have sick spells where she'd spend a lot of time on the couch, between trips to the bathroom (that was the only time you'd see her lying down in daytime).

Finally she was taken to the hospital, the first time in her life she had to be in such a place. She died there at the age of seventy-seven.

Everybody should be so lucky to have a Grandma like mine. Everybody should be so lucky to have aunts, uncles, and cousins like mine.

I've had a wonderful life.

Grandma's outhouse

After looking more closely at this faded old picture of my maternal grandparents with their children, I suddenly realized I might know where this shot is taken... even though I wasn't born for another twenty years.

I think the mound behind them is the "cave", or root cellar; and the structure in the background, I do believe, is the outhouse! I have two cousins who read this blog, so perhaps they can tell me in email if I'm right.

I don't know why, but it excites me to think there's a picture of Grandma's outhouse. We never called it by that name, by the way. We referred to it as the toilet. I used those facilities many times, visiting my grandma. My uncles finally put running water into her house sometime in the fifties, but in nice weather I still used the toilet when I visited her.

I wish that picture were clearer. My mom is on the right, standing in front of her father.

Today I made the best liver and onions ever, because I finally used enough onions to actually smother the liver. From the garden we had wilted lettuce (no, we're not tired of that), snow peas, and turnips. Cliff surprised me by actually taking a couple of bites of them.

The beets needed thinning, and I pulled up enough baby ones to have Harvard beets tomorrow. We're eating all this good garden stuff (as well as the liver) now, because starting next Sunday it'll be mostly meat, potatoes, chocolate, and starches for a week, once our son comes to visit. He never was much for veggies, except for sweet corn, and green beans with cheese sauce.

Remembering

As a child, I was pretty much allowed to eat anything available, at any time. Daddy often quoted some family doctor who had told them (referring to me), "We don't care what she eats, just as long as she eats." There were lots of foods I didn't care for when I was small, and I was never forced to eat those. By the time I reached adulthood, I started sampling everything I had passed up in my younger years and found out I liked all of it. Some dishes more than others, of course.

My mother was one of five children, and like most families back then, all the food on their table was home-grown. Chicken, I believe, was the main meat dish served out on the farm.

There's something I never thought about until recent years: My grandma, my mother, and some of my uncles and cousins, could be heard making the strangest statements when a platter of chicken was passed around:

"I love the neck."

"The gizzard is my favorite."

"Are all the wings gone? I love the wings!"

Yes, while I was reaching for a meaty drumstick or a nice wishbone, my Stevens relatives were fighting over the least-desirable parts of the chicken.

Those same relatives liked fat, whether it was on a pork chop or ham or a beef roast. "I love the fat," my mother would exclaim, sticking her fork in a reject piece I'd pushed to the side of my plate.

I now have a theory about these strange tastes my relatives had: Times were hard when they were growing up, and in a family with five children, one chicken might not go far. Especially considering those children worked up big appetites doing chores around the farm.

My uncles, I believe, all grew to be six feet tall, so their bodies needed a lot of fuel. I think my grandma did a bit of subtle brainwashing: with seven people at the table and only two drumsticks and two or three breast pieces, I think Grandma reached for the neck, praising it for the flavor, telling the children that was her favorite piece, for two reasons: One, because the mom always takes the smallest portion if there isn't much to go around... or she may even do without. (Ladies, can I get a witness to this?) Two, the more she praised those bony pieces (or the tough gizzard, or the fat), the more the kids grew to accept that those items were indeed prizes to be desired.

It's just a theory.

Over the years, I've developed a taste for fat (now that it's the last thing I need), and I love chicken wings, as long as there are several available; I'm not going to settle for just one, like Grandma was willing to do.

I'll still pass on the neck and the gizzard, though.

More old things

This is a 100-year-old cup and saucer my mother handed down to me. Notice the flowers on it are raised from the surface of the cup.

The message says, "Forget me not".

"Mom had this from the time she was married in 1909." I'm glad Mother stuck this onto the bottom of the saucer, so I know how old this is. I peeled back the tape to see if it said "Made in China", but there's no writing on it.

