family and friends

The Departure of the Roosters

/ eponine3 / 3 Comments

Until recently I had never had roosters before. I had hens, only hens, and they gave me eggs. That’s all I wanted, that’s all I got. I was happy and the hens were happy. A lot of people ask me: Don’t you need roosters to get eggs from hens? No. You need roosters if you want more little chicks (which I don’t). Hens lay eggs whether there is a rooster around or not. I prefer my eggs unfertilized, thank you.

I had always said I didn’t want roosters. This was because 1. My neighbor had them a few years ago and I could hear their annoying crowing all day long, all the way from his coop, which is way farther than a stone’s throw from my house. It’s at least ten stones. 2. I don’t want a major chicken operation. All I want are eggs. Hens clucking softly works for me as a background noise. They are a bit of entertainment too. Watching chickens go to town on mealy worms makes me smile. Oh boy, mealy worms!

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But all that time when I didn’t have roosters I wondered if I would change my mind if I actually had them. Would they somehow endear themselves to me? With this latest batch of 33 chicks, I had the chance to find out. (33, I know I’m crazy, you don’t have to remind me.)

It’s very hard to tell males from females when chicks first hatch. Hardly anyone can do it. You take your chances, and you don’t even really know for sure until you hear their crowing, which happens at about three months. Five of my birds started crowing a month or so ago. Three brahma roosters were “relocated,” one found his way back, leaving him plus two little (but loud) d’uccle roosters. Or so I thought.

It turns out there are other reasons not to want roosters. The crowing is, yes, every bit as obnoxious as I remembered. But roosters are also, shall we say, virile? Additionally, they want what they want regardless of how the hens feel about it. A rooster picks one pretty girl, chases her around the enclosure while she squawks like mad, and soon manages to have his way. It’s fast, and it’s the way of the world, but it riles up the hens. Understandably. I prefer a calmer flock.

Finally, someone answered my craigslist ad. God bless Pablo. Imagine that a person would drive more than an hour to come get a brahma rooster. He said he would come Saturday morning. Great!

First the Roundup. Let’s just say chickens don’t like to be captured. Perhaps there is a trick to this, but we are amateurs. The blurriness of the bird in this photo makes it clear that he is moving very fast to get away from Sandy. The job is harder than it looks.

20180714_082303.jpgPerseverance paid off, as it usually does. The brahma big boy was actually easier to nab. Look at the size of him!

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Before too long, three roosters were corralled and placed in the coop that they have been avoiding. The sliding egg door came in very handy.

 

Trapped! Oh, I mean ready for pick-up. Pablo, where are you?

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The roosters calmed down after they realized that the chase was over. So did we. Did I mention how happy I am that Pablo wants them?

What does he want them for? I had no idea, and I admit I didn’t care. You may recall the three general purposes for a rooster: dinner, lawn ornament and the fertilization of eggs. There is another and it is awful to think about: cockfighting. That people could get pleasure from this confounds me. If I let myself, I could even get angry about it, but I know you can’t stop all the evil in the world. Still, I didn’t want that to be my roosters’ fate. The only clue I got from Pablo as to his intentions was that he said he was coming with cages.

He also said he was coming in the morning and would let me know what time. In my world, the morning ends at noon. No Pablo by noon. No word from Pablo. Roosters were content in the coop, cluelessly awaiting their fate, but I was worried.

I breathed a great big sigh of relief when he drove in at about 230pm. His yellow truck did have cages in the bed – turned out he and his wife Andrea and their little boy had been to a chicken auction and already had some chickens in those cages. Pablo took one look at my brahma and said, “Whoa.” Yes, I know. He’s a big boy.

I breathed my second big sigh of relief when he told me he planned to use the roosters for stud. Andrea said she wondered if there were different strains of brahmas, big and small, because the brahma hens they had in the back of the truck were smaller than my brahma hens, and gigantic Mr. Brahma dwarfed them all. Thankfully size didn’t matter (you can save your size jokes). A brahma is a brahma after all and God bless Pablo for wanting mine.

The joyful transfer (joyful because I am soooo joyful that they are leaving) from my coop to their cages started with me getting into the coop with the roosters. What I will do to get rid of these birds!

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I was enough of a presence to make the birds run toward the door (make for the door! make for the door!) which Sandy blocked. He then got hold of them as they tried to get past. He turned them calmly around and handed them to Pablo.

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The last rooster put up more of a fuss than the others, but this little fellow had no more choice than the others had had.

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Pablo and Andrea and their son posed for me …

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… just before that glorious moment when the third rooster joined the other two in Pablo’s cage.

20180714_144148.jpgHappy smiles. Everyone is happy. All the humans anyway. No one is happier than I am!

A long time ago, a woman I knew said, “I don’t believe a thing will happen until it’s all over and I can speak about it in the past tense.”

Thus my moment of greatest joy: watching Pablo’s truck drive away with my roosters in the back, off to their new studly life. It’s over! The roosters are gone!

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Off they go! Bye-bye, roosters! Good riddance! Yay!!!!!

Until Sunday morning. Say it isn’t so!

It is true. We missed one. I heard the incriminating crow early, before dawn, fainter and weaker than the d’uccles had been. How did we miss him?! Possibly the other roosters had drowned him out or intimidated him. With them gone, he was free to let loose. All right, it wasn’t so bad. Maybe I could get used to a little crowing…

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But the rascal sealed his fate when he couldn’t help it and had to fast-chase a squawking hen around. Her racket got my attention while Sandy and I were moving plants in the late morning sun. I marched in there, caught him pronto (you are out of here, buddy!) and put him in the woods outside the enclosure. He soon walked back, curious to find himself on the other side of the fence from his beloved girls. Back and forth he walked along the outside of the enclosure. There must be a way back in…

I didn’t care. The image of him chasing an unwilling female meant I had no mercy at that point and would have relocated him to the bottom of the hill to be a fox’s lunch if I had not been so busy with the plants. But Sandy couldn’t stand it. He has a soft spot and hated to see this half silkie, half black copper maran become a snack. This rooster, despite his less-than-charming face,  has rather interesting features like blue ears and iridescent tail feathers. Sandy cornered him pretty easily and put him in the coop, away from the girls, awaiting a new life somewhere else.

Pablo, oh Pablo! Want another rooster?

