Now You See it, Now You Don't

 

The other day, as my lunch crew was leaving the restaurant, I got in my truck and noticed the rest of the bunch standing by their cars looking up at the sky.  I pulled alongside them and rolled down my window.  “What are you looking at?” I asked.  Alice turned to me and said, “We are watching these two hawks circling around.  They are beautiful!” 

I looked up at a gorgeous blue sky, totally empty of clouds, birds, airplanes, or any other objects.  “They were there!” Alice said.  I just shook my head.

As I drove away, I thought about the times I have been on the other side of the story.  Especially in my horse friend circle, I am famous for seeing things no one else sees.  The first happened in South Carolina, in the darkness of early morning at the end of an all-night drive to a horse show.  My friend Carol and I were traveling with the Gernt family, and we had left Cookeville at 10:00 p.m. to get to the show early the next morning.  Vic was driving and I was in the back seat of the truck by the window.  At some point I looked out the window and saw an enormous chair sitting in front of a building.  “Look at that big chair,” I said.  No one else saw the chair.  But they told everyone at the show about the big chair I claimed to have seen.  No one knew anything about a big chair in the area, or so they said.  For the next couple of years, I was teased at every opportunity about big chairs.  But I knew I saw it.  Then, one day I received a picture from Mary Helen, who had been at the show and actually lived in the area.  She had found my big chair. 

The second big occurrence was also at a horse show, this time in Murfreesboro.  This was a week-long show, when we all moved most of our worldly goods into stalls on the backside of the big barn on the MTSU campus.  Just on the other side of a chain link fence was a public street, which brought occasional visitors who would see the horses and come inside to see what was going on.  I was alone at the stalls one morning, puttering around while everyone else was off on errands, when three children rode up on bicycles.  They asked some questions about the horses, petted the horses and talked about the things children talk about.  The little girl in the group said, “I have ducks.”

 “That’s nice,” I replied, whereupon she unzipped her backpack and, I swear, three little duck heads popped up and looked around.  She had baby ducks in her backpack!  I stared for a minute, speechless, then asked, “And you carry them around with you?”

 “They like it,” she said earnestly.  We talked a little more, then she zipped up her backpack and they pedaled away.

When my friends, Carol and the Gernts returned (it always seemed to be with them that these things happened), I said, “Y’all aren’t going to believe what just happened.”  Truer words were never spoken.  “This little girl was here and she had three little ducks in her backpack.”  I obviously did not learn any lessons from the big chair episode.

They just looked at me.  Then someone said, “Were they sitting in a big chair?”  I spent the rest of the afternoon swearing to everyone that I did see ducks in a backpack.  This was in the days before cell phones with cameras, so I had no proof.

The next day, we were all at the barn, getting ready for the show, when I looked up and saw three children riding their bicycles down the street.  I dropped what I was doing and ran out to wave them down.  “It’s them!” I shouted.  “The girl with the ducks!”  They drove through the gate and got off their bicycles.  “Show them your ducks,” I ordered.  I was about to be vindicated.

“I don’t have them today,” she said.  Talk about a letdown!  She must have seen my disappointment and noticed the looks on everyone’s face because she explained, “I had them yesterday but I didn’t bring them today.” 

“Sure,” said Vic.  “Honey, you don’t have to try to make her believe she saw ducks.”  We didn’t see the children again for the rest of the week.  I don’t know where they came from or where they went. But I promise, she did have ducks in her backpack.  And I believe Alice when she says they were watching hawks in the sky in front of Papa Kayjoes that day.

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Shared Memories

 

Sitting on my front porch the other day reminded me of a recent conversation with my aunt, my mother’s youngest sister.  Janie and I are actually closer in age than she and my mom were.  I knew, because of old pictures, that she had spent time visiting on the farm when she was a child, even before I was born and before I have any memories.  I don’t remember why the topic of my grandmother, my daddy’s mother, came up in our conversation, but it led to reminiscences that startled me with their similarities.  I don’t know why it should have, except it just hadn’t registered with me that our times with Dixie Shouse were so close together.  Janie was only ten years old when I was born.

