My Laura Ingalls Moment

This is a photo from the summer of 1958, when our hometown celebrated its sesquicentennial. There were several days of parades and pageants celebrating our community's humble pioneer beginnings. Men grew beards and women dressed in sunbonnets and full-skirted dresses.

I'm the child on the left, waiting while my mother adjusts my outfit. I am holding hands with Kathy, who was a few years older and the oldest daughter of my mother's best friend. Kathy looks adorable. I am pouting.

I posted this photo on Facebook in response to cousins asking about another family sesquicentennial photo, one which I could also explain.

Margo pounced on my post immediately. She saw what I had not seen in all the decades I have had that picture:

Of course it was my friend Margo who responded immediately. Margo with whom I have had long discussions about the Little House books, ranging from "what about toilets?" (Caroline Fraser addressed that burning question in her new, absolutely sublime biography of Wilder: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to shaking our head over Pa scarfing down pancakes and bacon with the Wilder boys while Ma and the girls starved during the long, hard winter. Margo, my Little House comrade in arms.

Clearly some things are just meant to be. 

Books And More Books

Books 8, 9, and 10 on the list below. 

I have a friend, a constant reader, who keeps a log of every book she has read. The log, or at least the recent years of it, is on her iPhone, so when we are discussing a book, she can pull up the title and author. And I have met others, always women, who have kept book logs, also going back years, in notebooks or special journals. I admire the thoroughness of recording the reading life, but I always think, "Holy Smokes, I'd have to have a whole bookshelf set aside just for journals of what I have read!"

This is on my mind because I have several friends who set themselves a challenge this year of reading 50 books. Occasionally, they post on Facebook or Instagram how they are doing in the challenge.

I love people committing to reading and give them thumbs up when I see that happening.

Seeing all these reading challenges got me thinking about how much I read a year. I confess: I am a voracious reader. I am one of those people who grew up reading the backs of cereal boxes to have something to read since we weren't allowed to bring books to the table. Reading is my go-to activity whenever I have downtime. Reading is how I spend a huge portion of my evenings. I also read very, very fast, so finishing several books a week is not unusual for me.

So how many books a year do I read? More than I think? Or way less than I think?

I'm not joining a challenge, but I am going to keep track of the books I read (and reread, because I often reread books when I am waiting for selected titles to come in at the library)  in 2018. Here's my list current to date:
1. Adams by David McCollough ( A reread)
2. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis (A reread)
3. Dear Martin by Nic Stone (Excellent YA novel about race and perception of race)
4. John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life by Paul Nagel (After reading Adams again, I wanted to read more about John Quincy Adams. Fascinating man.)
5. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (Best. Wilder. Biography. Ever.)
6. Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol (A reread of a book by someone I admire greatly)
7. The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America by Edward Ayers (Wow wow wow. A history from 1862-1902 told through the lenses of two communities, Chambersburg PA and Staunton VA, using letters, newspaper editorials, and diaries from members of those communities, including African-Americans who fought for the Union. It was excellent, with a thoughtful analysis of the political positions of the major parties and players and how those changed after the 1864 presidential election and the lost promise of Reconstruction with Andrew Johnson in the White House following the assassination of Lincoln. At some point sooner than later, I will read the author's companion book, In The Presence of Mine Enemies, The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1869-1864.)
8. Halsey Street by Naima Coster (An excellent debut novel that I learned of because I am reading through the titles on the list 46 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2018.)
9. When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele (The authors with other women founded the BLM movement because, as they make abundantly clear in their work, Black lives don't matter in this country. Even more so since January 20, 2107. This too came from the list of 46 Books referred to in 8.)
10. Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt For The Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson (Because what could be fascinating than a search for a lost Arctic expedition from 1845? I mean, seriously!)

I just finished Ice Ghosts last night and need to head back to the library, where more titles are waiting to be picked up. I have another nine on hold, several from the 46 books list referred to above. If I don't make it today, I will no doubt reread something around the house and add it to the list.

To be continued.

Heat

It is a cold Saturday morning in Ohio, with the temperatures hovering in the low 20s and the sky gray. Warren is at rehearsal for tomorrow's holiday concerts. We left the house so fast and so early this morning for a community breakfast and last minute orchestra matters that neither of us nudged up the thermostat from its nighttime temperature of 61º.

The thermostat is still on 61º four hours later. I walked home from the concert hall, the 20 minute hike warming me up. Once here, I turned on the oven to bake a batch of biscotti and here I am an hour later, shuttling between the kitchen with the biscotti and the basement, where I am hanging laundry to dry.

As I sit here writing at the table in a cool kitchen and a chillier house, I am reminded of the homes I grew up in. I never lived in a house with central heating until long after I left home.

My lifetime-long friend Cindy and I emailed back and forth earlier this week about heat. She lives in a manufactured house, and there is always a worry about the water pipes running underneath freezing when there is a sudden cold snap. I wrote back that I remembered the first floor kitchen in my childhood house. (My grandparents and Aunt Ginger lived on the first floor; we lived on the second for most of the 14 years I lived there.) The sink was against an outside wall that I am pretty sure was just wallboard over stud frame and outside shingles. When it got really cold, someone would hang a lightbulb under the sink to warm the pipes all night (there may have been a fixture or a plug under there for this purpose; I don't remember). I told Cindy that the kitchen was unheated except for stove/oven activities. I went on to explain that there was no central heating: there were gas stoves (floor stoves) in a few rooms on each floor and that was it. She did not remember that, but I sure did. And when we moved to the house my parents still live in, there was only a coal furnace in the basement and floor grates on the first floor. Any heat beyond that was by virtue of hot air rising. All of us kids had bedrooms on the second floor. To this day, I remember the ice that formed on the inside of my bedroom windows in the dead of winter.

As a result of growing up with no central heating, I learned to prefer sleeping in cold air, a preference that is a great trial for Warren. Because I was a teenager (i.e., old enough to be reliable) when we moved, my dad taught me the basics of operating a coal furnace. I know how to bank a coal fire for the night and how to rekindle it for the morning. I understand how furnace flues work. I also know what it is like to shovel coal and stoke a furnace. (Relax: my parents switched to first oil and then natural gas to heat with, installing central heating. My dad is not shoveling coal at 84.)

As I look back, I realize that growing up without central heating made for family times in the winter that are less frequent in today's lifestyles. Think of the chapter "Winter Night" in Laura Ingall Wilder's book Farmer Boy. The Wilder family (her future husband's family) spent cold nights in the kitchen, where it was warmest, talking, doing needlework or greasing moccasins, eating popcorn, reading the paper aloud. My family likewise gathered in the winter after supper in our living room, near the gas stove, to watch television, read, work on homework, polish shoes, or play. I would sit crosslegged on the floor on Saturday nights while my mother put my hair up in curlers for church the next day. Dad would make popcorn. Even as my older brother and I aged and got moodier, we rarely retreated to a bedroom with a closed door in either house. It would be have been too cold! We needed those doors open for that heat to circulate.