Mermaids Live!

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

Imagine if there really were mermaids. The myth is ancient, the allure unending. Imagine moving through water effortlessly, changing direction gracefully, thrilling the audience thoroughly. Oops, did I say audience?

Yes, my mom and I (Mom with her eye patch, note coordinating color) were part of the audience at ACAC Four Seasons in Charlottesville. It isn’t every day you get to go to a mermaid show, but today was our lucky day.

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On this hot July afternoon we watched a dozen or so young ladies twist and flip and splash and do underwater acrobatics in as much synch as they could manage after (believe this or not) only one week of half-day lessons. It has to be hard enough to twist and flip and splash and do underwater acrobatics all by yourself, but to do it in synch with others, following the music and the instructions of your coach, that’s quite something.

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As with any performance, each player plays a part but cannot see the overall picture the way the audience does. I wish they could see how amazing they were. Imagine coordinating leg splits! No wonder they used to call this a swim ballet.

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Look at the pointed toes, the nine swimmers all upside down and doing their thing at the same time. And yes, that’s a tailfin you see on the edge of the pool. Part of the fun, surely, is not only getting into the water with other girls who want to swim gracefully together, not only learning to do things you’ve never done before, but also being able to enter that surreal, make-believe world where you are something you usually can be only in your dreams.

Yes, to be a mermaid just for a little while!

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To feel the water all around, to get a little idea of what it’s like to be a fish (a really pretty fish!), to feel sleek and strong and otherworldly, to be an elegant creature just long enough to know that you can, to feel a thrill like no other – this is a portion of what sustains us when such days have passed.

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The mermaid in this photo is Mackie, who came from California for two weeks to demonstrate techniques and to encourage and help train young swimmers. (Behind her you see the shadow of her dad, Mitch, who not only brought her here but also films the mermaids under the water while wearing scuba gear. Hats off to you too, Mitch!) Ten years ago, when Mackie was seven, she met and started training under Wendy Carter, Coach Extraordinaire, and kept on swimming in synch even after Wendy moved to Virginia. She swims with joy, passion and great skill. She also has a beautiful smile!

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Wendy directs mermaids any chance she gets — that is, when she isn’t on her way to the Pan-Am games herself to be compete with her masters team! I hope ACAC knows how extremely fortunate they are to have her on staff.

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Wendy gives these kids so many gifts every day, not the least of which is confidence. She wants them to go home and think and share and maybe shout from the rooftop (okay, maybe not the rooftop), “Wow, I did that!” And doing the next challenging thing because of having done this challenging thing will be that much easier.

We live in a world where the stories about what other people are doing are continually in front of us. Every day on the news it’s so-and-so did this fantastic thing and her brother did that unbelievable thing and this other person in some other random place did this other truly amazing thing. I think it’s great that those people are doing those great things and I don’t mean anything against them or their achievements.Watching people do their thing (and do it well) is all fine and good, especially when you can’t get out and do a thing yourself, and it’s inspirational and instructional no doubt, to say nothing of fun. We all do it sometimes, like Mom and I and a whole bunch of other people at ACAC did today.

But watching other people do their thing is a quite different than doing your own. Watching other people make their own story too much, instead of making your own, when you could be making your own, is kind of a shame. You get only so many hours each day, only so many days each year, and you don’t know how many days you have, let alone years.

The kids Wendy coaches are not watching videos about synchronized swimming. They are in the water doing it. I love that Wendy is giving them a chance to make their own stories. It doesn’t matter one single bit if any of them makes the news or ends up competing at the master’s level. What matters is that sometime down the road, they get to tell their own story, own their own memories, recall their own experiences. Not someone else’s. Theirs.

Similarly, I love that my sister read a book about straw bale gardening and decided to try it herself. Her vegetables are growing like crazy! I love that my son, who had a dream of building his own unique house, is building it. His pentagonal foundation is in! I love that my neighbor is raising her own pigs, moveable fence and all, so that she can have her own pork. I love that my aunt is going to a workshop to learn to paint pictures even better than she already does.

I love it when people make their own stories, follow their own interests, ignite their own passion, walk their own unboring path. I don’t need to see it on the news. Nearly everyone I know is doing a thing they love whenever they can, within their means, within their ability, inspiring me in different ways, in multiple ways, in spectacular ways. Today I saw mermaids in the water, daring to do something they couldn’t have done last week. What did you see? What did you do?

Pigs in the Backyard

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

First of all, not my backyard. Not my front yard. Nor my side yard. Nor my woods. To anyone who knows me: Don’t worry. I do not have pigs and I am not getting pigs. I do like pork though, and thank God some people want to raise them. There is a fabulous little breakfast place on 2nd Street in downtown Charlottesville called Bluegrass Grill. The first time I went in there I knew I’d love it because the staff wore t-shirts with “Don’t Worry, We Have Bacon” on the back. They even have bacon jam! It’s on a menu item called Smokey Joe, and available in little jars too, to take home. You want to try this, believe me.

My neighbor Tracy has pigs in her backyard, two of them this year. They are gilts, not barrows, which I learned from her means female, not male. These are fine gilts, each about 80 pounds now in early July. They will get to be about 300 pounds by the time their short but wonderful life is over.

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Pigs love acorns, and acorns make very good pork. If you are going to raise pigs for meat, you had best put them where they can eat acorns. Tracy’s pigs live on prime real estate:

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What you see is a fenced enclosure skirting the tree line. Those are mature oaks producing a feast of acorns for two constantly-eating pigs. Here, have some more, I imagine the oak trees saying to the hungry pigs during a rainstorm or a windstorm when their acorns rain down. What do I need with all these acorns? Every few days, or however often she deems it time, Tracy moves the fence along the tree line, which is not as problematic as you might think. The fencing comes in 100-foot lengths and has stiff uprights every ten feet or so with sharp points you can poke into the ground.

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The beauty of the system is that she can make the fence any shape, she can go around or in front of trees or other immovable objects in the landscape, and she can contain the pigs in one part of it while moving another part. There is a solar-powered electric zapper around the perimeter to keep them from trying to escape, but seriously, if you were these pigs, you would not want to escape.