One afternoon, when we were working on the room that was my grandparents’ bedroom and is now my bedroom, we had the windows up while painting was going on.  There was a brisk breeze blowing across the bed, the same bed that has been in that room since before I can remember.  My daddy was born in that bed, I believe, and it could very well be that my granddaddy was born there too.  I sat down on the bed for a moment and had a flashback so strong that it almost took my breath away.  Nanny, as I called my grandmother, and I were stretched across the bed, purportedly taking a nap after dinner, which is what we called our midday meal.  Nanny almost always took a nap then.  It was a family tradition from her upbringing.  “After dinner, rest a while; after supper, walk a mile,” Tom Colley said, according to family lore.  Sometimes she rested on the couch, crossword puzzle in hand, and I can still see her there stretched out with her glasses on her nose and pencil in hand.  But the best times, for me, were the times we both lay across the bed, with the window up and the breeze drifting across our faces.

Janie said she remembered lying on that same bed with Nanny, who I think she called Miss Dixie, with that same window open.  “I used to climb out that window,” she told me, laughing.  She also talked about some little dolls my mama had given her and how Nanny would play dolls with her.  Nanny played with me too, but not so much with dolls because I was such a tomboy.  (Mama used to lament how she would buy all these pretty dolls for me and I preferred trucks and horses and my farm set.)  She read to me a lot, too, and I especially remember us laughing through the Raggedy Ann books. Everybody in the house read to me – I vividly remember my mama reading the Thornton Burgess Mother West Wind series. 

We shared other memories of Nanny that day. As seems to frequently happen, the memories mostly involved food.  Her lemon pie.  I can see her now, rolling out the crust with an old wooden rolling pin.  Her lemon pie was the best, and Janey remembers her Karo pie, which I only vaguely remember.  I have the recipes, worn and splattered, for both pies.  I have never had the courage to even try to make the lemon pie.  Janey said she has made both of them – she’s braver than I am where cooking is concerned. 

I have Nanny’s old pie pan, her rolling pin and her dough tray but my skills do not live up to their history. I would sooner try to fly to the moon as to attempt homemade pie crust.   Both Nanny and Mama made the best fruit pies.  They would roll out a great big crust, larger than the pan, fill it with blackberries, peaches, or cherries, then fold the extra crust over the filling and sprinkle sugar over the top.  There was always pie on the table at dinner.  Sometimes there was enough left over for supper.

I remember Nanny’s fudge – she would cook it on the stove in a big pan, checking to see if it was ready to pour by dropping a bit in a glass of water to see if it made a ball.  Then she would drop it on waxed paper by the spoonful.  It seemed to take forever for it to be cool enough to eat, but it was always worth the wait.  I don’t think I have that recipe; I’m not even sure she had one written down.  When I make fudge, I use a candy thermometer.  I never got the knack of using the glass of water.

The conversation with Janie made me think about shared memories and how special they are.  I had lunch with one of my cousins last spring, and I was telling her some family story.  “I’ve never heard that,” she said.  She suddenly got this sad look on her face and said, “I don’t have anybody to tell that to.”  Her parents are gone and she lost her only brother to Covid a couple years ago.  It struck me almost as a physical blow how sad it is when the people are gone that share your best memories.   I find myself thinking the same thing sometimes when something happen that I wish I could tell my mom and dad.  Brandi Carlile has a song with a line in it that says, “stories don’t mean anything if you got no one to tell them to.”  Sharing memories is almost as important as making memories.  I’m glad I still can do both.

Food for Thought or Thought for Food?

 

I was rummaging around the kitchen the other night, looking for something to eat that didn’t involve defrosting, mixing, or cooking.  For some reason, a vague memory skittered through my head of pineapple sandwiches.  It seemed so unlikely that I had to look it up.  Sure enough, pineapple sandwiches were, and possibly still are, a southern thing.  My granddaddy used to make them, if I recall correctly.  My granddaddy did not cook on a regular basis, but he had a few things he specialized in.  Before I ever heard of s’mores, he made s’mores-like things with crackers, peanut butter, and marshmallows.  I can still picture them, toasted in an old black baking pan.  The crackers at that time came in square packages with four crackers in a large square.  I haven’t seen them like that in years and years.  I’m not sure, but I think they later came packaged with two small squares hooked together to make a rectangle before it became common to just have them in a small sleeve with a single cracker. The peanut butter was spread on crackers, topped with a marshmallow or two and slid into the oven under the broiler.  There was no chocolate involved, although I wouldn’t doubt that some people added it.

