Saturday, November 15, 2008

loss of a Pearl



I have a Pearl in my family tree.   A friend's recent loss of her Aunt Pearl reminded me of my family treasure chest.




My Great Uncle Pearl - yep an uncle - was a dairy farmer on the New York - Vermont border his entire adult life. Furthermore, I imagine, in his childhood, he didn't wandered far beyond his most local farm yard.  His life skills and expertise as a successful dairy farmer would be difficult to duplicate.  Uncle Pearl was one of a vanishing breed who transitioned this country from its rural roots to its urban industrialization, and now to its global outsourcing.

His wife Marcia, my great aunt, was my mother's mother's sister. Great Aunt Marcia basically raised my mother after her mom died in one of the early and deadly influenza epidemics in the pre-vaccine and antibiotic twentieth century. My mother's family were also in the dairy "biz" and aunt Marcia would have merely stepped from one farm into another to lead her life. 



Aunt Marcia spent many years in a school house as either a student or a teacher. She was, however retired from teaching except Sunday school by the time I knew her. There is a wonderful picture of her as a young woman in a period white blouse and long white skirt standing with some other young women outside an old, well kept one room school house which sits at the top of a hill next to a long dirt road. It is impossible to tell if she is the teacher or one of the students. The transition from one position to the next, if judged by appearances, seems to have been relatively seamless. 

In our era of hugh school taxes, one wonders how so much was accomplished in one room.  And perhaps there is something to be said to returning to educational simplicity in terms of the physical plant.  It's a thought which is bound not to be very popular.  



Uncle Pearl died in his 80s when I was in college (in the 60s.) Aunt Marcia died three months later. Both had lived together, independently in their village home until the weeks before they died. That they were inseparable became all the more clear in losing them both so quickly.

Uncle Pearl and Aunt Marcia worked the farm until their mid or late seventies. Once they left the farm, they seemed to grow younger. Aunt Marcia replaced her long gray, fine haired nape-of-neck flyaway bun and wire rims with a short bob and stylish glasses. Uncle Pearl was less successful. However he'd discarded his aged and softened denim overhauls with a well worn gray wide pin striped suit and perma-pressed short sleeved shirt and assorted retro wide (mostly maroon) ties.


I have a couple thread bare crazy quilt pillow covers Aunt Marcia fashioned from uncle Pearl's (or someone's) discarded ties. Sadly it is the strong colorful high test aniline dyes which caused the silk and rayon to disintegrate on textiles of this era, inevitably creating many worn out ties. What's a loss for fashion became a gain for the crazy quilters. 



Both Aunt Marcia and Uncle Pearl had a couple of strategic gold teeth which flashed in the village house's electric lights as they talked in deep throated rumbles (Uncle Pearl) or high pitched twitters (Aunt Marcia) - voices which appeared to contain lyric syllables coupled with sighs and grunts. I can hear them speaking now in what, to my child's ear, was a guttural, clipped foreign language common to New England farm families – composed of wide flat sounds that I had to concentrate upon to understand. 

Their reverse aging was quite odd but now I realize how difficult a life working the farm must have been for them. However, I have never known two people who entertained such a hearty life despite their respective illnesses which they, for the most part, found undaunting, and who lived, as a result, truly full and happy lives. The older I find myself, the more I admire their existence and the more their honorific "Great" seems more appropriate in terms of accomplishment instead of relationship.




I have uncle Pearl's pressed back arm chair which has a dark brown patina (unlike that here pictured) having absorbed the farm's hearth smoke for about 60 years. 

I also found many of Aunt Marcia's recipe clippings in an old tin bread box in my mother's garage. Many papers were moth eaten and unreadable but one day, perhaps, I will try and decipher some of them. My mother inherited Aunt Marcia's baking ability, which was formidable. Both could throw together a lemon meringue pie with a pinch of this and a squirt of that and folded, stirred, whipped and sifted ingredients. They did this on an old kitchen table reserved for this process with a planed cylinder of wood and assorted spoons and measurement tools. When their tools found their way into my kitchen, they were coated with so many layers of unrecognizable substances that after cleaning they were demoted to the realm of non-functioning decorative objects.