Don't get me wrong. I like heat. I am grateful I don't have to struggle financially to keep the house warm in the winter. The biscotti is almost done and I will turn up the thermostat so Warren doesn't freeze when he gets home.

But I don't regret the childhood memories of family time in the evening, the wonderful way those stoves would warm mittens before going outside, or even the ice in my bedroom. That other time, those other memories.

Later note: After writing this out by longhand while the biscotti baked, I retreated to my second floor study to type. I confess: it's cold up here. Back to the first floor!

Inch One Hundred Ten: Another Look at Laura

There is a new Laura Ingalls Wilder book out just this month: The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I read it last week.

Warren asked me after I had finished what I thought. As I suspect is so often the case, he asks a question hoping for a short answer or amusing anecdote, and instead unleashes a torrent of words.

What did I think? I think the book added little to my understanding of who Laura Ingalls Wilder was. I think it could have been condensed into a good, solid, scholarly article with a handful of representational letters. And I think it darkened the image of the little, smiling, white-haired "Laura Ingalls Wilder, American author."

Well, that's what I thought of the book.

William Anderson, a biographer of Laura, edited this collection. To his credit, he makes clear in the introduction that there are large gaps in the body of extant LIW letters. Almost none of Laura's letters to her family, especially her mother and her older sister Mary, exist, most of them thrown out in the 1920s when the family home in De Smet, South Dakota, was cleared out after Ma and Mary died. More disappeared after sisters Grace and Carrie died. Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's problematic daughter and only child, destroyed large numbers of letters from her mother. In fairness to Anderson, he worked with as much as he had available, but too much material, especially the letters that would show the personal side of Laura, is gone.

So what do I know about Laura after reading her letters? She was a tireless correspondent with her reading public and until she was well into her 80s (she lived to be 90), Laura pushed herself to answer personally every note that came her way. Even after her publishers took over answering the correspondence that came directly to their offices, she continued to answer those that ended up in her mailbox in Mansfield, Missouri. Given that she received hundreds of letters annually from children and adults reading the Little House books, her tenacity is admirable.

The collection also makes clear much more than any critical works published to date how much Rose collaborated with Laura on the Little House books, especially By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter. Rose was an accomplished author of the times (the 1930s) and brought a critical eye and a sense of narrative flow to Laura's writing. But make no mistake: the letters show that when it came to understanding both the story itself and what readers wanted, Laura reigned supreme. Rose has been characterized as a woman who was ashamed and resentful of her poverty laced childhood, ashamed and resentful of her parents for their humble backgrounds, and always sure in her conviction that she was superior in all ways to almost everyone else in the world. When she tried to put her attitude into the books and degrade the settlers of De Smet, Laura fought back tartly and precisely. Didn't Rose understand, she wrote, that the only way to survive the horrific winter was to hunker down into a stoic survival mode? Daily life was not the potboiler existence that was a feature of Rose's writing and Laura was not about to show the townspeople in unrealistic and unfair ways. Life that winter really was a matter of grinding wheat every day to survive. Laura also understood that the fictional Laura had to mature and that the story line had to mature with her, despite Rose's insistence that Laura continue to write only to young children.

In the end, of course, Laura was right. Her readers matured along with her storyline, a premise that J. K. Rowling understood well when she wrote the Harry Potter books decades later. The Little House books have never gone out of print, while much of the interest today in Rose Wilder Lane's books is to analyze how much she stole from her mother's history.

You cannot read even this small collection of Laura's letters without being aware of her politics, which were both conservative and harsh. Laura disliked Franklin Roosevelt and disliked the relief programs of the Great Depression. Better that children starve than give their lazy parents a helping hand (yes, she really did feel that way). She conveniently overlooks the great social welfare program of her youth, the Homestead Act, that allowed her parents finally to get settled and financially secure. As to her father, the immortal Pa Ingalls of the Little House series, she could be judgmental in assessing him: he was a dreamer, a ne'er do well until she was grown, and too quick to reach out and help his fellow man. Laura makes Pa larger than life in her books, but her real feelings were much more complicated. In those regards, she is not kind, she is not generous, she is not nice.

I am not sorry I read the letters, but it is not a book I will add to my personal library. Unlike other letter collections that I have read (E. B. White, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, to name but a few), collections that left me with a fuller sense of the man or woman behind the name, the LIW collections puts distance between me and the author.

I own the entire Little House series, well worn paperbacks with the Garth Williams illustrations, and they are still occasionally go to books when I need comfort reading (skipping the wildly inaccurate for the era of the stories and wildly bigoted for our era portrayal of Native Americans, which is why I will probably never buy the series for Ramona). As for Laura Ingalls Wilder the person, though, I will let her go. The author and the story are not the same, and I don't need the one to read the other.

Inch One Hundred Two: Last Night's Meal

Last night's meal was salad, a small loaf of bread I'd bought on the markdown rack at the grocery and stored in the freezer, and homemade Great Northern beans and ham soup—the ham from the bone which had graced my brother Mark's Christmas spread and then made its way to our soup pot.

Estimated total cost? Maybe $2.50. Possibly less, but maybe not. There were, after all, five olives (on my salad only) from the olive bar at the grocery, and that's an indulgence.

The point is, it was cheap. Wonderfully filling and delicious, but cheap.

I am headed back to Rochester, Minnesota in under two weeks. I'll have a day of testing at the Mayo Clinic, then labs and my oncology appointment the next day. I am reacting to this upcoming visit the way I normally react to my Mayo visits: by hunkering down financially. For me, that means scaling back on our already intentionally lean grocery spending. In a typical month, we spend around $200 on groceries and household items; this month we are closer to $100. It also means reading or rereading books about frugality (think The Tightwad Gazette) or memoirs about hard economic times. My book this weekend is Made For You and Me, Caitlin Shetterly's account of her husband and her losing their financial way in the Great Recession of 2008.

And if I am feeling really anxious, I'll pull The Long Winter off the shelf and read the chapter where Laura braces herself and asks Ma if they are going to starve.

I'm not exactly sure why going to Mayo makes me feel the wolf is at our door, trying to thrust his great shaggy head into our home. I have excellent medical insurance which covers Mayo. We can afford the gas to get there and back and the lodging and meals while there. Our car is reliable. My bank account, while not plump, is stable. Compared to many of the people I come into contact with through my job and the Legal Clinic, I am financially secure.

So why the wolf? Why the stress?

I think the wolf appears because I don't want to think of who more appropriately is hanging around the front door. That would be Death, who I have come to personalize in my poetry. Death has a persona when I write about him, somewhat of a callous trickster, a Coyote without the grin. Unlike the wolf at the door, which I can shoo away by throwing rocks at, Death is inviting himself in for tea.