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They have sun, shade, mud to wallow in, a terrific bath for cooling off, acorns galore, bugs, grass, leftovers. Pigs’ noses are as sensitive as our fingertips so they find the best food even among the rocks, sticks and other natural inedibles.

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I met Tracy a few years ago after she and her husband moved in. We all have our busy lives – work, family, meals, rest, projects, outings – and I hardly saw her until a month ago or so when I needed eggs. What? I needed eggs?? I have 27 chickens in my coop and I needed eggs?

Chickens don’t start laying until they are 4-6 months old and mine hatched in early March. That makes them four months old now. I know I will be inundated soon, but I’m not yet, and I wasn’t a month ago.  Tracy has 14 chickens I think, and I was happy to pay her for some. A couple weeks later she asked if I wanted some for free because she was about to be overrun. I gladly took them and gave her a jar of my homemade strawberry jam in return. She mentioned the pigs, and I said Can I come see them sometime?

There are pigs practically in my backyard! I did not see the ones she had last year, nor the previous year. I did not see this year’s until I needed eggs. I could have bought eggs at the supermarket but farm eggs are better. Most people know this. I’m so glad I needed eggs, contacted Tracy and got hers. She’s really nice, and now, besides getting great eggs,  I have met her pigs, toured her garden, borrowed a book (Edible Landscaping by Michael Judd) and lent a book (Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier – she will love the chapter with the hog). I laughed when I asked her what those tall pretty flowers in her garden were and she said, “tall pretty flowers.” (None of us have to know everything!)

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I got two bunches of wild onions for my woodland garden (aren’t they beautiful?!) and learned something about raised bed berms – and she told me I am welcome to come get rocks for my stream bed. If you had six feet of stream bed left to lay and you saw all the rocks in Tracy’s field and you could go collect them, I bet you would, just like I am going to. Right?

Maybe today is a good day to contact a neighbor of yours. Maybe you don’t need eggs, but you can connect or reconnect for some other reason. Chances are good you have a neighbor who is really nice too, maybe someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Maybe your neighbor is on the shy side or otherwise hesitant to call you but would welcome a friendly hello.

Maybe your neighbor doesn’t have pigs (okay, most likely your neighbor doesn’t have pigs), but you will find something very cool to talk about anyway. And you might learn something, or exchange funny stories, or find something in common that you didn’t know about before. And it will be a better day.

Morning Bumbles

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I play tennis on Sunday mornings with Scott, Cheryl and Pat. It is possible that we talk as much as we play, but I have never timed the breaks between every other game and every set, so I can’t know for sure. Nobody seems to mind, and we learn a lot about each other and our families, and of course solve the problems of the world every week.

Here we are after this week’s three sets:

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Pat opened today with a doozy of a story about what happened at her house this morning. She was preparing her morning coffee — feeling a little fuzzy-headed yet, it being so early — at the same time as she was looking for her cell phone. “I can never find my phone,” she said. Bumbling around, still half dazed, her routine is to zap her coffee in the microwave for 30 seconds, which is what she thought she had done. Thirty seconds isn’t very long, but at the end of it, there was a bad smell and she opened the microwave to discover her melted cell phone in there!

This is what NOT to do, even when you don’t want to talk 🙂

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Scott said his morning wasn’t quite that bad, but when he went to get his coffee, which he prepares in the drip maker the night before, he said to himself, “I wonder if I remembered to put the coffee in.” When he got to the kitchen he discovered that he had indeed not remembered to put the coffee in, nor the water (!), which of course did not result in a cup of coffee at his usual time.

I am a tea drinker, and often use a terrific little strainer that my sister Lynn got me. It sits in the cup. You put the loose tea leaves in it and pour the water over the top. Then you can take out the strainer and the leaves come with it. Left behind in your cup is the hot drink that has been my steadiest companion for years.

Only today I poured the hot water into the cup without the strainer in it. Dope. So I got the strainer and the tin of loose tea and put a spoonful of leaves into the hot water in my cup and put the strainer in after that. A lot of good the strainer does if the tea leaves are not in it!

The leaves float to the top, so if the leaves are in the strainer it will not look like this:

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It will look like this:

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Cheryl said she went to feed the dog and found herself pouring Cheerios into his bowl!

We told those stories, cracked up and started hitting balls to warm up. The weather was perfect, low 80s, sunny, light breeze. We then played three sets of really good tennis, lots of great shots, close games and good points. We did what people around the world do every single day, and what every sensible person should do: Do not let your morning bumbles get in the way of your fun!

Just Keep Going

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On Thursdays my mom and I read to a wonderful 100-year-old blind lady named Evelyn. Mom met Evelyn nearly half a year ago, and they started with a biography of Queen Victoria. I love this idea, so I asked if I could too. I read at 2pm and Mom at 3. A few weeks ago I mentioned Coco, the adorable black pug I am taking care of, and Evelyn wanted me to bring her. Today was an especially good day for that because Evelyn got bad news this week. Coco was perfect. She did what she does. She brought joy, comfort, warmth. Oh that fur. For the full hour that we read today, Coco lay wedged between us on the couch and Evelyn’s hands didn’t come off her once.

The tongue seems disproportional to the size of the rest of her, I know.

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Coco put her tongue (mostly) inside her mouth and I picked up where Mom left off last week and kept reading till Mom came and took over. Today’s chapter was rather heart-wrenching. Victoria was in the throes of despair when I handed off the book and took my leave.

Some days are monumental. You accomplish something big, learn something new and very useful, have a great influence on someone’s life, solve a mystery, explore a new and exciting place, have an important meeting, or experience a life-changing event. Or it dawns on you that if you put food in the chicken coop that the chickens don’t want to go into, they might want to go into it! (Thank you, Kim. I know this doesn’t really qualify as brilliant or monumental the way it seemed yesterday, but we are creatures of habit, we are. Never have I had to put food in a coop to entice the chickens to go in it — why should it have occurred to me before? One of these days I will try though. Perhaps I should drape tempting greens on the steps of the chicken ladder. Spaghetti? Maybe that would lure them up and do the trick?)

Today wasn’t a monumental day (nor did I care to entice the chickens – let them sleep on the ground!). Most days aren’t. Today, like most days, I just kept going with this and that. So did Evelyn, as she’s been doing for a hundred years. That’s a long time to just keep going! It struck me today that despite what happens, we keep on eating good food, sleeping as best we can, loving the people we love, figuring out what to do next and most of the time doing it, or trying to do it.