My mother was a consummate user of Crisco - a sort of sanitized or fake lard, cheaper than butter which revolutionized baking. It's a material, made entirely of vegetable oil (before we knew that trans fats in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil are a health hazard) - referred to as "shortening" for some reason; which glued ingredients into recognizable shape. I suspect my Aunt Marcia also used Crisco. It allowed a longer shelf life for baked goods - as we began that long process of removing all the actual real food from what we consume. Considering my tendency to personal girth (remember someone had to eat all those pies, cakes and cookies), learning to bake as a young woman became one of my reverse obsessions.  As a result, my mother's and great aunt's baking skills ended with them.








I suspect the secret family recipes are to be found within my aunt's and my mother's drawer-full of faded yellow clippings, scraps of greasy paper with handwritten formulas and notations, old Betty Crocker pamphlets and early direct mail baking soda and flour booklets - each of which is chocked full of recipes and cooking hints. 




It's all about the pie.

Someone has to create the recipes, someone has to make and sell the ingredients, someone has to convince someone that their client's ingredients are somehow superior, someone has to list everything in the ingredients (and their country of origin) on the label, someone should be testing the ingredients (although this being a government handled procedure - it's apparently usually ignored), someone has to bake the pie, and finally, and thankfully (except for those cases where ingredients were included which were concocted in China) —  everyone, should they dare, gets to eat the pie.


Rather than their content, I find the graphics and printing quality on many of the found pamphlets rather remarkable. One classic advert which I've framed  says "Isn't it time for a Strawberry Short Cake?" It's a beauty of delicate multi-color, early lithography. However the sentiment — ah, the sentiment is most wonderful. I must admit that vintage design, strangely persuasive print, package and label advertising is something I truly admire.  I confess to an instinct,  which might have been entirely unthinkable, I'm afraid, to my great aunt Marcia. Value, purpose, worth is clearly evaluated uniquely through each set of differing mult-generational eyes.

I have a pair of Aunt Marcia's turn-of-the-century (the one before this one just passed) hand made "drawers" that extended down nearly to one's knees.  I'm also now the keeper of a large box of family photos of total strangers with no known histories or connections to me. Sadly those memories were never mine and have been lost. My mother had no interest in family history (or antiques which she considered "used" furniture) and so...it's gone. But I retain the evidence of a family tree no matter what or where the branches grew or the fruit fell.  It's an odd sort of family abandonment which I suspect I am not alone in recognizing.  Talk about being orphaned.



Every Christmas, my immediate family received a set of pillow cases with handmade tatted or crocheted lace on its edges from Aunt Marcia in a recycled, scented, decorative stationary box. I found, in my mother's keepsakes, many of the old boxes which are treasures in themselves. We also always received a set of fancy soaps with very strong aromas which were meant to be kept in a linen drawer for sweeter dreams or floral scented panties (go ahead and connect those dots.) I still have one or two of Aunt Marcia's crocheted pillow cases. They are worn thin and faded - unusable, but bits of tangible family history. Oddly, until more recently, I thought everyone had an aunt or grandmother who sent these types of holiday presents. Consequently, it seemed natural to continue what I knew of gift giving traditions by presenting "smelly" soaps to friends in their honor on special occasions. Did anyone have any idea of what to do with their pre-aroma therapy presents? Too many old, wonderful and strangely functional traditions are lost as they are set aside, unused or re-gifted and passed blindly forward.