So, I am off to Mayo and feeling frugal. But don't worry: we're eating well. And yesterday afternoon, I tried out a new lemon bar recipe with a thick, rich curd calling for not only butter but also olive oil. We had the aforementioned delicious meal, an evening of plumbing work (Warren) and writing letters (me), and then sat down with the inaugural slices of the dessert.

We savored every sweet, tangy bite. And the wolf slunk off, gnashing his teeth.

Inch Seventy-Two: Whistling

I heard a sound this morning, early, that is so rarely heard anymore that I had to listen for a few seconds before placing it.

It was someone whistling.

In searching for the source, I soon saw and heard a tradesman across the street, working on the neighbor's driveway, whistling while he carried his brushes and buckets up and down the driveway. 

We are always surrounded by sound here. There are the birds, of course. The cicadas are back for the summer and today being a warmer day than we have had as of late, they set up their chatter early. There is street traffic and the occasional hum (more audible at night) of the nearby highway. If there is a light breeze, as there is while I type this, wind chimes start sounding. But there is never anyone whistling.

This guy sounded as if he were whistling for the pleasure of the sound. Or the pleasure of the morning. Or perhaps both.

Where did whistling go? It is rare (unheard of) that I hear anyone whistling anymore just for the heck of it.  Is it because so many are plugged into their iPods or other devices that whistling has fallen by the wayside? Have people forgotten how to whistle? 

Jo March famously "sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle" just to annoy Amy in the opening chapter of Little Women. The Little House books are full of whistling: Pa whistles constantly, Laura whistles and even sings a song about whistling to Almanzo when they are courting. And I believe it is somewhere in that same canon that I came across the saying that "a whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to some bad end." 

As of late, I have been piecing my days together, more crazy quilt than carefully crafted pattern. Today is stitched together with whistling.

Inch Twenty-Five: Straws

It has been a bumpy couple of weeks since returning from Chicago. Two fellow columnists at The Myeloma Beacon died while I was away, which caused me to scrap the topic I'd plan to write about in August and write about dying and death instead. Death and dying still remain taboo topics by tacit agreement, even at a website dedicated to an incurable, terminal cancer. Cancerland has been a hotbed of activity lately for several friends, and I came back from our trip feeling as if everything had fallen apart while I was gone.

It turns out more than just Cancerland had fallen apart.

My aunt Ginger, who is meandering towards her 85th birthday, somehow gashed her leg while we were out of town. With her increasing dementia (the family curse), she could not remember how or when, but by the time we returned and I got her to her doctor, an infection had set in. There have been rounds of doctor visits, rounds of antibiotics, rounds of my stopping by daily to inspect and then bandage the wound. The physical stress has sent the dementia into a higher frequency, so I have taken control of the antibiotics, so she doesn't take too many in one day, as well as the bandages, tape, and topical ointment for her leg, so she doesn't redistribute the items throughout her apartment, an activity that caused me several merry mornings of "where did she put it today?" Ginger lives a block away, and I carry all the items, including the antibiotics, in a little blue bag. Our public schools went back into session last week, and as I trot back and forth between Ginger's apartment and our house, I feel like a school girl swinging her lunch bag.

In addition to my job at Juvenile Court, I recently took on a fast track court project at Municipal Court, where I used to work. I agreed to the project after a discussion about community legacy building with my good friend Doug, who lives in Cancerland. This new project is legacy building. I committed to the project before Chicago, which means I didn't yet know that the routine with Ginger was going to unravel at least for a few weeks.

Not that I'm counting days. Not really. I feel more like the proverbial camel with the bundles of straw mounting on its back.

My health continues to be baffling. Great lab results, inconsistent physical responses. Earlier this week, my oncologist listened to me, looked at the labs, and  then scratched his head. Who knows? Another round of Revlimid, another rounds of labs in a few weeks, another straw on the camel.

So when our almost-daughter Amy called or messaged me with a series of crises over the last ten days, that was the straw that broke this camel's back.

Wednesday night I collapsed into a puddle of tears. Yesterday, helped along by little sleep and miscellaneous medical issues, I just collapsed, period. At one point, I realized I was channeling essayist Jane O'Reilly, describing her own collapse. "Waaaaah," [Jane] wailed, "bills, soot, work deadlines, interpersonal relationships, urban woes, the meaning of life, inflation, equal rights, the human condition, woe, etc."

Okay, so I don't wail about soot and urban woes. Different lyrics, but the same melody. WAAAAAH indeed!

Earlier this week I finished reading Passages in Caregiving by Gail Sheehy. I cannot say enough about this book, other than I am buying it to own it. Reading Sheehy, I smacked my forehead at the obvious error in my thinking. I am the caregiver for Ginger, I am the caregiver for myself,  I am a caregiver for the court project. And as Sheehy stresses, over and over, the caregiver needs to take care of his or herself as part of the overall continuum of caregiving, which she compares to a labyrinth. Not a puzzle, not a maze, but a path that is not always visible or predictable. Taking a deep breath and a few steps back from the brink, I can see that I let the events and stresses of the last two weeks invade my personal realm. No wonder I collapsed. Protecting personal time and space, including time and space with Warren, is not only important but critical to my being able to take care of health issues, jobs, Ginger, and even the woebegone Amy.

When this camel's back broke, the straws went flying everywhere. Straw is slippery and hard to gather up and put back just as it was before. That's why in On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa was so upset with Laura and Mary after they rolled down the straw-stack and scattered it in the barnyard. And straw imagery pops up in other places than on the camel. Straws in the wind are portents,  drawing straws signals choices.

I've got straws everywhere.  I may just fashion myself a straw hat and bracelet and go off to see the world.

Soapbox: Why It Matters

Note: This is not one of my One Square Inch Focus pieces. This is a piece I have been thinking through for a long time and finally wrestled onto paper.

I recently read all four of the Birchbark House books published to date. They are already on my "buy these for Ramona" list, even though she is still a long ways away from being old enough to listen to them, let alone read them to herself.

The Birchbark House books are author Louise Erdrich's contribution to the body of juvenile literature featuring Native American characters and written by Native American authors. The series is a fictionalized retelling of her family history and how her family migrated from the Great Lakes region of Minnesota into the plains of the Dakotas  in the 1800s.

Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The Chippewa, also known as the Ojibwe and the Ainishaanabe, are among the largest groups of Native Americans and First Nation peoples on this continent. Ramona and Alise belong to the Little Shell tribe in Montana, also a Chippewa tribe.