I have mentioned before in a story that Granddaddy was famous for his country ham.  He began with a ham processed and cured right here on the farm.  Sugar cured ham from a recipe that, if it was written down, has been lost over the years.  I have his instructions for cooking the ham, a long process involving boiling the meat in a lard stand, wrapping it in a quilt and allowing it to sit, then trimming and baking it in an oven with a coating of sugar and spices.  He didn’t use pineapple on his ham, something that I have a deep-seated prejudice against even now.  Pineapple sandwiches, pineapple in sweet tea, but pineapple never appeared in any kind of meat when I was growing up.   I think there is something in the Bible about that, somewhere in the Old Testament, right close to the verse about not putting sugar in cornbread.   We didn’t eat pizza when I was a young child, but I’m positive that if we had, no pineapple would have appeared on that dish either!  Fruit is not meant to touch meat, just like fruit salad must be kept separate from other food on your plate, preferably in a pretty little cup.  But that food touching on your plate is a whole different story.

I do remember eating sandwiches made with crowder peas, mustard sandwiches and crackers with butter spread on them.  I saw something not long ago about crackers with butter being a popular new snack.  We not only ate crackers spread with butter; I’m pretty sure they used to bring a basket of crackers with little containers of butter to the table in restaurants before they brought our food.  Maybe that was a Southern thing.

Granddaddy also made fruit tea when we had big gatherings at church or at other community meals.  He had 2 or 3 big stoneware crocks, cream colored with blue strips near the top, that he would fill with tea, sugar, lemon juice, sliced lemons and pineapple juice.  I don’t have his exact measurements – I’m not sure he had them written down and I can’t imagine making that much tea at one time anyway.  But people who knew him still talk about that fruit tea, mixed in the big crocks with ice and covered with dish towels to keep the flies out. 

In those days, we served church dinners on large hay wagons out back of the church.  It wasn’t so much dinner on the ground as it was dinner on the wagon!  I wish I could say that I still have one of those big crocks, but somehow we accidentally sold both of them in an auction after my daddy died.

I can’t remember as much about the pineapple sandwiches as I wish I did. I can’t remember if they had cheese slices on them or if it was just mayonnaise spread on white bread and a pineapple slice.  I expect my grandmother made the mayonnaise in the beginning, but I think she eventually used Miracle Whip instead.  I think these were made for church dinners too, although I am not positive.  They may have just been a weekend supper dish in hot weather.  My mama told me that when we gathered at my great-grandmother’s house for meals, they always waited for Nanny to make the mayonnaise. She had a glass container with the word “mayonnaise” and the recipe for it etched on the front with a little handle to crank on top.  I still have the container, but I would not dare to attempt to make mayonnaise.  I don’t see that ending well. 

Granddaddy also made excellent scrambled eggs.  He cooked sausage in the skillet first then cooked the eggs in the same skillet with the leftover grease and little bits of sausage meat.  I remember one time when my mother had been in the hospital and said when she same home that Granddaddy cooked those eggs for breakfast the next morning and it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

When I looked up pineapple sandwiches, I found directions for plain old pineapple mayo and bread and I found several recipes for grilled pineapple and cheese sandwiches.  I did not find recipes for un-grilled pineapple and cheese sandwiches.  Maybe the cheese part is just my imagination because I don’t think our sandwiches were grilled.  I do still eat pineapple and shredded cheese with a dollop of mayo on top and I still eat what we called pear salad.  I thought everyone ate pear salad, which was served in little dessert cups with a leaf of lettuce under the pears, shredded cheese on the pears and of course that little dollop of mayo that was also served on top of congealed salads.  A weird thing about pear salad is that it’s not nearly as good with sliced pears as with halved pears.  I have no idea why, but it’s true.   It's the same principle of cutting sandwiches in four little triangles.  You can eat a dozen little triangles, even if you normally would only eat one sandwich at a time. It's a math thing, I suppose.   I found out years later that pear salad is apparently a Southern thing and people up north never heard of it.  I’ll bet they haven’t heard of pineapple sandwiches either, and I’ll bet they never ate fried chicken, deviled eggs and potato salad served off a hay wagon under a grove of oak trees.

Just after my book was published, my friend Linda bought her copy from Amazon and a couple days later she sent me a message that she had started reading it but had to stop to eat lunch because I wrote so much about food.  I don’t know why I write so much about food; maybe I need to ponder on that and write about it!