I was checking out the items Aunt Ruby had put in the drawer of the music box and found this. I imagine it's a bobby pin Grandma used. It really brought back memories of Grandma sitting in her rocking chair at bedtime, releasing her hair from the bun she wore (didn't all grandma's in the '50's wear their hair in a bun?) and brushing it, before she turned in.

Grandma always read one chapter from the New Testament before she went to bed.

Memories.

Old dishes

When my mom's sister, my Aunt Ruby, passed Grandma's music box along to me, she also gave me a set of dishes... ice cream dishes, she called them.


"These were my grandmother's," she told me. "She had them when she set up housekeeping."

The dishes were in a bread sack, and this tape was on the outside of it in Aunt Ruby's handwriting:


Now, my own grandma was born in 1888, so that means these dishes are older than that. Yesterday when I took the picture, by the way, I noticed for the first time that one of the dishes is different. Which makes me realize what a shame it is that I've kept these treasures in a drawer all this time. I need to find someplace to put them where I'll see them often!

I've asked my cousin Carolyn (that's us in the picture) some questions about all these things because her family lived right up the road from Grandma. They were the ones who took Grandma to town to do her "trading", or to visit the doctor, or to Church. In later years when she needed help with things, it was Uncle Leo's family who did whatever was needed. Carolyn is eighteen months older than I, so I imagine she remembers things I've forgotten.

In an email, Carolyn told me that she seemed to recall our grandmother mentioning that she only got two or three things from her parents' estate. Those dishes, then, would be one of those things.

Carolyn said her mother has a cup and saucer than may have been our great-grandparents', as well.

Family heirlooms.

More on my blue canning jars

Some research on the Internet has led me to believe the jars pictured in my previous entry were made between 1923 and 1933.

This goes along with a story my mother often told me.

Mother acquired a lovely little girl (around four years old, I believe, at the time) when she and my father married in 1932: my half-sister, Maxine, whose mother had died giving birth to our brother.

Someone asked Maxine if she was getting plenty to eat now that she had a step-mother (she called Mother her "foot-mama" at first).

"Oh, I should say we do!" Maxine reportedly replied with great enthusiasm. And then she started naming all the individual things they had been eating, including many canned goods given to them by my maternal grandma as sort of a wedding gift... peaches, green beans, jam, and so forth.

I like to think these old jars are the ones Grandma gave to my parents, full of things so delicious that the flavors and abundance amazed a little girl who had been without a mother for a while.

The most nostalgic food I know

It's almost 6 A.M. I've been cooking since 4 o'clock. First off, I mixed the noodles. Then while they had their twenty-minute rest, I started the old settler's beans and got them ready for the crockpot.

Today is the only big holiday feast I'm giving this year. Back before Cliff's heart issues were discovered ... before the quadruple bypass... I cooked like this at least once a month, and invited all nearby relatives to come and indulge. Now it happens once, or maybe twice, a year.

There can be no family feast here without chicken and noodles. A holiday dinner without noodles would be like Communion without the bread (or wine, take your pick). We don' t need gravy for our mashed potatoes, because we put noodles over our potatoes. Another family tradition.

You see, noodles take me back to the farthest reaches of my childhood memories, back to Grandma's house. There was never a family gathering without noodles; it was one of the first things anyone fed their infants, at Grandma's table: I recall hearing the phrase, "give that baby some noodles" more than once.

When I make noodles, I roll them up and cut them exactly the way she did it. My mom, in her later years, acquired a noodle-cutter, which my daughter, I believe, inherited. I wouldn't use it if I had it, because I like to do it the way it was done in my childhood. I like to think about Grandma.

Grandma would sit on a tall stool at the end her cupboard and roll out the dough and cut it just like you see I've done it, in the pictures. It fell to me, or whatever cousin was handy, to unroll the noodles as she cut them.

When I'm making noodles, I am back at Grandma's house. I can smell her little kitchen and see it exactly as it used to be. I can hear the clock ticking in the other room.

Merry Christmas, Grandma Stevens. Thanks for the memories.

By the way, while I'm being all nostalgic: at this entry on my AOL journal, you can see some pictures of our hog-killing yesterday, if you're so inclined.