I was born on Uncle Pearl's birthday and so, I suppose that is why he named a black and white cow after me. To be fair, this was not a one time occurrence. Over the years, there were several cows awarded this privilege. I'm sure, as a child, the where abouts of earlier cow namesakes was left a little sketchy and I prefer to leave it that way. My mother explained that the naming was a gift and a large honor. No other cousin or niece was so awarded a similar namesake. One might have thought a cow naming an odd reward for a contemporary post war child. In retrospect, there might have been a tinge of embarrassment in having an entire cow named after me — but considering the alternative, I'll take the whole cow thank you. The memory is now so endearing, I'm proud to acknowledge to have befriended the soft brown eyes within the boulder sized head of a several hundred pound Holstein who was named Suzie.  I must admit I could never have picked out my Suzie from  a group of her peers but I bet she was easily spotted in her several reiterations by my cow savvy Uncle Pearl.  My great aunt and uncle had no children of their own so I guess I was almost their grandchild. I suspect the cows, dogs, cats, ducks, chickens and what have you were also part of their multi-species family (well, all but the individuals destined for the stock pot.)


My love of farm houses grew from so many fond memories of Aunt Marcia and Uncle Pearl's homestead way, way off in the country with what seemed to be, acres and acres of beautiful rolling hills covered in thick green grass, corn, grains and a stand or two of trees. The tune and lyrics to "over the river and through the woods" comes to mind when I remember the trip to their house. The drive took forever for a small girl from our upstate New York home. Knowing the visit would be wonderful always made me nearly sick with anticipation. The trip itself was long — a considerable distance to travel in our assorted red and white Chevrolets.



To a child's sensibilities, the trip encountered very few odd bits of fun along the way. The Chevrolet was not equipped with a DVD player in the back seat.  In fact, the only way I could avoid severe car sickness was to keep a window partly opened and keep my eyes on the passing landscape.  There was something about the intense red color of the big fenders and hood, the shine off the chrome and the ride on the fat rubber tires which still drives me to nausea.  My father considered red the ONLY car color which could safely be driven on the highway.  I can, to this day, not ride in a intensely red car.  In days long past, Porsche burgundy, thankfully, was the closest shade I was able to safely endure.  That fact, was, at least, a spot of good news.

Burma-Shave sign groupings were always anticipated, diligently hunted and never failed to satisfy even with the fading verses of some previous year's travel.



Shaving brushes
You'll soon see 'em
On a shelf
In some museum
Burma-Shave





My aunt and uncle's house, like mine, had registers ( open grates) in the floors of the upstairs rooms and I could sit upstairs by myself playing quietly and listen to the adults gossip downstairs about all manner of normally verboten grown up things.  I thought my eves dropping intensely clever and never considered that my parents and aunt and uncle could clearly hear me as easily as I heard them.  I probably was supposed to be taking a nap.  I guess I thought sound, like heat, traveled uni-directionally — upwards.  




Some years later I was slowly alerted to another creative use for a ceiling grate.   Amedeus, my large black and white Maine Coon cat was intensely jealous of my mother's cat Christopher, who came to live with us after she was taken ill.  All of Christopher's considerable bulk, some 22 pounds of him, was fond of assuaging his new insecurities by draping himself in my lap as I tried to read or watch tv in the library.  After dozing and awakening to startling liquids which mysteriously found their way onto the table lamp next to me (with disturbing, odiferous results), I was convinced poor, old Christopher had some serious behavioral problems.  After several similar post dozing incidents where I found my shirt, my head, my chair similarly liquified — I began to blame the transplant, Christopher with greater and greater severity.  However, incidentally, I noticed Christopher was also being liberally sprinkled in liquid.  Either he had really bad aim or the source of the liquid was elsewhere.  Finally, I discovered Christopher and I were dozing under a cat-made shower courtesy of smarty pants Amedeus, which down poured through the grate under which we sat.  Since then, leaving nothing to chance, in our house, an extremely large coffee table book on the wonders of the Irish countryside resides topside of the grate over the library.  And I've found that being mindful of the location of ceiling and floor grates in a house full of animals is easier than living with the consequences of blissful ignorance.  Although, to be honest, one can never second guess a smart cat. 