All around me, everyone and everything is doing the same. The lettuce keeps on making more of itself so there can be a salad every night. Oh, a new dressing to try: Mix a bit of yogurt (maybe two spoonsful) with some apple cider vinegar (about ¼ cup) in a jar (same as you would mix olive oil with vinegar). Add a bit of strawberry jam! The batch I made this year came out kind of soupy, so I just pour a tablespoon or so in there. You might need to mush it up a little bit. Shake the jar to mix it all up together. Salt and pepper to taste. Yum! (Those are the carrots right behind the lettuce in this bed, in case you’re wondering.)

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The cabbage keeps getting bigger too, this head bigger than a softball. Somehow I thought the cabbage plants were Brussels sprouts plants instead. I feel slightly disappointed about that. It seems I will have a good deal of cabbage to saute slowly with onions one of these days.

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Speaking of onions, they keep pushing harder to get out of the ground. I planted 300 “sets” (whatever that means) – 100 each of red, white and I don’t remember what the other one was. Yellow maybe. It seemed ridiculous at the time. Now I am thinking this might be a good number. If there are any left at the end of the summer, they will keep well.

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The tomatoes keep getting taller and have started getting red (yay!). I couldn’t find my favorite “sun gold” variety this year, so I don’t have any of those. But these will be excellent anyway and make the sun golds all the more special when I surely find them next year!

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The lemon grass keeps on getting fuller and taller. By the time the fall comes, this plant will occupy the entire raised bed. I am not exactly sure what to do with this other than admire it. The two other times it has grown in my garden, its entire purpose has been to make an incredibly big and ornamental show of itself, which is nice, but there has to be something else to do with it. Another day I will look into this.

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Everything just keeps going.

It was 90 degrees today, but shady where I myself kept going, rock after rock, on my stream bed. This morning I had 23 linear feet. I drove back from Evelyn’s and went very slowly down my road, stopping to pick up a few more set-aside stones from the last outing that were waiting patiently for their own special place in my long puzzle. I gathered some more rocks from around the house and softened the dirt bed before starting to set them in, then kept going to the main curve of the stream, banked those big anchor stones tight against the edge, and decided this was not far enough for one day, so gathered some more rocks and began again, adding 11 feet total today. There’s only 11 to go until I reach the woods and call it done! (I don’t care what happens to the water when it reaches the woods. Let it delta out all it wants.) After all this, I sure hope the water will choose to stay in its pretty channel during the next heavy rain.

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Needless to say, the chickens kept on being ridiculous! It’s hard for me to look at them sometimes and not think they are little aliens. For all I know, this one could have been looking back at me saying You think I’m funny looking?

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Habits of Good

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My cousins Matt and Austin grew up in New Hampshire playing hockey incessantly, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Every time I visited, one or both of them had to be at practice at 5 in the morning or some other crazy time, and the next day the same thing. I wondered if they were training for the Olympics. But no. When I asked my aunt about all the practices, she simply said, “If they are busy doing something fun, and it makes them tired, they won’t have time or energy for getting into trouble.”

This reminds me of CJ, the washroom attendant I admire so, who occupied his time so fully with doing his job and so consistently with being the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, that he didn’t have time to complain.

The holiday season that’s fast approaching will, as usual, cause people fill their time with lots of fun activities and lots of good works, and on the surface this seems above reproach. We will not only be buying presents for our loved ones and going to special parties and dinners, we will also be singing carols at nursing homes, giving turkeys to the needy, deciding what to do about the Salvation Army Santas collecting on the street corners — pass them by altogether, give a few dollars to each one, tell the next one you gave to the last one?

When we were homeschooling for all those years, we were not the homestead-on-the-mountaintop sort. It was important to me that my kids develop a sense of community. Besides attending local theater, watching local crafters in their studios do their glassblowing or basketweaving or woodworking, and being part of Little League and other sports, we  made it our business to serve and interact with people in other situations.  Together we prepared and delivered meals for the emergency shelter, attended events that included a wide swath of culture and characters, and visited the elderly. I didn’t want my children to think that everyone lived the same way and I didn’t want them to get the idea that the world revolved around them.

One year in November I called a local nursing home to set up a time for our little coop group of kids to come in December to visit the residents and maybe sing some Christmas songs. The woman who answered the phone made me think about the frenzied few weeks of the holidays — and giving in general — in a different light.

She graciously said, “Your offer to come is much appreciated, but frankly we are inundated at this time of year. When January comes, the residents can feel like everyone did their good deeds and can now forget about them for another year. Really, the better thing for you to do is come at random times when they don’t expect anyone to be thinking about them. That’s what really makes them smile.”

Spread out the good, she was saying, and it will do more good than if a lot of good is crammed in all together. Too much good all at once can be counterproductive, and maintaining a balance is healthier for many reasons. My aunt didn’t send her boys to a hockey camp for a week or two and then leave them to their own devices for the rest of the year. CJ doesn’t speak kindly some of the time. Both of them developed what could be called Habits of Good. 

When I see the word “habit,” I think of nuns. What they wear is called a habit. They wear it every day. The woman on the phone at the nursing home was suggesting the same for us — that visiting the residents would be not a sometimes-thing, but instead, a habit, sure and steady. For us, her suggestion turned into a relationship with one individual who ended up spending his last days on earth at our home. We became his family.

Time is short. We all know that. We all know that something could happen later today that utterly changes our world. Therefore it’s a good question: In the time we have each day, do we wisely allocate time for ourselves, time for others, time for good? Might we want to rethink how we divvy up our days, perhaps shift our energy to something that matters more, consider developing some habits of good? 

A voice of reason and … crackers!

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Hankerings come in handy. Yesterday in the afternoon a colleague called me. “I have a personal favor to ask. I need about an hour of your time. Things with my daughter right now are…let’s just say…I need a voice of reason.” I said How about dinner? We settled on tonight.

Last week we had had a conversation about who pays for dinner when friends go out. We had agreed that the person who holds the ball and runs with it is the one who asks or suggests in the first place. I realized I did just blurt out How about dinner? A case could be made otherwise, but I owned this one.

