94 F Today! Vegetable Soup

Today was soooo hot. It is like midsummer here today. I was/am a sweaty mess. However, I want this weather to hold on.

Free lunch Tuesday saw vegetable soup, ham and cheese sandwich, crackers, cookies for dessert, and unsweetened tea. Happily, I did not have to stand over this, cooking soup in a hot kitchen. Luckily, there were no peas in the soup. Of course, we got a to-go box/bag with the same items.

For dinner, I put two bottom round steaks and lots of potatoes in a cooking bag and put it all in the oven. My hurt shoulders suffered. This is the first time I have tried to put anything in the oven since the wreck and damage to my shoulders, especially the left one.

Naturally, I made the meat dry. Ten minutes more and it would have burned. I forgot to put in onion, celery, and bell pepper for flavor. But, I did season it all with something...forgot what. At least, Tommy never complains. I tasted one bite and the meat was delicious. I didn't dare eat more of the beef. I had potatoes and my ham sandwich from lunch. I still have the soup and sandwich from lunch.

We are so exciting. I took a nap while he watched tv. Before the lunch, he took me to buy a newspaper at the paper office. And, I returned something I bought two of at Lowe's.

I bought something at Lowe's, could not find it and thought I imagined buying it. When I ended up with two, I was puzzled. Anyway, he drove me to Lowe's to make a return. Neither of us bought anything today, a good thing.

One of my chickens is laying an egg. They eat it before I can get there....grrr. got to stop it. I forgot where wooden eggs are found, but I will call around. I wonder if a pink plastic Easter Egg will work?

So, summer is still with me and I have no complaints. What is it like where you live? And, remind me where you live.

Trembling Enchantment of Green...again

 

"He who loves a garden still his Eden keep" A. Bronson Alcott

A republishing of one of my favorite posts. Indulge me.

Don't get me wrong. I never wear green. Nothing in my house is green--no walls or furnishings. Green of nature enthralls me every year as though I had never seen it before. As I grow older (almost 66 now), it seems I appreciate it more....not sure why. The life I see in green is something Thoreau would appreciate. Nothing else seems to hold the peace and promise of green trees, foliage of yard plants, and the grass. Maybe it's just me. My St. Augustine grass has a depth to its green that is lacking in other grasses that I have observed. By no means have I experienced all the greens and grasses of the earth.

As I drove the back way from Huntsville, south to my home, avoiding the interstate, about 6:30 pm last Saturday, I was struck by the majesty of the land around me. There were few houses, a little mountain foothills range, and absolute quiet. People must be at home eating, tending the last bit of their garden, or getting ready to go out on Saturday night, I thought. This road normally has many cars. Not so when I drove the 30+ miles home this evening.

Since I had the radio off, the drive seemed especially serene. From now on the radio will be off so the noise won't interfere with the green experience. I could not see green for the cacophony of my favorite music (60s and easy listening).

I passed the old barn right beside the road with the little stand for selling produce. No one has sold produce there for the last 25 years. The old man died. His widow insisted on raising and selling gourds. Maybe that is produce. Her son raised gourds just for her and filled a 6' x 6' x 4' high lattice bin, made just for her and her gourds. The bin has a nice roof and overhang for shoppers and gourds to stay dry and shaded.

One summer day, I saw her, bent and walking slowly. She wore a faded, printed cotton house dress, topped by a faded apron. She had a bonnet on her head and old knee socks scrunched around her legs. For years there was never anyone at the stand. The one sighting of her and a later conversation with a very young, respectful relative were the only means of communication except for the locked money box in which to deposit money to pay for gourds. Laughing gently, the relative said the old woman had the only key and checked it regularly.

Now, there are only very old gourds in the bin. It does not look like they raise gourds any longer. The young relative had pointed them out to me, up on the hill near the woods. Did she die? I wonder. Everything was too quiet and green to stop and inquire.

Even the dogs seemed to honor the peace of the green afternoon, soon to be dusk. All their masters must have mowed the lawns because every lawn was freshly cut. The scene was not marred by a jarring note. Mowers were gone. No cars were in sight in the yards and few were on the road. Nature, even subdued by a lawnmower, seemed to be in charge. For one moment, I wondered if it were this quiet a hundred years ago. Home awaits me.

Late Spring has given us over a week of rain which seems to have added another dimension to the green world. As I stood in the backyard today, hanging clothes on the line, I was struck by the fact that I could see only green as I gazed round me. Only the clothes, the chicks and part of the back of my house broke the green spell. The sky was blue with clouds. The 6 foot back fence was obscured by scuppernong vines and wisteria. Even the trunks of the trees were gone, hidden by privets that reached up toward the branches of the hickory nut trees and bowed to the ground, touching the grass. The low-growing limbs of the tree hid my car and the house next door.

The diffuse, trembling green of Nature seemed at her best. Green must be female, tantalizing us each day to play with her, to interact. Green has many agendas and roles--nurturing, playing, birthing, tending, feeding, burying, cleaning, listening, hiding. Green is there to discover as I increasingly have the last few days.