My good friend Anne and I often discuss the dearth of children's books, starting with picture books, and juvenile fiction featuring indigenous children, children of color, children of ethnicity, and children of any race other than white. In march,  The New York Times ran two editorials, "The Apartheid of Children's Literature" by author/artist Christopher Myers and "Where Are the People of Color?" by author Walter Dean Myers (who is Christopher's father). Both articles address the segregation of children's literature: of 3200 children's books published in 2013, only 93 were about black children. I suspect, although I do not know, that children's books featuring Native American children were even fewer in number. [For a link to both articles, this excellent post on the need for diversity in children's lit has a link to the Walter Dean Myers' editorial, and from his editorial you can link to the one by Christopher Myers.]

So what does it matter? Can't Ramona read through the vast panoply of all children's books, from picture to prose, and find direction and guidance? Can't she identify with Ramona Quimby? Can't Anne's son Sam, who is biracial, do the same in his reading?

Yes, but that's not enough.

Walter Dean Myers had no problem identifying why it matters that our children's literature is so white. "Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?"

I want Ramona to see herself and her family represented in those books, not as savages (sorry, Laura Ingalls Wilder, among others) but realistically and with elements and values from her tribal culture. I want her books to reflect her past, present, and future and not merely my past, present, and future.

It matters that Ramona has good literature with strong Native American characters and Sam with African-American ones so that they know they count too. It matters for the same reason that Little Women mattered so much when it was published in 1868 and 1869. Louisa May Alcott became the world's first true best-seller, wealthy novelist because she knew girls wanted to read books about girls, a salient point that the publishing world in America and England had overlooked. The rest is publishing history.

My son Ben and daughter-in-law Alise will make sure Ramona grows up with a library full of good books of all kinds, as full of those by Louise Erdrich and Cynthis Leitich Smith as those by L. Frank Baum and Madeleine L'Engle. Anne and her husband will do the same with Sam and his soon-to-arrive sibling. All of these children will be immersed in children's literature of rich voices and histories and faces of all kinds.

Because it matters. You bet it matters.

Christmas By the Book

For all my love of reading, I did not receive a book as a Christmas present until 1965 (4th grade) and then only as a reward for refraining from biting my fingernails. That a child would crave books over toys was unfathomable to my young parents and I think they were taken aback when I would ask for them. Betting against my daily nibbling of my nails, my parents indeed rewarded me that year. While I no longer own the books, I still remember them well: Marguerite Henry's An Album of Horses and The Golden Stallion by Rutherford  Montgomery.

That is the only thing I remember about that Christmas: I finally received books that belonged to me and me alone. By sheer fate, that Christmas turned into a hat trick of sorts when it came to books as I also received a children's abridged and illustrated Little Women. (I still own that book.)

With Christmas just hours away, I have been recently revisiting my memories of Christmas stories and tales. My earliest are oral: singing "Away in the Manger" in church toddler class or listening to Grandma Skatzes recite the nursery rhyme beginning "Christmas is coming."

Once I learned to read, I discovered Christmas in books and learned I could experience the holiday anytime I felt like it. I heard and read the lilt of Clement Moore's "The Night Before Christmas" and set about memorizing it, starting with the names of the reindeers.

There was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (Dr. Seuss) and the wonders of Whoville and Mr. Willoughby's Christmas Tree (Robert Barry) and my satisfaction over the mouse family getting the last tip of the too big tree. There was Laura cuddling Charlotte in Little House in the Big Woods, the first book of the series I had yet to discover. When I did discover and devour the series, I found that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a Christmas scene into every single book in the series. My favorite was and remains the time that Mr. Edwards swam the Verdigris River to bring Christmas to Laura and Mary way out on the big prairie.

Wilder had a knack for Christmas scenes: the rag doll, Mr. Edwards, the church gift trees in Plum Creek (the muff) and De Smet (the secret gift from Almanzo), the store bought cap Almanzo received as a boy, the hard winter where the Ingalls family read stories until the kerosene lamp went out.

As my world of books expanded, so did the Christmases I experienced. I joined Sam Gribley and Bando for Christmas day in My Side of the Mountain. I followed the fate of the Christmas tree in Hans Christian Andersen's story"The Fir Tree."

I can never think of Little Women without hearing Jo grumble "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." And even having read that book hundreds of times, I still thrill when during a later Christmas when Laurie  "popped his head in very quietly. He might just as well have turned a somersault and uttered an Indian war whoop, for his face was so full of suppressed excitement and his voice so treacherously joyful that everyone jumped up, though he only said, in a queer, breathless voice, Here's another Christmas present for the March family."

By the time I was in junior high, I'd added the Christmas chapter from Sally Benson's Junior Miss, Abby Deal's Christmas efforts in A Lantern in Her Hand (which introduced me to the writings of Bess Streeter Aldrich, who was no slouch herself when it came to Christmas stories), and the Christmas celebrations woven though the Betsy-Tacy novels of Maude Hart Lovelace. At about the same time, I first read Dylan Thomas's "Conversation About Christmas"and Truman Capote's evocative story, "A Christmas Memory."

Interestingly enough, there are no celebrations of Christmas in any of the Oz books. Santa Claus makes a cameo appearance at Ozma's birthday party in The Road to Oz.

In my children's young years, I added a few more Christmas tales to the list: Jingle Bugs, a marvelous pop-up book by David Carter, Carl's Christmas by Alexandra Day, and, a little later, Beverly Cleary's Ramona and Her Father, in which she plays a sheep in the church pageant.

There are two other books I would be remiss to skip. The first is Gregory Maguire's Matchless, a retelling and reworking of Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." Told simply and starkly, it contains a favorite line of mine: "The family was still hard-pressed for money, and dreamed of savory treats to eat, but they had the warmth of one another, and enough on which to live, and in most parts of the world that is called plenty."

The second is, of course, my beloved A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I confess: I do not remember reading it as a child, learning my Dickens from the early broadcasts of "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol" instead. I have long since made up for my lapse by reading the book some fifty or more times as an adult.

It is the afternoon of Christmas Eve as I finish this. Somewhere Jo is grumbling about the lack of presents, somewhere a lonely boy is searching the sky for a "lost pair of kites hurrying towards heaven." Somewhere Ramona is wiggling her bottom to make her tail wag, and somewhere Sam and Bando are trying out Christmas tunes on the willow reed whistles.

Somewhere it is always Christmas.

Trust Me, They Are Pulling Our Leg

My friend Cecelia, whom I absolutely love (and who blogs here and is one of the bravest bloggers I know) put the bag on my desk a little over two weeks ago. It was a gallon size plastic bag with some pale glop in it. Alongside the bag of glop was a sheet of instructions to make "Amish Friendship Bread."

You know what I am talking about. These recipes have been circulating for decades. My beloved late mother-in-law, Ellen, had one tucked away in her cookbook with a note that it came from Betty Meyers next door. Somewhere in my long ago past, I was even on the receiving end of one of these recipes. I was unsuccessful back then: my glop turned rancid and moldy.

