Porch

Weekend Road Trip

~ Delivering some parts that my man built to a town a couple of hours north of us ~

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~*~

Treasures

Subtitle: What I Brought Home

The first of my treasures from Auntie D.'s house was a big box full of lovely little girl clothes that are just Greta's size. It was great fun to go through it and see all of the lovely outfits for her, and it has been even more fun to dress her in them each day!

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~'::'~ ~'::'~ ~'::'~

The next thing Auntie gave me was truly breath-taking to me. It was ::drum roll, please:: the living room chandelier from her 1911 house. Now it's interesting how a child's mind works and which things end up holding particular significance to them. To me, this chandelier symbolizes all that was warmth and home and family and hospitality about the years we lived in the city. From back when Auntie D.'s home was our home.

The image in my mind associated with this fixture is of evening-time. Winter, because it's dark out already, and we're waiting for Daddy to come walking home from the bus stop. Mama's in the kitchen making supper (always something delicious), and we've just finished picking up and straightening from our day of playing and school. Most of the time the radio was on at this time of the evening playing instrumental hymns. From the front windows where we were watching for Daddy we could see the far off lights of the highway below us. The glow from the chandelier could be seen from the street through the windows of the four-season porch that french doors opened from into the living room. I always thought it looked so welcoming. I also associate it with waiting in anticipation of family or friends who were coming for supper. The dusting and planning and straightening and table setting would be over and it would be time to turn on the lights and make our home welcoming. We moved often, so for me to have this tangible piece of the best of my childhood in my own home is so wonderful to me.

Auntie also gave me a set of four art deco swing-arm curtain rods that match from that house. They are now beautifying my own living room windows. I am thrilled.

(I look forward to having the chandelier glowing again; it just needs a simple rewiring. Soon.)

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A day in the city ~'::

In the neighborhood where I spent the majority of my growing-up years there is a little Italian grocery on a street right next to the park. Delmonico's Italian Foods. I have good memories of walking down there to pick up something for Mama. I felt so grown up! The older gentlemen who ran it were always friendly, and they would make sure we got a sample of their Italian cheeses and salami before we left. A slice of cheese and one of salami on a piece of waxed paper for each. Those guys are gone now, but the grocery is still running. I got to visit the other day when I went with Mama to pick up a friend of ours, Miss A., from the airport. It still smelled and looked just the same as it always had. Beautiful produce, cheeses, crusty Italian breads, vinegars, olive oils, pastas, and anything else you might need at a moment's notice for supper. It was so good to be there for a few minutes again. My Greta Rose got to visit the neighborhood for the first time. It's not an easy neighborhood to live in, being in the middle of a big city, but there is a community of believers there ministering in Christ's name who are very dear to me. Their homes are what I consider to be "my native planet" (in the earthly sense, you understand--my real home is heaven!)

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After Delmonico's, we went to Auntie Dorothy's house for a visit. Dear ones from across the alley came over too. It was too short (as always!), but wonderful.
The gate of Aunt D.'s home (where I lived once!) ~':: ~also: undoing little girls' braids~
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We drove home in the rain ~
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I brought pictures back with me of course, and I had to frame a couple for my kitchen.
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That wasn't the best of what I brought back with me though. Aunt Dorothy sent some real treasures back with me. But that will have to be for another post ...

I don't think I could ever get tired of the smell of browning farm hamburger and onions. It's the smell of home to me!

the Beauty of Nature

If you want to spend a few minutes enjoying the beauty of God's creation today, I suggest you visit my brother's blog Stream and Fencerow. The birds, insects, animals and plant life in his gallery will show you a little bit more of the wonder of our God's creative power. Each post is so full of beauty and color that I revisit them often and each time the pictures are like new to me.


"O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." Psalm 104: 24

Miss Read's Home

..........The Village School..........

A passage from Village School, by Miss Read,

Chapter 4 "The Pattern of the Afternoon"

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"I had my tea in the warm sunshine of the garden at the back of the school-house. The schoolmaster who had lived here before me was a great gardener, and had planted currant bushes, black and red, raspberries and gooseberries. These were safely enmeshed in a wire run to keep the birds off, and I bottled the crops or made jelly and jam in the evenings or in the holidays.

I had planted two herbaceous borders, one on each side of the garden, both edged with Mrs Sinkins' pinks which liked the chalky soil. Vegetables I did not bother to plant, not only because of the lack of room, but also because kind neighbours gave me more than I could really cope with, week after week. Broad beans, shallots, peas, carrots, turnips, brussel sprouts, cabbage, they all came in generous supplies to my doorstep. Sometimes the donors were almost too generous, forgetting, I suppose, how relatively little one woman can eat. I have found before now no less than five rotund vegetable marrows, like abandoned babies, on my doorstep in one week.

