Photos full of memories (2)

With my outdoor and active life still “on hold” I am finding all sorts of different things to do. The other day I was paging through some photo albums and found some older photos in them that were fun to see.

I grew up with cats and so did my dad. One of the photos I found was of my dad in one of his cars. What I didn’t notice until later was there is a cat in the car with him. I believe the photo is from the 50′s, the car is much older than that, but I have no idea what kind of car it is or the year.

This photo is one of my all-time favorites. I was almost 5 years old in the photo.

I’m having fun looking through the old photos. I’m also glad that I can take a digital photo of them to share with family and preserve them for generations to come.

You can see a few other old photos that I posted back in November here.

Are you preserving some of your old photos? How are you doing it?

Sincerely, Emily

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Hometown

I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, back when suburbs were leafy and dense, with public transportation connecting them to downtown.

But my hometown is Urbana, Illinois, where I went to high school and college.

You can’t imagine two places more different. My Brooklyn-bred parents never acclimated and my mother eventually homed back on the city and moved to Chicago. My father is still there, but it’s never felt like a natural fit to me, despite the fact that he passes for a native, corn-fed wife and all. The landscape is flat. There are no rocks. Public transportation hits the edge of town, if you’re lucky, and turns back around like there’s a force field preventing you leaving.

Eventually, of course, most everyone leaves. The diaspora from my high school graduating class stretches from Chicago to Texas to Manhattan to California to Tasmania. I left with a man, homing in on Chicago, his hometown. And now, I suppose, more than 30 years later, I’m a Chicagoan.

Growing up in a college town comes with a strange dissonance, because millions of people your age also “gorw up” there, so that having conversations with people about your hometown often ends with “oh yeah, I lived there. That’s where I went to school.” They think they know Urbana, but they don’t remember when there was a movie theater in downtown Urbana, assuming they can even find downtown Urbana. They don’t remember when the Courier Cafe was actually a newspaper office, complete with printing presses, which was my secret source of giant endrolls of newsprint. I used to bring it to the art department when everyone else was buying it at the art supply store. Because I was from Urbana and knew where to go. Even those of us who stayed home to go to college think of ourselves as “town” not “gown”.

As has happened with high school classes across America, mine reconnected several years ago via Facebook. So many years after graduation, you find that the petty issues of high school are gone. The cheerleader and the freak are friends. The freak discovers that the cheerleader was probably a cheerleader because she’s so damn friendly and nice, and the cheerleader discovers the freak was a freak because she’s so quirky and creative. And everyone discovers this bond that is the hometown. “I know what you know” is a powerful glue.

I homed in on home this week, because the man that I left here with, 30+ years ago, left our home today.  I couldn’t bear to be there to watch him strip away half my life so that he could start a new one. And as I drove down I57, through the cornfields, past the familiar towns, and turned onto Lincoln Avenue I realized that you carry your hometown with you, and no one can take that away.

There really is no place like home.

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Smart people ride the train

When my daughter Nga was 15 we went to Dexter, Michigan and found the house I lived in when I was 3. I took the picture below in an attempt to recreate the photo of me that is sitting (or was sitting) on my father’s desk for as long as I can remember.

The photos were taken at approximately the same place along the road. A lot changes in 40 years.

Dexter House had been an antebellum mansion outside Ann Arbor in the small town of Dexter; it was divided into university housing for nearby U of Michigan and had supposedly been a stop on the underground railroad.

I have known this fact my entire life although I don’t remember when I first heard it. I think it must have been when we lived there, and that my mother explained what that meant.

I doubt I understood the concept of slavery, or escape, or race for that matter. I know that when I was in 3rd grade I did not understand what “colored people” were (that was the term used then). I know this because I can remember my friend Dodo (yes, Dodo, short for Dorothy) talking about someone’s “colored” gardener and the image that invoked of a person with skin like a book’s endpage– a swirling kaleidoscope of color.