It all seemed too perfect, punctuated by two bright petunia plants, rescued from brown doom at Lowe's. I nurtured them back to their green and pink state. The old-fashioned roses on the back fence have faded, and I won't cut the vines until I see hips. Maybe I will have hips.

For a moment, I felt as if I were in a secret garden, seeing nothing and hearing only the birds and chicks. Sometimes, it is hard to tell them apart just by listening.

I had no far-off horizon, only walls of green on four sides and a blue ceiling. The house is there, but from where I stood, I could not really see it. The blaze of the sun, though blinding, kept me focused on the green. Weeds grown up over my rock garden hid even the heat of the rocks so nothing emanated. It was all green, just green.

This feeling comes over me every year. Today pulled all the green I feel from the depths of me. I never told anyone before.

"He who loves a garden still his Eden keeps." (sign in my yard)
A. Bronson Alcott

(Written on June 22, 2009, ten days after I had no TV)

(July 2012 Just another little reprint and two weeks late, since I missed republishing it in June. I still have not asked about the old woman. I will; I promise. The yard is overgrown after five days of rain.)

Your turn
Does the green of nature touch you deeply? Does green, lush foliage renew you as it does me?

1950s--fans, oppressive summer heat and nostalgia

As I was looking at the June 2010 issue of Country Living, there was an article about the nostalgia of classic electric fans. The fans they showed were round table models and one round type like a box fan. These are nothing like the fans that bring back memories of my youth. We had no pink fans! And, certainly no protection from our monster black fans.

When we would drive from Jackson, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, we drove mostly at night. My siblings would sleep. Mama told me to sleep. But, sleep rarely came to me as we slipped through the dark, sometimes the only car on the road. I was fascinated to see the sun come up. Usually, I would rather have been asleep at sunrise.

In the early 1950s we had no air conditioner in the car or at home. (Neither did any of our relatives.) So, driving during the night made the trip bearable in the summer. We would leave about 3 a.m. Besides, my parents had four children, sleeping instead of fussing about who looked at whom, wanting to eat, needing to make bathroom stops, complaining about the heat, and a million other things we could think up on a long trip.

We arrived at our uncle's house and waited until everyone awoke. My grandmother lived in a tiny house out back, built just for her. Sooner or later that morning, I would be tired because of no sleep all night. Eventually, I would be so exhausted and begging to sleep that I would be taken to my grandmother's house to sleep on her double bed.

Mama always adjusted the fan to blow on me. I remember sleeping so soundly in the intolerable heat with a fan humming away, cooling me only a bit and leaving me with a sore throat. Our house was never that hot, and we never slept with the fan directly on us at such close range. AND, we never took a nap on the bed at home! I can close my eyes and see grandma's house and hear that loud, old fan.

When I was about eight, we still took naps every day of the week we were not in school. In the summer we slept on the cool wood floors with a fan stirring the air. Beds were too squishy to be cool. Mattresses held our body heat and pressed into our damp bodies, unlike the bare wood floors. When mosquitoes invaded the house and evaded my mother and her pump Gulf Spray, the fans kept us from being bitten. Mosquitoes did not land when a breeze buffeted them about.


Fans were just a way of life back then. At one house Daddy put two screens together and freshly-mown grass in between. He soaked the grass with water and turned on the huge, square, window fan to pull air into the house. We became very cold on even the most torrid days. Of course, no one knew we were all allergic to grass!

Just look at the picture. A grown man could just plunge his arm through to the shoulder. One whack of the fan blade, and he would only need one glove. (picture is way below and I cannot move it!)

We always had fans that were black table models. The one thing I remember that they all had in common was that they were DANGEROUS. Yes, the bars across the front to shield the blades from little fingers were three and four inches apart, allowing access to the blades. One day, when I was about fourteen, I walked into a room where a fan was sitting on a table just inside the door. As I entered the door, I dropped my hand--right into the fan. All four fingers look like they had been beaten and felt even worse. About two days later, I could finally move my fingers and the knuckles were not as swollen. That is how we often had lessons reinforced long ago. Never after that did I allow my hand near a fan.

Of course, everyone had to be vigilant about children just learning to pull up and those just learning to walk. They were the most likely to investigate. Toddlers were mischievous, and older children and teens were just not careful. For all the dangers in fans, I still remember them fondly.

In the kitchen a fan and open windows did not suppress the oppressive heat of the day and cooking in an oven. But, it was the best most people had. Folks, we just sweated lots. Living in the Deep South at that time in the summer was hard. Heat was just a fact of life for about eight months of the year. Electric table fans were our only salvation.

Right now, in the Deep South I am suffering. There is no central air in this house, just an ac window unit meant to cool several rooms. Since it was installed in the window in 1977, I suppose I am lucky it blows anything resembling cool air. I use a fan to pull the cooled air from a window ac unit in another room into the kitchen. This way, I don't have to run the ac continuously to make the kitchen bearable.  At dusk the temperature was 92 degrees. The temperature is not falling below 75 during the night!

The fans over 50 years after I napped with one are hunks of plastic with some metal. They have no style and no imagination. But, they do move air.

Is it hot where you are? Do you remember the old, black fans of the 50s?