The whole friendship glop thing is not unlike a chain letter. You feed the batter, you nurture the batter, then you beef it up and pour off cup portions of it to give to friends.

It never stops.

All the same, I was intrigued. What Cecelia gave me was about a cup of potential sourdough starter. I have always been interested in baking with starters, but never went beyond envying people who baked with them. Given my extremely limited and highly unsuccessful experience with glop in the past, I never tried my hand at a starter.

So here I was, with glop from someone I truly, truly like, which meant I couldn't just toss it away. And it was starter. So I squeezed it and fed it and nurtured it just like the instructions called for. By the miracle of fermentation, the glop actually did what it was supposed to do. It developed bubbles and froth and had a nice tangy odor when I opened the bag.

Today was "make more glop to give to people and bake the bread with the remaining glop" day. I just popped the "bread" into the oven. I have a large bowl of starter, which I may just be selfish and keep for myself.  We'll see.

But here's my take on the "Amish Friendship Bread" recipe. Somewhere there are a group of Amish women laughing their heads off.

I don't know why the recipe calls for starter, except to make middle class white women (who I imagine are the only ones who ever, ever make this stuff) feel they are baking something authentic and earthy. They may be communing with their Little House on the Prairie alter egos (and who among us doesn't do that?) but trust me, this is not a recipe that needs starter. There are more than enough ingredients (eggs, baking powder, baking soda) to make it rise on its own without the starter.  

But I digress. The real reason this recipe is still making the rounds is that "Amish Friendship Bread" is a sugar fest from the word go. Even cutting back on the sugar, there is more than enough in the dough (especially after you add one LARGE box on instant pudding) to stun a horse. And that was before I sprinkled the cinnamon sugar combo on the top. As it bakes, I can smell the sugar rising through the house. While traditional Amish baked goods do call for a lot of sugar (because this is a community that does everything manually and they need the calories), I doubt there is an Amish woman anywhere in this country who ran to the general store in her little community and popped a large box of instant pudding into her basket so she could make this little treat.

I won't be making "Amish Friendship Bread" again. But I DO have a lot of starter now and see no reason it cannot be used for real bread. And I'm willing to be the butt of the joke in the meantime. Because I know darn well that somewhere out there is a whole bunch of Amish women laughing their heads off at us all. "Oh, ja, that's what we bake all the time," they assure us, waiting until we turn the corner before clutching one another in gales of laughter.

Getting Away

Back in August, I started the following post:

Canning is a messy business. Over the weekend I canned a batch of salsa, only seven pints, and by the time I finished, there were dirty dishtowels everywhere. Everywhere. In the sink, on the table, on the stove. By the time I had washed and dried bowls and cutting board and knives, there were even more towels.

How did Ma Ingalls do it?

We know Ma canned, because Laura refers to her doing so in The Long Winter. So if Ma was canning at the homestead shanty at De Smet, we are not talking a big room. We are not talking about a family that had a lot of towels either.

My good friend Margo and I often dissect the Little House saga with painstaking precision. Where did Ma go the bathroom? And now this all consuming question: how did Ma can?

I am not planning on a lot of canning this year. My heart is not in it and, other than the salsa, I am not sure I want to lay up treasures in my earthly pantry.

That's as far as I got.

My writing got set aside for lots of reasons. A concert cancellation lead to Warren being able to leave town for a week and we made tentative plans for a long overdue break. Aunt Ginger unexpectedly went into the hospital for the better part of the last week of August, an adventure that started at 8 p.m.on Monday and segued into rehab at a nursing facility at 4:00 p.m. the following Friday. Our vacation plans tottered and threatened to all with the medical crisis, but once Ginger was safely ensconced in the nursing home, I felt I could leave town with impunity.

So we fled. Fled to Cape Hatteras and the gift of a cottage at the ocean. Fled to a week of no office, no Symphony, no hospital, no much of anything. Oh, we did a little bit of going out and looking: Monticello on the way to the cape, the Wright Brothers National Monument when we got there, but for the most part we kept quiet and stayed home. The ocean was a short walk over a dune and we both spent time walking or just sitting and listening.

The cape is two weeks behind us and I am still playing catchup. (But I'm closer, really I am.) The great news is that Aunt Ginger was released today from the nursing home and is now back home in her own comfort zone. She lives a block away from me, so now she is a short stroll away instead of driving across town.

It's good to be writing again. I did write some while I was gone, but not blogging posts. It's good to be back, but because I am still catching up, I am finishing this post with my September Myeloma Beacon column:

I once read an article in which the author described her habit of working herself into an illness requiring hospitalization about every two years. She did this routinely until a doctor finally pointed out to her that scheduling a vacation every so often would be a more cost-effective, healthier practice. The author, who had been eschewing vacations as a waste of time, became a convert.

I read that article decades ago. I read it back in the pre-computer, pre-cell phone, pre-tablet, pre-plugged in 24/7/365 era. Today, a similar article would have to start with the precept, “disconnect.” While I agreed with the author’s conclusion, I too have been guilty of not taking time for myself but instead pushing myself to the point of dropping.

Not this year. The first week of September, I took an unplugged, “health first” vacation. It was made possible by the generous loan of an ocean cottage by a very good friend and an unexpected opening in my hus­band’s too tight schedule. A last-minute medical crisis of a family member managed to resolve to the point I felt I could leave town without worrying too much. So the first day of September, we were on the road to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Living with myeloma, I never forget the reality of having a chronic, terminal cancer. Every time something new and different emerges (the latest being veins that spontaneously break), I flinch. I try to spend my days not dwelling on it, but the truth is that myeloma is never far from my mind.

But for the vacation, it was, at least much of the time. There is a timeless quality to the ocean, an eternal pattern in the waves. Sitting on the beach and watching them roll in, I could shove myeloma to the far corner of my mind.

To my surprise, my awareness of the cancer was strongest the first time we walked up over the dune and dropped down onto the shore. I stood for the longest time just watching the waves, closing my eyes to listen to the surf. Then I turned to my husband.

“I didn’t realize until just now how much I was afraid I would never see the ocean again,” I told him, my voice hoarse with emotion. I sensed a weight lifting from me as I took in the sounds, the smells, the sights. I stored them up greedily, hoarding them for when the surf is too faint and distant to sense.

Prior to our leaving on the trip, my husband asked me what I wanted to do while we were on vacation. My answer came quickly.

“Sit on the beach, listen to the waves, and do nothing.”

Okay, we did a little more than that. We toured Monticello en route to the ocean, and we ventured away from the cottage a few other times as well. And we did watch some old movies (old, old movies: “Giant” (1956) was the newest of the lot) on television. But a lot of the vacation was spent reading and resting and watching the waves.

The great naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote, “[a] man may stand [at the shore] and put all America behind him.” He was writing of Cape Cod, which he walked the length of more than once in his lifetime. I was considerably farther south, but my sentiments were one with Thoreau’s.