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I made some jam in the evening with a basket of early black plums which John Pringle, Mrs Pringle's only son, and a near neighbor of mine, had brought me.

The kitchen was very pleasant as I stirred. The window over the stone sink looks out on to the garden. A massive lead pump with a long handle stands by the side of the sink, and it is from this that I fill the buckets for the school's drinking water. When the water supply is laid on through the village, which may be in a few years' time, I have been promised a new deep sink by the managers.

In one corner stands a large brick copper and my predecessors used this to heat water for their baths, lighting a fire each time, but I have an electric copper which saves much time and trouble. The bath is a long zinc one, which hangs in the porch outside the back door, and it is put on the kitchen floor at bath time and filled from the tap at the bottom of the copper and cooled with buckets from the pump. With a bath towel warming over the hot copper and the kitchen well steamed up it is very snug.

The rest of the house downstairs consists of a large dining-room with a brick fireplace, a small hall and a small sitting-room. I rarely use this room as it faces north, but live mainly in the dining-room which is warmer, has a bigger fireplace and is convenient for the kitchen.

Upstairs there are two bedrooms, both fairly large, one over the kitchen and sitting-room, and the other, in which I sleep, directly above the dining-room. Throughout the house the walls are distempered a dove grey and all the paintwork is white. It is a solidly-built house of red brick, with a red-tiled roof, and in its setting of trees it looks most attractive. I am very fond of it indeed, and luckier, I realize, than many country headmistresses."

the 4th

We had a wonderful day. Our morning was spent as a threesome weeding the gardens and doing yardwork. In the evening both of our families and my Grammy came over for supper. We all walked to the lake for fireworks late in the evening.

Roses

(I am hoping to get to weed that lovely crop of weeds in the background this evening. Hopefully Caleb will have some time to play with Greta so the mosquitoes don't eat her while I do that. :))

Laundry on the North Dakota Prairie

A passage from

Nothing to Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother by Carrie Young,

from the chapter "The Seedling Years"

"Two days of my mother's week were consumed in doing the laundry for her family of eight. My mother thought she had to boil everything white. Before dawn on Monday morning she brought in the giant oblong washboiler and set it on the stove, filling it with four or five pails of soft water pumped from the cistern. She added soap and put in the bed linens, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, underwear, and white shirts. She brought the whole mess to a boil and kept on boiling and boiling for at least a half an hour, stirring with a long stick. She transferred the clothes with the stick to a washtub, which she had set up on two kitchen chairs pushed together. Rubbing the clothes vigorously up and down on the scrubboard, she was soon wet with perspiration. After wringing the clothes out and putting them through two rinses, one of blueing water, she was finally ready to put them out on the clothesline.


My mother was never fussier about anything than hanging clothes on the line. Anyone driving down the road, she said, could see your entire life hanging on the line for judgement, and a carelessly hung wash was a sure sign of a sjusket kvinne--a slattern. Each garment had to be attached to its neighbor by a common clothespin, and the could not be slack. They must all hang taut. All of the colored clothes, even the men's socks, had to be turned inside out so they wouldn't fade. Even in the coldest part of the winter, my mother always hung out the wash, although it froze solid in a few minutes. She held the opinion that the cold air freshened the clothes and got out at least some of the water. The frozen clothes had to be brought indoors again and hung on wooden clothes-racks to dry around the stove.


My mother spent every Monday from dawn to late afternoon doing the family wash. It was probably no accident that four out of six of her children were born on a Tuesday.


If she wasn't having a baby on Tuesday, my mother ironed. She had three flatirons, which she heated on top of her kitchen range and which she lifted with a detachable handle. She changed irons about every ten minutes as they cooled off. When I awakened on Tuesday morning, I could hear my mother ironing. The handle squeaked as it was pushed against the flatiron moving across the ironing board. One Christmas my father bought her an outsized gasoline iron, which was equipped with a small gas tank on the back; it had to be generated like a gas lamp before being lit. My mother loved that iron. It had such a large smooth surface, she didn't have to heat up the coal range as she did with her old flatirons. But all day the carbon monoxide fumes drifted up in her face, and by the end of the day she had a splitting headache. Still, she refused to give it up; she thought the headaches were worth the time it saved. One Tuesday, however, she was in a hurry, and she didn't generate the iron long enough. It started to puff, and she hurled it out the kitchen door a second before it burst into flames. It couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of equipment."

garlic