In a specially designed alcove of Aunt Marcia's front sitting room, there was a large, somewhat built in antique organ which you pumped in order to play. I was allowed full access and spent many hours making the machine make very bad music which no one seemed to mind.  I had to grow into the organ, waiting until my feet could reach the foot pumps to hear the organ's voice. I am sure the instrument was granted a minimum of my attention since it was forced to battle with the many serious, spectacular splendors of farm life. However, on some days it rained and indoor activities were limited. I suppose I wasn't really strong enough to make much of a racket even when my feet could touch the pedals. My Aunt was an accomplished organist as was my mother (I think) but I don't recall either of them ever playing for me. By the time I knew my great aunt Marcia, her cataracts made her eyesight very poor and she could no longer read music to play. I do seem to recall my Aunt's high singing voice and standing near the organ to sing Christmas Carols. Someone must have been playing and I suppose it was either my mother or my aunt. The organ was not all that attractive a "sound machine" to my then Perry Como and Patti Page taste. Years later when people began to bring small electric pianos (known usually as organs) into their homes, my connection to the much stranger sound of a pump organ became apparent. I recall baby-sitting while I was in college in a home where a small Wurlitzer just begged to be played. I'm afraid I didn't like the newer organ's version of music much more than the old one. The updated option of pressing a button to add a rhythm section to one's "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was quite tempting.  I'm not sure, to my ears, if adding bells and whistles was a step forward or back.




All the family would convene sporadically for enormous meals.  What I mean by this is not in the amount of food consumed, although it would have been sizable, but the number of people eating.  My mother's brother and wife and their seven children often joined my mother, father and me and my aunt and uncle. When my mother sold off the furniture from the village home after my great aunt and uncle were gone, she sold a matched set of a dozen press backed chairs for a ridiculously low price at a yard sale...which is part of the reason why I rescued Uncle Pearl's arm chair. These chairs were arranged around a table which must have been a good 15 or 20 feet long for an average family farm meal. Several table cloths had to be overlaid to cover the entire table. The table did not make it to the village home. Most of the farm house furnishings, including original Tiffany lamps, remained (to my later horror) with the house when the farm was sold. 

There was a shinny, glossy white incongruous rectangular box in the corner of the dining room. It was the new refrigerator — as opposed to the old "ice box" which was probably unused for cold storage but still housed in the kitchen. Since the new appliance was an example of a "new" fang-led machine (to my aunt and uncle), it was given a prestigious location as a symbol of relative prosperity. I believe their first requirement for the appliance was that it should be handy which somehow made its location successful. It was always full of of raw milk some of which was used to make ice cream — an incredibly delicious treat. 

Things like fruits and vegetables were in the root cellar under the house. We certainly have lost a lot of "systems" which worked much better for preservation of foods than what we currently find indispencable. As far as I recall, the refrigerator was for indoor cold beverages...that's it. One might have found homemade cold salads and cold cuts and handmade mayonnaise and mustard in the frig — but it was never stocked with all the things most of us, these days find essential. 

The freezer was always in the basement. I have a freezer (I don't use) in the basement too. My mother used her basement freezer, but then again, she cooked all her meals and shopped like clock-work on Saturdays. I was so bored as a pre-teenager that I used to think grocery shopping at Slim's was the highlight of the week, and perhaps it was. I recall trailing sullenly after my mother in her bermuda shorts and curlers. Women used to regularly shop with their hair still "set" for a variety of bad reasons. One forgets the Jetson's environment of assorted head gear apparatus and concealment wrappings that used to be commonplace in our shopping arenas in the country. Lest I forget, the beauty of the home freezer meant meats and veggies could last longer and sales and specials could be used to keep the freezer stocked. I believe the underlying reason for this behavior had something to do with not wanting to run out of food. And this survival instinct is a remnant from poorer times which is uncomfortably sounding more and more like the era in which we currently find ourselves.



Great Aunt Marcia's kitchen was about thirty feet long and half again as wide. It was heated with an enormous cast iron cooking stove which she used as well as a conventional range. There was always a kitten or two nearby staying toasty.  My farm job was to collect the warm eggs from the hen house (cleverly designed so one could stick ones hand in under each hen and retrieve the eggs without disturbing the chicken - or that was the theory.)  I was also trusted to carry the fresh milk to the kitchen from the milk house (sometimes know as a spring house) next to the road. 