On Cape Hatteras, I could stand facing the ocean and put all America, as well as all of my myeloma, behind me.

And I did.

Saturday Afternoon

"That's almost two quarts of green tomato pickle. Even if it's only our first garden on the sod and nothing could grow well, these pickles will be a treat with baked beans in the winter," Ma gloated. (The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Well, it was salsa and it was ten pints (five quarts), but I know just what Ma Ingalls meant.

Letters with Katrina

Katrina and I have been friends for 36 years, shortly after we were matched (by hand in those long ago days before computers) as freshman roommates at the University of Chicago.

Our friendship has been maintained for that entire time largely on the strength of written correspondence. Not email, not texts, not phone calls, not Skype, but plain, old-fashioned correspondence.

Back and forth, back and forth, for all these years.

We have written about college, about jobs, about life. We have written about romances, about marriages, about divorces, about life. We have written about pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, and our own children's experiences in college, jobs, marriage, and life. We have written about the death of her parents and about my cancer. We have written about sad times, lonely times, exciting times, boring times, exhausting times, and laugh out loud times.

We are Facebook friends, but we rarely touch base through Facebook except to share photos. We have each other's email address, but largely reserve that for finalizing the details of our occasionally seeing one another (more frequent in recent years with Warren attending the League midwinter managers meeting in New York). Not counting calling for directions, we have talked by telephone less than a dozen times in 36 years.

No, we are snail mail friends of the highest order.

As a result, our friendship has had a rhythm and pace to it that has molded it (and, perhaps, us as well) deeply over the years. When you drop a note or card into the mail and know that there will be a reply not in 10 seconds but perhaps 10 days, you put a little more effort and thought into the whole process. The time lag with written correspondence is such that the superficial "noise" of everyday life drops away. The daily routines, the seasons, and the passing milestones have deepened and have become the framework against which our thoughts and dreams and debates have played out over the years.

In my bedroom closet is a box, maybe 3 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, that is almost full of Katrina's correspondence with me. There are postcards from almost every place she has traveled as early on we both got in the habit of sending postcards - the more garish the better in some cases - whenever one of us went "somewhere." There are Christmas cards with photos of her children - now young adults - growing up over the years. There are letters in which she chided me or responded to my chiding her. There are political letters (she is a conservative R and I am a liberal D) and there are theological letters. There is at least one letter that caused me to call her in response and the two of us to talk for an hour just so she would know she wasn't alone.

I don't know how many notes, letters, and cards are in that box. Hundreds at this point. I know I am only missing the handful of letters we exchanged in the summer on 1974 before we met in Chicago for the first time.

I believe Katrina has a similar box in her house, holding, of course, my letters and cards to her over the years.

I have left the box of her letters to her in my will.

You can't write that many words over that many years without getting to know someone really, really well. And because of that, when we do see each other, our conversation flows as seamlessly and connectedly as our correspondence has.

There is a scene in The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder where Ma is finishing a letter to send back to Wisconsin:

When her neat, clear writing filled the paper she turned it and filled it again crosswise. On the other side of the paper she did the same thing so that every inch of paper held all the words that it possible could.

That is what Katrina and I have done for the last 36 years. We have written down one side, filled it crosswise, down the other, and crosswise again - not just on paper, but on each other's lives. We have written all the words - and all the love, loyalty, friendship, concern, sorrow, and joy - that our lives have held to date.

Last night I sat at the table and wrote a letter to Katrina, in reply to the one she had just sent, which was in response to the one I had written last week, which was in response to…

Back and forth, back and forth for all these years. The letter went out in today's mail.

Grateful to the Dead

We just finished a 4600+ mile trip out to Helena, Montana, to see Ben and Alise get married. I will be writing about the wedding as well as the trip. Really.

It was a wonderful wedding. It was a great trip. I really will write about what we saw and experienced. But my first post-trip blog is about the dead. More specifically, it is about the dead I carried home with me on this trip.

The return portion of our trip was a chance for me and Warren to explore, as we are often wont to do. We had some Big stops on the way home: Little Bighorn, Devils Tower, Mount Rushmore. We also had a number of Little stops on the way home, including the Blue Bunny ice cream parlor in Le Mars, Iowa, and the Dvorak rooms in Spillville, Iowa.

It was a lot of fun sharing that part of the country (which I knew somewhat) with Warren, who had never been there. It was a wonderful opportunity for Warren and me to talk, explore, and connect.

The dead, though, were always with me on the return trip. Maybe it was the talk that Father Joe (literally and figuratively: he is both Alise's father and an ordained Episcopalian priest who performed the service) gave in which he referred to the ancestors on "the other side of the veil." Maybe it was the Shehecheyanu, the Jewish prayer for celebrating special occasions. The prayer thanks God, "who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion." It kept chasing through my head as I watched Ben and Alise say their vows - five years earlier that day, I was about to undergo a second stem cell transplant. At the time, I didn't know if I would live long enough to see my older son graduate from college. And now I was sitting at his wedding, my hand in Warren's as we watched the joy light on our children's faces.

Whatever it was, I felt the dead - some nameless, some known - with me for the duration of the return trip.

One of our stops was Clear Lake, Iowa. Clear Lake is a small town in northeastern Iowa that gained posterity on February 3, 1959, when a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and Ritchie Valens, crashed into a cornfield shortly after takeoff. The crash site, located in a farm field about a half mile off a gravel road, contains a memorial marker to the musicians, and may be visited, provided you stay on the mowed access strip and do not harm the field crops.

The field crop this year is corn, which in this part of Iowa this year is growing particular thick and tall. Even though Warren and I were there in the early morning, the sun was already hot and the air was heavy and hot as well.

We walked slowly back towards the site. The corn formed a deep channel on either side of the strip of grass. You could smell the fields baking beneath the sun and hear the corn rustling. About halfway down the access strip, I commented to Warren that these were perfect "Field of Dreams" cornfields and I expected to see Shoeless Joe Jackson emerge any moment.

Warren quickly commented, "well, if Buddy Holly walks out, I'm out of here."

Buddy Holly didn't walk out. But by the time we reached the memorial marker, it was clear many, many people had walked in. The ground around the small marker was covered with offerings - coins, glasses, CDs, music, jewelry, pictures. Some articles of clothing were tied to a nearby stake, much like Indian prayer bundles. There was a second marker for the pilot of the plane, at which there were more coins, these all neatly stacked on the crossbar of the marker.

Fifty years after the crash, people still make pilgrimages and leave tokens to show they were there and that the musicians are not forgotten.

The day before we had been in De Smet, South Dakota. De Smet became immortal as the Little Town on the Prairie after Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about her youth on the great South Dakota plains. De Smet, even on a day when the thermometer was reaching 100 degrees, has a high density of small girls and frazzled mothers trekking from location to location.