The simplest, most straightforward thing to do would be to just go out. Most people would just go out. It would be good sometimes to be like most people. I might have been able to in this case if I had not had a hankering for crackers.

Crackers had been a lifesaver for me during a particularly demanding stretch of months some years ago when I was writing my book on my old laptop, comfy on the couch next to a good fire, poring over sentence and paragraph construction and dealing with the too-hot computer resting on my lap which was burning the tops of my thighs more and more as the fan in it became less and less effective over time. I remember the red marks. I graduated to using a pillow between my lap and the steady warmth. It was a happy day when I got a new laptop. Thank you, Mom and Dad!

But not just any crackers. Back in the day I had been one of the lucky ones who got a first edition of King Arthur Flour’s 200th anniversary recipe collection in a smart three-ring binder. And one lucky day Ken Haedrich’s recipe for Cheddar Cornmeal Crackers on page VI-43 had caught my eye. Samuel had fatefully experimented with that recipe one day, found a clear winner (you never had store-bought crackers like these), and obliged himself henceforth to provide them as sustenance when I was too occupied with transcribing interviews or piecing together disparate pieces of text to have time to cook dinner. To be fair, he did enjoy cooking and did volunteer for this service. I will remember his willingness and skill fondly, always. The crackers hit the spot on numerous occasions before the book was done. I especially liked the darker ones — still do. When you make them yourself you can take them out of the oven at exactly your choice of the right golden color. Or you can tell the very kind and loving son who is making said crackers for you the exactly goldenness you are longing for, and he will take them out at the right time. Bless him forever.

For a long time after the book was done and after Samuel left home, I did not make these crackers. Fond as my memories of them were, it was as if they were his crackers, not mine, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I elevated them in my mind to a place where they downright intimidated me. My crackers couldn’t possibly be as good as his. One Christmas I hinted that he might fill a tin of them for me, and oh joy! He came through! But those didn’t last overly long, naturally, being as good as they are, and I finally realized that if I wanted these, I would have to make them myself. And did, now and then, over the last year or so.

So, dinner with a friend combined with a hankering for crackers. The grocery store is not far away, but I like working with what I have on hand. The recipe calls for cheddar cheese, but suggests you can also use swiss, monterey jack or parmesan. How handy that I had just — the very night before — grated (with the very fine grater) a hunk of parmesan enough to nearly fill a quart mason jar. The image of this jar in my fridge triggered my Brain of Debatable Reason to say Well, I’m halfway there already, so why not make crackers?Serve them with some good cheese, a few nice salads, a bottle of wine and a bit of chocolate for afterwards, and voila — dinner!

Anyway, I had had a rough day and there is nothing like getting busy in the kitchen as a means to decompress. I started with the cucumber salad because they were still warm from having sat still attached to their vines in the hot sun all day. Cucumbers don’t get fresher than this, I assure you. I grated them with the not-so-fine grater, layered it with salt and put the bowl in the fridge to cool.

On to the cracker dough. Having already grated the parmesan saved me all of five minutes in this process, but hey, we count our blessings. All I had to do was dump the contents of that jar into the bowl with all the other ingredients and carry on. Thankfully there was a bag of whole wheat flour in the freezer, which is of course where you keep it when you use it infrequently. I tripled the recipe and therefore did not have enough corn meal, but just put that much extra regular flour in instead. It worked out fine. Here is the recipe. I forgot the pepper but it worked.

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If you decide to make these, remember olive oil is the best. And add enough water (which might be a little more than the recipe calls for) to make the dough just shy of sticky. It has to hold together when you roll it out, and there is a fine line between too much water and not enough water. I tried a new way to roll these out this time to save myself time. It was, after all, 7pm already when I started all this. I cut two pieces of waxed paper as big as my sheet pan, laid them flat on the counter, floured the center area, and rolled the dough right on the paper. Then I was able to slide the whole big flat piece of dough up and over the lip of the pan, trim the edges, brush with beaten egg, cut shapes with my little zigzag wheel, salt them and pop it right into the oven.

This is my cutter. My mother had marked it GRANDMA when she gave it to me because it belonged to my grandmother. You can see that the letters are wearing off, but that only makes it better.

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The recipe calls for a 375 oven, but as I said, I like them dark, so I bumped it to 400. Two of my three pans have the silicon liner,  which did not by the way affect the crackers or the clean-up in any perceivable way. Tripling the recipe gave me a lot of crackers. Having a lot of crackers is not a problem because 1. They keep. 2. They do not last long anyway. This is half of them:

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While the crackers were baking, I used the not-so-fine grater to shred the beets that Sandy had pulled from the garden the night before. They had been rinsed, boiled in water until soft (skins and all),  put in a bowl, covered with water and chilled until I decided what to do with them. It was handy that they were there waiting there in the fridge for such a time as this. I love sticking my hands in the water and easing the skins off. The beets are smooth as velvet underneath. Now shredded, they again sat and waited. Next thing was to squeeze the water from the grated cukes. It’s a good thing vegetables are patient.

I smiled as I thought about this upcoming dinner that would include cucumbers and beets from the garden made into yummy salads and crackers that brought fond memories. As I grated the veggies and squeezed the cukes and rolled out the stiff dough, I looked at my bare arms (it is summer after all), realized how much they were working, and thought This is how women burned calories in the old days. Who needs a gym when you have an agenda like this?  

Over the weekend, in my favorite grocery store in Charlottesville, Food of All Nations, I had bought two items that also evoked fond memories. Beemster is a hard cheese with little pockets of salt and sharp, delicious flavor. It used to be a staple on the cheese board during Villa Lunch at Keswick Hall. Quark is a German dairy product that makes the best cheesecake you ever had. It’s like a cross between yogurt and sour cream. This one comes from Vermont besides. Be still my heart.

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The word here is Providence. There is not a lot in my fridge, but there was Beemster and there was Quark. Slices of Beemster would be handy to go with the crackers along with Jarlsberg and Manchego. Quark would work in the dressing for the cucumber salad. Quark plus lemon juice and a bit of salt, pepper and sugar. The beet salad I dressed with olive oil, cider vinegar, salt, pepper and oregano which, shame on me, I did not go get fresh from the garden (it was dark by then, really).

