What's in your cupboard?

I’m actually contemplating spring-cleaning—the old fashioned kind of spring-cleaning like my grandmother used to do. The walls in each room get washed down and the kitchen cupboards get emptied out and everything gets a bath before being returned and hopefully—if memory serves me correctly—to same spot so that it all fits back in there.

Oh yes, I have a lot of junk stuffed in my kitchen cupboards—cupboards that are original to this old farmhouse of the late 1940s, tall and deep enough to hold your imagination.

In fact the cupboards are so deep that I can hurl new packages of spaghetti and boxes of lasagna noodles into one of them from half way across the kitchen, and they disappear, never to be found again for six months.

I need a small stepladder to reach to the top shelf of the one corner cupboard and even then I have to stand on tippy toes to get a look inside. I can’t see or reach the back of it without a flashlight and a yardstick. I have no idea what’s stored in that cavern.

I could host a highly successful reality TV show right here, dub it “Storage Wars from the Creek” and watch as the winning bidders paid good coin for a chance to treasure hunt. Rest assured they would not leave empty handed nor unsatisfied.

Another of cupboard top shelves hasn’t been disturbed since before I moved here 12 years ago. No word of a lie. It’s a vintage mystery.

It’s full of well-loved, tattered cookbooks and small wooden boxes overstuffed with all manner of old recipes.

Tonight I pulled out an old cookbook entitled “The Home Queen Cookbook,” published in 1901 and it looks its age.

The Table of Contents for the 607 pages of ancient text includes instructions for 21 ways to fold a table napkin. Who knew?

How about a recipe for boiled calf’s head or stewed pigeon? I don’t think so.

On impulse I opened to Page 31, where I found two handwritten recipe remedies I’m also not likely to try anytime soon.

The ankle sprain mixture consisted of turpentine, vinegar, and two beaten egg whites. “Mix in bottle, shake well and apply.  Yep, the smell would make you forget how much your ankle was hurting as you threw up.

As for the vile solution touted to cure a live “turkey with a swelled head,” well, if I were the turkey I’d make a run for it. And if the live turkey’s head was swollen chances are pretty good I wouldn’t choose him for the dinner table anyway.

“1/2 teaspoon boracic acid, 4-5 drops carbolic acid, ½ cup luke warm water. Take a sprayer, open the turkey’s mouth and spray it up into the nostril.” Yep, run turkey run.

Oh yes, and there’s a stiff little chapter on keeping your kitchen organized. I guess this part was written for me—or not.

“The password to this indispensible apartment of the home is “neatness,” and it should be spoken morning, noon and night, and not simply on occasions to suit the convenience of the housekeeper.”

Really? I think I’ll go fly a kite instead.

Here's to you, Woman

We all know women who inspire us, be they the pioneers of our heritage -- those Amelia Earhart types -- courageous, living on the edge, outspoken, adventurous, challenged, spirited women folk – maybe they are our grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sisters, teachers, best friends, and/or a host of other women who have motivated us to the good. 

On April 12^thI attended a “History on Tap” presentation by the Koochiching County Historical Society/Museum (International Falls, Minnesota) entitled “Women in the Wild – Stories of Pioneer Women in Border Country. 

What can I say, but WOW!  And I thought my bravery to walk alone to the barn yesterday evening at an eerie late dusk, while not wearing an overcoat or a toque, took some fortitude. 

Annie Shelland-Williams; Violet Kielczewski; Betty Berger-Lessard; Lydia Torry; Bessie McPeek; Maggie Sha Sha; Jane LaFramboise; Maude Riker Vanderwalk; Mary Earley-O’Loughlin; Mary Colwell; Dr. Mary Ghostley; The Bower Sisters – Katherine, Anna, Melissa, and Martha; Hannah Pendergast; Mable Freebury Parker; Selma Branlund-Hoglund; and Jessie Singleton – they all take the cake for fortitude. 

These fabulous women, both Canadian and American born, and many arriving in the area from more comfortable circumstance to forge out a wilderness life with their husbands – and without after their husbands died - led lives we in today’s society of luxuries would likely fail miserably at. 

I wondered as I read the story boards filled with vintage photographs and listened to the history lesson that captured but a fraction of the lives of these pioneer women who once lived around here in the early 1900’s, what they would think about all this wide-eyed fascination we have about what they carved out as the matriarchs of the many families that grew from their indomitable spirits. 

  

Would Violet tear up, Maggie bite her lip, Hannah shake her head? Would the Bower Sisters slap their right knees and kick back in laughter and wonder what all the fuss was about? 

I suspect, the range of emotion would be as infinitely tender and fragile yet resilient and proud as that of the you-and-me women of today. 

I’d like to believe that whatever the life challenges these pioneer women had, they never strayed too far from believing they could do anything, never swayed in their faith, never used life’s difficulties as an excuse for setting the bar too low.

I have a 1927 photograph of my late Grandma Florence holding a bible and surrounded by eight other young gals whose names are written on the back. They include Lucille Heward, Adeline Steele, Eva and Annie Caul (grandma’s sisters), Gladys McLeod, Astrid and Alice Herrem, and Vera Hanes. 

The photograph shouts to me “carpe diem” and how fast time flies and I am reminded again to listen a little harder to the stories of the women I admire who are alive in my life today – to my mother, to my Norma Jean, Tanice, Cheryl, Jody, Jan, and Ms. Carla M., and especially to my 3 daughters. 

Don’t miss your opportunity to do that with the women you love. 

My heart is a stereo

The last time I wrote a column was almost 12 months ago. What a phenomenal detour from my passionate road.

Some readers have asked me if I stopped writing because I wasn’t happy.  I don’t deny those reader friends their assumption, because I have alluded to that very roadblock in past columns. However to the contrary, I have been happier in the last year than most of the last decade of my life.

I continue to grow forward in a most loving and fulfilling relationship with a good, good man and he reminds me daily how grateful I am for second chances, and more importantly that I deserve nothing less than the most excellent feeling of being respected and acknowledged for who I am as a woman and a human being. (Kudos to you, Virginia!!)

In all honesty, I stopped writing my column because I didn’t think I had anything new to say.
And even now I’m not sure I do have anything new to say but I know for sure I need to get back to the page of saying just that and/or something else.

Yet, who am I? Get in line I say. Even at 57 years of age, I’m not sure I know yet—and believe it or not—I think that’s the most exciting revelation ever.

I’m never going to be the one who says she is stuck in her ways. No, not me. Yet, I have my stalwart habits.

“Mornings are my table.” I still get up early, write in my diary, and read my daily books, including my new epiphany symphony, “A Return to Love,” by Marianne Williamson (which is not about the kind of love you might assume) and “The Wisdom of Sundays,” by Oprah Winfrey. Both books are thought improving movements for my time here.

Yet, my hair is going grey so fast I can’t fathom it. My Buddha, bless her soft and unforgiving shape, continues to plague my profile in my best pair of jeans. In the morning my joints are stiff and sometimes I stand at the wall to put my pajama bottoms on.

And I have the beginnings of a “trigger ring finger-right hand.” I pretend that it means I am an expert shot at the evil pigeons that continue to defecate in my barn hayloft, but when that finger gets stuck and won’t straighten and I grimace and make new face wrinkles, I really think not.

I have two emerging brown circles on my face that I think my late grandmother would have said were “age spots.” I’m not ready for those either.

Where did the time go? What happened since yesterday—1971—when at age 11, a school class photo was taken at Robert Moore School with my unplucked eyebrows? Life happened, that’s what—good, bad, and otherwise.

And I’m growing grey and much happier and wiser. Life rocks (and Virginia, so do you).
My heart is a stereo.