About three years ago I started collecting Wedgwood’s Wild Strawberry pattern. One day Mom was at my house, looking in my china cabinet, and she said, “You know, that was Aunt Nancy’s pattern.” “Oh, my gosh,” I said. “That’s so interesting! I have such strong …
This is my great-grandfather, my mom’s father’s father, Frank Allen. He was born in the 1890s, I believe, and died in the 1960s. He owned a small dairy farm near Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“What was he like?” I asked Mom when she gave me his picture. “Was he nice?”
“Oh, he was okay,” Mom said. “Joan and Diane remember him giving them rides on his bicycle and all that, but I don’t.” She laughed. “I told them they must have been his favorites, because I never got a ride!” (Joan and Diane are Mom’s sisters.)
“You used to go and spend time with him and your grandmother in the summer, right?” I said to Mom, prompting her. Mom doesn’t really like to tell me stories about the past—I have to force her. Mom lives in the present. “You’d go and stay with them, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mom said. “But they didn’t do anything special with you. They didn’t take you anywhere, except to church on Sunday. They were busy, so you’d trail after them or you’d play in the barn.”
“But it was still fun, right?”
“Oh, yeah. I loved spending time at the farm. My grandmother always made jut, which is mashed potatoes and cabbage, and that was my absolute favorite. Can you imagine a child liking such a thing these days? I can’t. But I loved it. And she made Belgian pies.”
(Mom’s paternal grandparents were from Belgium. They came to this country as very little children, around the age of two.)
“Tell me something else about your grandfather,” I said.
“For Christmas he’d always give you a silver dollar,” Mom replied. “That was his typical gift. Every year you’d get that silver dollar.”
Here’s how the Vine House is shaping up these days. One side is draped with coral honeysuckle and the other with native pipevine. Lush Boston ferns, in baskets, hang from the roof beams on chains and provide tempting nesting spots for wrens. In the last …
Every summer it’s the same thing: I’m just delighted by my caladiums. I’m constantly admiring them and taking pictures of them and thinking about them, making lists of the ones I have and the ones I want to get: Candyland, White Queen, Rose Bud . …
This has been a great summer for eggplant. Rob and I have globe-shaped eggplant and cucumber-shaped eggplant in three colors: solid purple, solid white, and purple-and-white striped. The fruits are so bright and cheerful they look like balloons festooning the plants, and every day it seems as if the garden is decorated for a birthday party. Even if you couldn’t eat eggplant, I think I’d grow it just because it’s pretty.
But luckily you can eat it—and it’s good for you too. It’s low in calories and high in fiber, and the skin (of the purple varieties) is rich in disease-fighting phytochemicals. For the last couple months Rob and I have been enjoying eggplant all kinds of ways. My favorite way to eat it is in thin slices drizzled with olive oil, rolled in panko, and roasted in the oven.
Finally! We got some nice fresh clean awnings hung on the breezeway the other day. The old ones had gotten sooooo dirty. We need to take better care of our awnings this time around. Terry, of Terry’s Awnings & Canvas in Havana, the man who …
Two Saturdays ago, Rob and I built a path out of fieldstone between the Barn Garden and the Meadow Garden, replacing the old muddy trail that ran between those two beds. Rob used to call the old mud trail my “nemesis” because it bugged me so much. “Oh, gosh, this looks so terrible,” I’d say every time I set foot on it.
He’s taken to calling our new stone path “the Old Cobblestone Road” because it’s so wide and grand (for a path). We wanted to make it nice and roomy so we can push the wheelbarrow down it and carry big bags of leaves and fertilizer to the vegetable garden.
I like to see Bernie, our stray-cat friend, making use of the new path, strolling between the thick stands of purple coneflowers and wild petunias. We often meet on the path, Bernie and I, headed in opposite directions, which I find comical somehow. Bernie is going about his Bernie business.
Rob and I worked so hard on the path that we finished it all in one day. When we were done we went out to Decent Pizza to celebrate, even though we were so stiff and sore we could barely walk. I got a pizza with artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, and Daiya cheese. I was in vegan heaven.