Into an old tin went the crackers. Into a basket went said tin, two plates, two forks, two knives (for pushers), two wine glasses wrapped in white cloth napkins, a wine key, a bottle of pinot noir (always keep a bottle of red on hand), and a small cloth for the tabletop.Into the fridge went a small container of cut up cheese, a mason jar of cucumber salad and a mason jar of beet salad.

I am ready for dinner. There is a park in town that has a pavilion with picnic tables. It will be quiet there and hopefully a good atmosphere for good conversation.  I hope I can be a voice of reason for my friend. One could argue that I did not demonstrate much reason in the preparation of this dinner. It would have been easier to go out. But I had a hankering. 

Sauce and cheese

/ eponine3 / 5 Comments

This week I was reminded how words can mean such different things to different people, how easy it is to think someone else knows what we mean, how words are so little yet encompass so much.

Two little words: sauce and cheese. You know what I mean, right? I don’t have to say more. If you would look in my freezer and see a plastic container labeled sauce, you would know what is in that container and what it goes with. You would know how often I make it, how often we eat it and what else would be on the table with that meal. If we were at the table together and I was eating soup and I said This would be really good with cheese, and got up to get it, you would know before I returned to the table what I was getting. You would know what color it is, what has been done to it since it was purchased and how and where it is stored. We would understand each other, right?

When I was growing up, we ate pasta three times a week. We did not call it pasta. We called it macaroni. You boiled the macaroni in a big pot on the stove, and in another smaller pot you heated the sauce. On Wednesdays for dinner (5:00ish) and on Sundays for dinner (1:00ish because you ate Sunday dinner after church) we had our macaroni with a red, meat sauce, a.k.a. sauce. We had it so often that there was no need for modifiers. Seriously we ate this every Wednesday and every Sunday of my childhood. That’s 104 times per year x approximately 18 years, or somewhere around 2000 times. The very same meal.

My mother made sauce (not the sauce, mind you, just sauce) on a regular basis such that we were never out. It would be inconceivable to not have sauce ready to go on Wednesdays and Sundays. I am quite sure my mother would never have let that happen. The basic ingredients were the same every time, but if we had had a pork or lamb roast recently, she added these bones for flavor. Here is the recipe exactly as I wrote it many years ago when I decided it needed to be in my cookbook for reference. I did not need it myself of course. The recipe is etched in my mind’s file. But someone else might need it.

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This recipe is perfectly clear to me. You could follow it, right? You would know how many onions and how finely to chop them. You would know what chop meat means and what percentage of fat content was normal. You would know to put these first two ingredients together in a large, heavy pot over a medium flame and cook them together until the onions are clear and the meat is browned. You would know what size the cans of tomatoes are, what brand to buy, and whether they are whole, plum, chopped, diced or pureed. You would know what paste is, and how to get it all out of the can — even the parts that stick stubbornly to the sides — and why you need two cans of water per. You would know to dump all of this over the meat and onions at just the right time and stir it up. You would then know to add just the right amounts of s&p, garlic powder, oregano and basil. Strictly following tradition, it would not occur to you to use fresh garlic, oregano or basil. You would shake these out of jars you bought in the store and you knew the perfect quantities to shake and how big each little pile would need to be as it sat on top of the tomato-meat mixture in the pot. You would stop shaking when each pile was the right diameter and height. If you had leftover bones from a recent roast, you would add them in at this time. Then you would mix it all together and turn it down. You would know how low to turn the flame down, and you would let it cook for a few hours and walk away and do something else. You would know by the smell that it was done. The smell was normal. This was home.  Every Wednesday and every Sunday we had our macaroni with sauce for dinner.

On Fridays for dinner (5:00ish), being Catholic, we had our macaroni with a non-meat sauce, maybe red and maybe not. The non-meat red was called marinara and the non-meat other could be onion or ceci (you know what those are, right?). In my memory we ate all macaroni meals with a salad. We did not additionally (and it never occurred to me until much later that others might) eat long thin loaves of crusty white bread. On Sundays, however, you might also have meatballs (either softened from having been taken from the freezer and heated up in sauce, or crispy from having been freshly fried in oil) or a veal or eggplant parmesan or a roast (beef, lamb or pork) on the side. Thus the leftover bones that might go into the next batch of sauce.

Onto any of these macaroni dishes you put cheese. You put imported, finely grated, sheep’s milk peccorino romano stored in a little glass jar which had little holes in the chrome screw-on lid. This jar was stored in the cabinet, by the way, not the fridge. You turned this jar upside down and shook it, and cheese landed on your macaroni. At some point prior to the meal someone had taken the four-sided stand-up grater out of the cabinet and stood there holding the fist-sized hunk of cheese in one hand and the handle of the grater with the other hand, and with well practiced vertical up-and-down motions, pressing the hunk against the sharply perforated side of the grater, created tiny, slightly curly shavings of this ivory colored, aromatic, aged wonder. I did not think of it as a wonder. It was just cheese. Cheese went on macaroni. Macaroni had sauce.

The conversation about sauce came about because Samuel was fishing around in the freezer and found a container labeled SAUCE. What kind of sauce is this? he asked. What kind of sauce? Is there another kind? I see SAUCE on top of a plastic container in the freezer and I know exactly what is in there. But he doesn’t. Oh.

Can it be that he wouldn’t know what I mean when I use a simple word? I thought everybody knew what that word means.

What about cat?

House?

Party?

Surely he knows what those are. Surely you do.

Words evoke images. Do you have a lithe, grey feline in mind, one that snags large moths and bats them around until they give up? A white clapboard Cape Cod with three dormers set up on a hill with a large stand of maple trees behind it? A lot of well dressed people in a small room, holding fancy drinks and trying to hear one another above the loud music? Or do you imagine a tiger, a brick ranch, and a wild frat house?

This gets harder when the images associated with the words are not so concrete:

Honorable.

Divine.

Patriotic.

It’s no wonder we get tripped up sometimes. I am sure you know what I mean when I use certain words and you are sure I know what you mean. But do we really? John Durham Peters in his Speaking into the Air, says that there are hints and guesses in communication, which “at its best may be a dance in which we sometimes touch.” Thankfully we use lots of words to fill in the mental pictures, and usually manage to understand and be understood. Usually.