One of the stops in De Smet, at which we found ourselves the only visitors, was the cemetery in which Ma, Pa, and all of Laura's sisters are buried, as well as a number of other townsfolk whose names and personalities appear in the books. In contrast to the crash site, the Ingalls plot is pin-neat. That surprised me. I thought that some of those mothers and daughters, making their trek to and through De Smet, might have left a flower, a drawing, or even a clothespin doll. But there was no sign of anything, and no indication that memorials of any type, even a rock placed on the headstone to show someone was there, were ever left.

The cemetery was quiet and empty, except for the two of us.

Two days before De Smet, we had gone to the battlefield at Little Bighorn. In the last decade, the National Park Service (and this country) finally recognized that Little Bighorn means different things to different people, especially those coming from the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes. Those tribes were the victors at that battle and there is now a memorial to the Indian warriors who fought and died that day. The memorial is an enclosed circle; visitors enter through openings in the wall. There is an additional opening in the wall that lines up with the memorial to the US Calvary soldiers who fell that same day. This is a spirit gate, placed there to welcome the spirits of the Calvary dead into the circle.

Little Bighorn is a haunting place.

Our ways of marking death are so varied. At the site of a long ago plane crash, people still walk a long fencerow to leave mementoes. In a windswept prairie town, the graves of those immortalized in the Little House series are painfully clean, almost as if Ma had her broom out on a daily basis. And in a remote battlefield where the battle began and ended 134 years ago in one bloody, desperate day, there is a gate for the spirits of all the soldiers - Indian and Army - to be at peace with one another.

As we walked down the corn row to the Buddy Holly crash site, a pair of yellow butterflies kept dancing in the air before us, almost leading us to it, as it were. It reminded me of the closing lines of I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a gem of a novel by Margaret Craven about which I have written briefly before. In the Indian village, all is still the night before the young vicar's burial. Only two residents are awake. One is Peter, the carver, who remembers that "in the old days," the soul of a man would return after death to the village in some other form:

Peter did not believe this literally. Yet it seemed likely to him that the soul of the young vicar would return to the village he had loved, as would his own, and surely it would be most inhospitable if no one was awake and waiting. Thus he dressed and sat on the top step of his house in the dark night, and hearing the rustle of some small night creature he, too, spoke softly, "It is only old Peter, the carver, who waits here, friend."

Those lines came to me as I watched the butterflies lead us to the crash site. They were nowhere in sight when we made our way back out to continue our trip.

In the Nursery

I thought we were done with the nursery.

No, not that kind of nursery. Until and unless there are grandchildren, Warren and I are both done on the baby front.

No, I mean the plant nursery. Ever since March 21, a large folding table has dominated the space in front on the patio door. To get to the back deck, you had to go through the percussion room, into the garage, then out to the patio and up to the deck.

All that was coming to an end this weekend. We spent part of Mother's Day tilling the two gardens. They and I were ready to go this weekend.

The table would finally, blessedly, be empty.

Yesterday I put in peppers, eggplants, and broccoli. We took some tomato plants out to dad. Today, I heeled in our tomatoes, planted onions, and seeded cilantro, basil, greasy beans, pumpkins, and zucchini.

In addition to being the weekend I planted the garden, this weekend is the Delaware Arts Festival, a two-day downtown street fair. The Symphony always has a booth there, which Warren and I helped set up early Saturday. I wanted to buy Ben and Alise's wedding present at the fair, so later on (before the first round of gardening), we spent a good hour or more wandering up and down the blocks looking at the wares.

One of the booths was a gourd artist, the kind who paint and carve gourds into decorative art - penguins, jolly Santas, dogs (no, Ben and Alise, I did not buy you gourd art). Warren is always interested in gourds - not to decorate our house with, but to turn into percussion instruments such as shakeres or güiros.

While he eyed the gourds, judging size and dimensions, I realized there were trays of brown paper packets underneath the lowest shelf.

Seed packets.

Gourd seed packets.

Warren and I engaged the proprietor in some gourd talk. What's this gourd here? How about this one?

Gourds have descriptive names: kettle, pear, apple, basketball. That's a big pear. That one? A penguin (painted like, you guessed it, a penguin).

I treated my husband: one pack of kettle seeds, one pack of large pear seeds. The seed owner and I talked planting and germination. He suggested starting them inside, under heat. They have a tough coating, so they'll take awhile to germinate. Just stay at it.

If I started now, I asked, would I still have enough growing season to get gourds this year?

Oh heavens, yes.

I spent all morning today gardening. The kitchen garden is fluffy and easy to work. The sod garden, even after last week's compost and roto-tilling, is still rough and still has a long ways to go. Pa Ingalls flashed across my mind.

The broccoli is down in the sod garden this year, where it can grow to the size of fifth graders if so desires. I have two rows of pie pumpkins and two rows of zucchini seeded. A fifth row will hold the gourds when their time comes. The kitchen garden will have eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, basil, cilantro, and pole beans this year. It is not as crowded as last year and this year I know where every single tomato is planted. I also planted six containers: two with artichokes (trying yet once again) and four with sugar lump cherry tomatoes.

By the time I finished, I was tired. But not too tired to make ten newspaper seed pots, fill them with wet potting soil, and poke a gourd seed down into each one. The big table came down as planned, but one of the small deck tables holds a tray of seeds and a lamp just fine. The babes-in-waiting spent a hour or two in the sun before I carried them inside and tucked them in for a nap.

The nursery is humming one last time this garden season.

Christmases Past

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long past?" inquired Scrooge…
"No. Your past."

I had intended this post to be a series of photos only, from Christmases past, but the popcorn balls intervened, so indulge me while I talk about popcorn balls.

My grandmother Skatzes, my beloved Grandma Skatzes, loved Christmas. It was her favorite holiday. She always announced loudly that Christmas was for children, not for adults, and she meant that. I think though that Grandma always carried a child's delight in life in her heart, and she reveled in the Christmas season.

Christmas in that household meant popcorn balls and Grandma was the sole possessor of the recipe and the sole maker of the balls. Until I was 13, we lived in the same house - my family upstairs from my grandparents - and I loved to come downstairs on popcorn ball day to be with her. When I was very young, she would give me a handful of popcorn or a few caramelized pieces and shoo me out of her kitchen and out of her way. But as we both grew older, she slowly started letting me help - first bagging the balls, then shaping them, then working alongside her cooking the syrup. Even after we moved out of the house, I would come back on popcorn ball day. On one of those days, she finally decided it was time to pass along the recipe to me.

I still have it.

Grandma Skatzes was all but blind, and so cooked the syrup by feel and not by a candy thermometer. Under her tutelage, I learned to judge its consistency with my fingers as it passed from soft to hard stage. (It occurs to me as I type these words that her extremely limited vision was yet another reason she did not want a rambunctious little kid hanging at her elbow while she handled the hot syrup.) She taught me to dip my hands in cold water before shaping the balls to minimize burns. (I quickly learned that burns were part of making popcorn balls.)