When I was really little, this job was accomplished with adult supervision. But later on, from the time I was strong enough to carry a pail of milk or a basket of eggs — the job became my own. The water was always so cold in the stone trough of the milk house that it kept the milk pails chilled to just the right temperature. The large metal milk cans were left sitting in the spring house for the regular milk truck to take away for processing on some sort of regular schedule. The Spring House was open to the dirt road it sat next to. There was no concern about items being stolen. I have one of the milk cans on my kitchen porch. My mother had it in her kitchen with dog food inside and later, after it became difficult to open – in her dining room as a decorative piece. I recall this same milk can I have on my kitchen porch was always in my way once it made its way to the dining room. I sat on the same side of my family table as the milk can. To my mind, the milk can had priority.



The barns were big and red with white trim and uncle Pearl could knock a stool under a cow and squirt milk into a pail five feet away. There were barns for machinery, barns for storage, barns for just about anything, fences and corrals for farm animals and a big main cement floored barn for the cows. The herd was large but by no means anything like this centuries big corporate machine farms. Uncle Pearl ran the farm with a sole farm hand and one or two good dogs.

My family history is the primary reason I love Columbia County....for the black and white cows and what is left of the farms. I hope other children here are allowed the memories with which I was rewarded. I've met one young man who was raised on a Columbia County dairy farm and his memories are much like my own. Traditions remain in family run farms although the technology, when it can be afforded, threatens to over power the simplicity of the past. I hope some other young hands will remember collecting warm chicken eggs in the afternoon sun.



You should have seen the farm dog(s) bring home the cows after dinner from the far pastures. The dogs could open the gates. Astounding really. Fiercely loyal. Uncle Pearl would send the dogs from his rocker on the porch and we'd watch while we sat on the steps and the sun began to set. Soon a leader cow would begin to amble over the crest of a distant hill and come into view with dashes of silky piebald fur flashing at its heels. I think Uncle Pearl sent the dogs out with a simple whistle. Sometimes it was just one dog and if it was two dogs, one was always in training — being trained primarily by the senior dog. Uncle Pearl need not have done anything. The dogs knew when it was time to retrieve the cows and the cows knew when it was time to return to the barn. However, knowing this, did not make the return trip home any less eventful. 

It always took a dog to orchestrate the long walk home of the cows. (If you're interested in what the cows coming home looks like, follow the link [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBioDFGbqHI] to watch and listen; surely worth a good You Tube gander; however, don't start thinkin' maybe you should have listened a little more to those good ole Mavericks who fell by the wayside in the last election — just because you might like watchin' the cows come home, you bet cha'.) The herd was a many membered, ominous group of large animals being moved along by a relatively small, but vastly faster and many, many times smarter, running dog . The dog was always one of the most important assets of the farm – easily as important as a tractor or a milking machine. Uncle Pearl respected the dogs in a way I've never seen a person connect with an animal in my life. They were a remarkable team...my uncle and his farm dogs. I have no memory of the names of the dogs. Somehow the farm dog names, unlike those of the dogs I loved at my own home, were such a minor part of their existence. Like my Great Uncle Pearl, his dogs were also farmers and seemed to grow right up out of the dirt.    A remarkable harvest.

By the way, the barn was always full of barn cats lapping up the intentionally spilled milk. They were quite feral. So it's no wonder I live with my own herd.



This story offered as a simple step back to a time when 55 ways to save eggs was a concept worth pursuing. 

S.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

73 days and counting









Elated, hopeful, proud of my fellow citizens and a little in love with a tall man and his tall wife and his adorable children.

This will not be an easy transition and I'm not expecting quick fixes...but still....

WOW, we can! Yes, we did.

GOBAMA

One small consideration - I hope the Obama's consider a mixed breed puppy or an older dog adoption to join their family in the White House. It's a small thing, but it seems the more appropriate.