At least we are now clear about sauce. After Samuel fished it out of the freezer and I explained it and thought I knew what we were having for dinner, he asked another question: What’s onion sauce? Ah, onion sauce!

Chop three large onions. Saute them slowly (I mean slowly) in butter until they are soft and golden. This will take at least half an hour. Turn on the pot to boil the macaroni in only when the onions are almost done. In the meantime, finely dice that wonderful aged peccorino romano till you have a handful or so. Once the water is boiling, put small macaroni like ditalini in there with some salt and stir to make sure they do not stick to each other. When the macaroni is almost done, put the cheese in with the onions and butter. You don’t want to melt it, just soften it. Some ground black pepper and a little bit of cream in there with that rounds it out nicely. By now your macaroni is done. Put your colander over the bowl you will serve this in. Pour out the pot of boiling water and macaroni so that the water ends up in the bowl and the macaroni ends up in the colander (this makes the bowl hot, which keeps the food hot on the table longer). Dump the water out of your serving bowl, put the macaroni in there, top with the onion mixture and stir it all together. The word for this is divine.

The peril of place and the beauty of Real

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

Every place you go, there is or is the possibility of something unpleasant.

Where I live it is sometimes humid. Most everyone thinks of humidity as something bad. One morning last year I was playing tennis with a woman from Tennessee. It was about 7:30, and shaping up to be a scorcher of a day. In Virginia that means mid-90s or so. This particular morning it was also humid, and we both were feeling it — but one of us not in the usual way. Of this I am certain because at one point, as we were energetically whacking the ball back and forth, she said to me in such a way as you would have to think she really meant it: “Don’t you just love this humidity?!”

I don’t usually stop the ball but I stopped the ball. “Did you just say you love humidity?” I felt sure I must have heard her wrong. She assured me she had indeed just said that. Well, aren’t humans the most unpredictable creatures? Whoever heard of such a thing? But to her, humidity is not a bad thing. “It reminds me of home,” she said, “and I like home.” Huh. Maybe a thing I always thought a negative doesn’t have to be.

Where you live, there might be the risk of hurricanes or wildfires or tornadoes. It might get to 20 below in the winter, or colder. Maybe the black flies buzz around your head for a few weeks in the spring or the Japanese beetles eat your garden produce. Maybe you do not walk through the safest areas on your way to work, or you have to listen to someone else’s music blaring from their apartment, or your taxes are really high, or there is no good bakery!

Black snakes are harmless but creepy, I grant. Twenty below is very cold. Black flies are irritating, humidity is sticky, and if you ask me, hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes are downright scary. I am sure you have your own feelings about unsafe areas, bad music, high taxes and the lack of excellent bread.

Every place has its risks and annoyances. Every place has its quirks too. In two corridors of the hotel where I work, there are wide carpet runners going the full length of the space. All around the carpet there are beautiful old floor tiles imported from Europe to lend authenticity and character, which they do effectively. But during my tours I have fun telling guests that when the staff was doing the installation 20+ years ago, they discovered they did not have quite enough, meaning that under the carpet is plain concrete. Think about it, I say. You all have somewhere in your own homes where you know it isn’t perfect but you covered or patched or ignored it and said That’ll do!

The imperfection makes it real. Very often, when something is Real, it’ll not only do, it’s better.

The very best description of Real that I ever read came from Margery Williams’ version of The Velveteen Rabbit. In it, the Rabbit is feeling troubled, insecure and out of place, and the Skin Horse comes along to comfort him.

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         The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away. He knew that they were only toys and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

         “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

         “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

         “Does it hurt?”

         “Sometimes.” For he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

         “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?”

         “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

         “I suppose you are Real?” And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

         “The Boy’s Uncle made me Real. That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

         The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished he could become it without these things happening to him….

Just like weather and insects and corridors and Rabbits, places are real. Home is real. Like the woman from Tennessee, I like home. I’ve always liked home. I have lived in four states and spent some time feeling quite at home overseas as well. Not a single place has been perfect. I know this. I accept it. Every place has something about it that must simply be tolerated.

But perhaps I did myself a disservice when I wrote a few weeks ago about the black snake. Worse was adding a photo of the fellow. Today I received a note from a dear friend who does not live locally. She said, “If I could get that picture of the snake in front of the cottage out of my mind, I might consider driving down to see you!”

Oh dear. This is a little bit like the proverbial opening your mouth and inserting your foot. I did post that. And I cannot take it back. But as I think of it, I don’t want to. Illusions are pretty and clean and perfect, and they look great on magazine pages and in films, but our everyday worlds are clearly imperfect and we all know it. Occasionally, the Midwest gets a tornado, the Northeast gets a blizzard and the West gets a drought. Occasionally, my mother in New Jersey sees a black bear scampering across her front lawn and my son in San Francisco deals with street crime. This week, my sister in Phoenix is trying to keep cool in temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Somehow we all manage. Somehow we sidestep (literally perhaps when it comes to critters) the inconveniences and imperfections of the places where we live. Somehow I deal with the occasional black snake, even if I don’t like it (and let there be no illusions — I don’t like snakes!). But in a world that’s Real, somehow we get by. The lucky ones — some would say the smart ones — do more than that. The lucky and smart ones are like the Skin Horse. They prefer wisdom and grace and they gladly (if sometimes reluctantly at first) accept the various imperfections about their worlds and themselves. They understand that regardless of its downsides, imperfect is better. Imperfect is Real.

A “recipe” for strawberry jam

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

In the early homeschooling days, someone gave me a bit of advice that can apply to just about anything we do. Take a few minutes, he said, and write down why you are doing it. Make a list of your reasons. Make sure you think it through and make a good solid list. One of these days you will be tearing your hair out and asking (seriously) What was I thinking??!! (i.e. What was I thinking when I thought this was a good idea!?) Post your list where you can see it (so that you know just where it is!) because on those days when you are tearing your hair out, you need to look at your list and let it do its good work. Let it remind you why you decided to do this, whatever it is. Chances are good that your list will bring you back to a good place.

