Rural Routes, Blog Version

When it’s the road past home.

This picture was taken in September 2018, looking west down the road from our driveway. At the time, we were just weeks away from a move to the city.

I used it as my September picture for the 2020 calendar I made for myself. For the next month I will face it every morning when I enter the kitchen to put the coffee on.

September’s arrival is always bittersweet – a mixture of regret for the end of summer and anticipation of the cooler evenings and shorter days that fall will bring.

It also means a return to school, but this year feels different, just as June and the end of the school year felt different in 2020.

I have always been an unapologetic school nerd. I loved shopping for school supplies when I was a student and when my children were students.

And after summer vacations as a parent, I learned why it can feel so good to send your children back to school.

My children are now adults, although one of them is an educator at the middle years level. I consider myself lucky that I never had to worry about distancing on the school buses my children rode for more than hour every day, or having to tell them that “No, you cannot trade masks with the student next to you”. At that point in our lives, the dial-up Internet service available to us would have been an obstacle to the kind of remote learning offered today.

When I begin to feel anxious about the new school year, I look at my September picture until I once again feel grounded.

Perhaps I shall keep that picture hanging longer than one month.

Old things

I love old things.

No surprise then that I was excited to find a 1932 Blue Ribbon cookbook that belonged to my grandmother.

“For every day use in Canadian homes”, the cover says.

Looking through the book is interesting just to compare recipes from that time to ones we use today. Many recipes, for example, call for boiled water or scalded milk – a health precaution for those not using pasteurized milk or treated water.

Almost all of the cake recipes call for cake flour. Alternatively, the baker can sift all-purpose flour. I am old enough to remember this – and how great it was when all-purpose flour began to come already pre-sifted.

There are handy hints for meal planning (“Serve pickles and highly spiced foods sparingly and do not give to children”), serving styles (Russian is the most formal, English is informal, and Compromise is a combination), serving rules (when removing a course, the salt and pepper should be the last to go).

Conversation should be about light and pleasant things. Do not severely reprimand children while at the table; anger, fear and other negative emotions interfere with the digestive process.

Besides the recipes and tips, however, I value the book because my grandmother made it her own, writing recipes in the margins or on blank pieces of paper which she either glued or pinned in place.

In addition to food recipes, she also collected recipes for face cream, hand lotion, shampoo and mouth wash. One hand lotion recipe called for gum tragacanth gum which necessitated a Google search. Gum tragacanth, I learned, is the sap of the thorny shrub tragacanth. It is great for reducing wrinkles and improving skin elasticity, apparently. You can find it on Amazon, they tell me. I don’t know where they found it in 1932.

Another hand lotion recipe called for flax seed and bay rum, among other ingredients.

Grandma also liked to save poetry, lines such as:

“A man’s no bigger than the way

He treats his fellow man.

This standard has his measure been

Since time itself began.”

Or

“I ask but this: to keep a green point growing

Within myself, whatever winds be blowing.

To put out blossoms one or two

And when my leaves are thin and few

To have some fruit worth showing.

JIMINY CRICKET

We had a cricket in the kitchen. It sang twenty-four hours a day. It only stopped when I followed the sound to its source. Then it remained silent and, despite my best efforts, I could never locate the critter.

Until the day it found its way into the kitchen sink.

“Aha”, I said. “GOTCHA”.

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