Everyone in her large family watched and waited for Grandma's popcorn balls. It was the one flavor that Christmas needed to be complete. Grandma made them in massive quantities; I remember bagging over 300 one day. She made them for the families of her children and any adult grandchildren who were known to be coming into town for the holidays. By the end of popcorn ball day, there would be paper grocery bags filled to the brim on all of the kitchen chairs.

What I never knew was when and how this tradition got started. Was it something Grandma began in the depths of the Great Depression, trying to make Christmas a little more festive? Did it date back to her childhood? All I know is that we all looked forward to the sack of popcorn balls arriving each December, and how everyone - young and old alike - regretted when there was only one left, because that meant the end of the popcorn balls until the next Christmas.

Grandma died in early 1978; she had stopped making popcorn balls some years before that. When she made her last batch, she gave me two pans - a large roaster pan and a very heavy pot - which were the critical pieces of popcorn ball making equipment. I have carried those pans from here to Chicago, to Oregon, to California, and back again to my hometown for the last 30 some years.

Over those years, I have made popcorn balls sporadically, but never in the volume Grandma did. My life was complicated and there were other demands. My children have only had them a few times at the holidays.

This year, I am making popcorn balls.

I popped the popcorn this morning - four pounds of it - dumping it into grocery bags to cool just like Grandma always did. I have already burned a finger on the heavy pot - the one in which I will make syrup later today - because I forgot that somewhere in its past the wooden handle came off and my grandfather's repair included a large threaded nut that gets as hot as the pan. It will scorch your fingers if you forget and touch it while cleaning up.

Laura Ingalls Wilder mentioned popcorn balls more than once in her Little House books - they were on the church Christmas tree in Plum Creek and they appear again at a Christmas in De Smet when Almanzo surprises Laura by coming home early from a trip east. They appear in Robert P. Tristam Coffin's Christmas memoir, "Christmas in Maine," where they were "big as muskmelons." My guess is that popcorn balls are woven into the fabric of our country's past and probably make more literary appearances than even I could imagine.

They are certainly woven into the fabric of my past.

It is that fabric that will be swaddling my heart later today when I make them. I cannot wait for the smell of the syrup, for the crunch as I shape them, and even for the small scorches which are part and parcel of the making. They will bring me memories of Grandma Skatzes, memories of my childhood, and memories of Christmas past.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Christmas, 1957


Christmas, 1962


Christmas, 1986


Christmas, 1991

Sam


Ben

What Would Pa Have Done?

I am a huge fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. Ever since reading Little House in the Big Woods when I was a third grader, I have read Laura's books countless times. Even now, if I am "between books" and want something to read while eating lunch, I am more likely to grab a Little House book off the shelf than anything else.

I never watched the television show, so my mental images of Laura and her family are those by Garth Williams, the original illustrator. That's a good thing as lately I have been dogged by Pa Ingalls, and I'd rather not have Michael Landon popping into my head as I struggle with starting the second garden.

I knew I wanted and needed a second garden bed for all the vegetables I planned on sowing directly. Zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss chard, spinach, Lazy Housewife beans, pie pumpkins. I even toyed with the idea of having a separate pumpkin patch, as pumpkins sprawl so.

The lawn where I wanted the garden has been undisturbed for decades, and the grass is well established. My dad brought over his old front-tine rotor-tiller, but I couldn't begin to handle "the beast," as my dad calls it, let alone till with it. After several futile attempts, I gave up. I couldn't break through the grass even after dad sharpened the tine blades.

Fortunately, a neighborhood friend has a rear-tine tiller that he was glad to lend me. Last Friday night, Warren and I walked around the corner, walked the contraption back, and then I set to tilling the garden.

This is the point where Pa Ingalls first came to mind.

As already noted, the grass is well established. Warren's house was built in 1964 on a parcel split off from the imposing brick 1869 home directly to the east. A rear driveway from the large residence to our street was removed for this house, but other than that, my guess is that most of the backyard has been lawn for a long, long, time.

Long enough for the grass to grow roots to China.

The borrowed rotor-tiller was a "dirt-eating machine," per another friend. It did not balk once as, inch by inch, it cut through the grass roots and turned the soil.

But it was really, really hard work. And as I sweated and grunted and clung to the tiller, I thought about Pa Ingalls. Specifically, how did he do it? We all know from reading the Little House series that Pa was always breaking the sod of the Great Plains, whether it was in Indian Territory or out in the Dakotas.

We also all know from reading these wonderful books the two basic rules about breaking sod. First, it is very hard work, even if you have horses to help pull the plow. I didn't have horses to help me till, although I did have horsepower. I know the root stems on these lawn grasses don't begin to measure as deep as prairie grass roots, which can reach 15 feet or more. And I'm only digging a garden measuring about 20 x 15 feet, not breaking 160 acres.

All the same, it was hard work. Warren offered to help, but I figured I needed to do the bulk of it since it was my idea to have a second garden. Besides, Warren had a shed to build and a storage unit to move. So most of the tilling fell to me and as I cut through the grass, I thought of how many times and in how many places Pa put the plow to the prairie.

The second lesson about breaking sod is that you don't get very good garden results the first year. As Pa noted after that first harvest in the Dakotas, "we can't get much from a first year on sod-ground, but the sods will rot this winter. We'll do better next year." I hope so because my results dismay me. After three passes through the plot, I didn't have the strength or the daylight left to do a fourth. It was clear from everything I saw that, whatever I did, the results this first year would likely be meager at best.

My dream garden, put together on paper back in February, has zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss chard, spinach, Lazy Housewife beans, and pie pumpkins growing in it. Uh huh. I've got a sod garden that looks like a dirt-eating something or other barfed in the backyard. The garden will take time and hard work, and I am particularly short on any capacity to do a lot of hard physical work, having used up a huge chunk of my reserves in tilling the garden and helping with the storage unit move (one phrase: a ton of rosewood).

Something has to give, and what has to give is my dream garden.

When the Ingalls had to sell a heifer calf to send Mary to college, Mary was dismayed, but Ma was ready with a response. "We must cut our coat to fit the cloth." As I walked the tiller back to its owner, I already had my scissors out and was taking measure of the cloth I was about to cut.

This year, the second garden will be zucchini and pie pumpkins only. I am planting those because I believe that zucchini will grow almost anywhere and that pumpkins are known for their ability to break up soil. (Let me hold onto those beliefs, no matter how deluded I may be.) I never saw a zucchini mentioned in the Little House series, but I know there were always pumpkins, even in that first poor Dakota harvest.

I'll sow the garden tonight if the rain holds off. I've cut my cloth. With luck, come the harvest, my coat will be orange.