It seemed like a good idea to me, so I made my list. Its title was something like: Why I choose to home school my children. One of the reasons had to do with joy. I very much wanted to keep the joy in learning. If I can find a way to keep it fun, I thought, keep them engaged in the process, keep them hungry to learn something new — then (the hope is) throughout their lives they will always be excited and happy to learn new things. I was homeschooling because I wanted to make sure that my kids became lifelong learners, and one way to do that was to keep it fun. I suspect that John Holt’s Learning All the Time played into this, but there were other factors. I just didn’t want my kids to ever be bored or uninterested or think they had nothing yet to learn in this life. There is always something to learn in this life. Too many people think learning is over when you finish school. Oh, how much they miss!

Therefore, when I meet someone who is hungry to learn something, to explore something, to be challenged by something, I am both impressed and happy. If that someone wants to learn something from me, I’m over the moon. This is one reason I love Millicent. She has thrilled my heart time and again by saying things like “Next time you make a quiche, can I come and make it with you? … Oh, please teach me how to make pizza — can I just do it with you next time?. … How do you do that? Can you teach me?” Millicent has a nursing degree and a law degree, plays the harp, sings like an angel, and makes me think deeply and laugh out loud in all of our conversations, and she is hungry to learn something new. These days Millicent is learning how to ride a horse. I am sure she is doing it with enthusiasm and joy, and I could not be happier for her.

Last week one of my airbnb cottage guests reminded me of Millicent’s spirit and her joy of learning. It was all about jam, strawberry jam. As the berries came ripe during the month of May, I began to see that there were many of them, more than last year. They were gorgeous and bountiful and delicious. Look how beautiful.

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I learned last year that these garden-grown berries, untouched by anything except sun and rain and the human hand to pick them, are not like the kind you buy in a store. If you have never picked a strawberry off a vine, it may be hard to imagine the very particular sound they make as they pop off the stem that holds them. To me it is downright musical. The flavor sends you to heaven then, far exceeding any berry on a plastic box. Their being untouched also means they do not last days and days. Freeze them or make jam within a day or they will not be the same.

The first batch looks like and feels like a treasure.

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A few days later there were enough to make jam. (The stuff laying on top is rhubarb, yet another taste marvel…)

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My good friend Sandy was game to help me, and together we made a batch, and a week or so later there were this many again, so we made another batch. There might be 15 jars or so total, I didn’t count. But it came out really good.

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At about the same time, my airbnb guests Sara and Scott (of grilled salami fame, two or three posts ago) had invited me to have dinner with them. During my visit with them, they gave me a good sized hunk of some amazing bread they had bought in town, and I took it back to my house later and had some with that lovely strawberry jam on it. Fresh jam on fresh bread — does it get better than this? So I brought them some in a little bowl so they could enjoy it with their own hunk in the morning for breakfast. After they left I found a note in the cottage that told me that had enjoyed it on cheesecake besides. Sara called it incredible. I smiled. That would have been enough for me. They completely endeared themselves to me.

A couple days after they left, I got the following note:

Hi Patricia – Scott and I enjoyed the last of your strawberry jam this morning.  We have been milking it – literally!  Anyhow, we are just getting strawberries in our neck of the woods and I plan on picking at the orchard nearby this coming week.  Would you share your jam recipe?  It was superb and just the perfect amount of sugar.  Hope all is well with you.  We sure do miss the Charlottesville Area.   

Kind regards,  Sara

Not only were they perfect guests who also invited me to dinner. Not only did they call my jam incredible. Now she wants to make her own! I was thrilled — and worried! I admit it, I am not a good recipe-follower, and here she is asking for a recipe! Having made jam in the past, I knew it is a bit involved, and I had no way to know if Sara had any idea what she was getting into. I had no idea if perhaps it was a fluke that mine came out the way it did, seeing as I was not overly precise about amounts and timing and technique. For example, I am not even really sure how much fruit I used. I just cut up what I had and eyeballed it. How could I possibly give her a recipe? I decided to just tell her what I had done as best as I could which doesn’t look like a recipe to me, but the following is what I told her.

You have to really want to make jam to follow the following.

Hi Sara,

I am so thrilled that you liked the jam that much!! We are really enjoying it too  🙂 As far as the recipe, it is going to sound like a crazy amount of sugar, but every recipe uses a lot. I read five or six recipes in my cookbooks and online (since it had been some years since I made jam) to get an idea of the proportions of fruit to sugar, then cut up the fruit (halved or quartered depending on the size of the berry), which (eyeballing the same amount of water in my pot right now) seems to have been about 3 quarts. I then added a 4lb bag of sugar and 4.7oz Ball Real Fruit pectin (1 container of it) and brought it to a hard boil. It develops foam, which you methodically skim off little by little with a long handled spoon. It continues to make more foam. Just continue skimming it off (a relaxing exercise actually, if you can look at it that way). All the recipes I read said it needs to get to 238 degrees F on your candy thermometer, but we boiled the first batch (not the batch you got, but the one we did the week before) for a long time, half an hour I think, and finally decided that my thermometer had to be faulty because it never got above 220. With your batch, I drew the line at 15 mins (the thermometer was still faulty apparently because it did no better), skimming all the time. Good enough, I said, let’s jar it. Before we jarred it, Sandy mashed it with a potato masher, which broke up the fruit a bit more.

In the meantime, you have a big pot going with boiling water (your canning pot), and you sterilize the jars this way. Have you canned before? If you are not familiar with this process and want to bypass it, I think you can freeze jam too. But the canning is easy, and every canning pot comes with instructions. You sterilize the jars, take them out of the water with tongs (carefully), put the hot jam into the hot jars, wipe the top rim of the glass where the lid will meet it, put the lid on, screw the screw cap on (not too tight) and lower them into the water carefully (again with the special tongs) and boil for 7 mins. Remove from the water and set on the counter; wait for the center each lid to pop down as they cool. This assures you of the seal.

Hopefully I have not in any way discouraged you.  I am delighted that anyone would want to make jam! But if you prefer, send me your address and I will simply mail you one of my jars 🙂

The poor young woman, I thought. She has to make sense of that! But if she had thrilled me by asking, she thrilled me more by her response to my “recipe.”

Thank you for this!  I have canned before (not jam- and it’s been a few years) but I am sure I can do this.  Looks like I will be digging out some of my jars this weekend.  And thanks for offering to mail some jam, but I will attempt this work of art.   It is a labor of love and one I can appreciate .  I will let you know how it turns out.
Kind regards,
Sara

Oh, may the joy we have in learning something new never be squashed!