This is not so much a beautiful evocation of the natural tolerance of children as of the rigid segregation in which we lived, inasmuch as I never ever encountered people of other races. I can remember vividly in fact, because it was so rare, the few non-whites I met growing up. The housekeeper at my school, the Hindu girl in fourth grade (also the only handicapped child I encountered), the three black girls at Haverford Junior High.

My kids knew from a very young age that there were different races, but they didn’t exactly understand what that meant. They knew their father wasn’t white, but since Asian people are essentially invisible in our society, and you never really encounter the terminology, they used to tell people that their dad was black, which people found very confusing. When Nga was about 6 she asked me one day, in her high piping voice, why we were the only white people on the train we riding. Everyone on the train laughed, especially since Nga is not, in fact, white.

I believe I told her that it was smart people who ride the train, and has nothing to do with the color of your skin.

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A Family

Seng is an ocean
Deep and shallow still and moving
Inevitable
With shores that stretch beyond sight
And fingers that reach up the strand
And retreat
Back to deep
To the hidden large and constant universe

Nga is a sea of tall grass
With roots tangled anchored
To the ground
And stems that stretch for the golden sun
And wave and reach for
air
They hide the small and private things of the earth
with sound and movement and mystery

Wei is the night sky
Far and sparkling faint lights reaching down
Bright as pain at the source
Soft as mystery to the eye
There is no end
There is no start
Deep beyond imagining and twinkling patterns
Moving across life

Xan is the deep black soil
Holding roots water living things
Nurturer and shroud
Feeding crumbling and flowing
Waiting
Wrapped around rocks, grass’s anchor
Ocean’s edge
As far from the night sky as dreams

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Holidays

Today I am 57 years old.

That looks funny– 57 is old! I’m trying to remember how I felt about people who were 57 when I was, say, 20, and I can’t. I didn’t think about 57 when I was 20.

My birthday is  #5 in a string of eleven holidays, birthdays, and miscellaneous family events that string from Thanksgiving to Easter. Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. Anniversary (30th this year). My birthday. Wei’s birthday. My brother-in-law’s birthday. Valentine’s Day.

It’s still not over at Valentine’s Day, but by the time February 14 rolls around I. Am. Done. with holidays.

Part of the problem is that I’m not a very sentimental person, so having to keep finding creative ways to express my love about once a week for freaking months is a challenge.

Plus, expensive.

Where were we.

Right. Valentine’s Day, Sister-in-law’s birthday, son’s birthday, Easter. Celebrated twice (once for the western Christian side of the family and once for the Eastern Orthodox). Although frankly, we kinda dumped Easter about 15 years ago, since no one on either side of the family is religious. The only vestige of Easter that’s really left is the Greek Easter cookies, unless my mother-in-law suddenly remembers it’s Easter, which she does every few years.

Then, thank heaven, we get a whole month before my daughter’s birthday. I don’t complain about Mother’s Day, because by that time I haven’t had a gift in several months, and I start getting greedy. Which then guilts me into the Fathers Day gift.

And with that, the gift-giving, meal-making holidays are over for several months, giving me time to develop amnesia about January again.

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Looking forward

No New Year’s resolutions around here. I really liked Xan’s post the other day and I enjoyed reading Annie Rie’s post Six at Sixty. I have accomplished many things over the past year and will continue to make my lists and continue to check items off those endless lists. I much prefer my to-do lists to resolutions.

Am I going to start a New Year’s list? Heck no, my other lists are still way too long! There are times I feel like I have been sitting around and I wonder if I have accomplished anything, but when I start to think about the things I have done and the things I have accomplished I lighten up a bit. Not all things are huge and noticeable.

I am happy to have the opportunity to explore new things, plant more vegetables, walk next door to visit the neighbors, and be involved in some local community things. I am grateful for my husband and my family, and the time we have had together and the memories that go along with living our lives. I look forward to more exploring, more veggies in the back yard, more visits with the neighbors. I look forward to more memories and time spent with family (and friends.)

Tomorrow is a new day. I look forward to many new days in this New Year. I hope you do to.

Sincerely, Emily

 

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Sunday recipes: sweets

You have an official pass to eat goodies– it’s Christmastime! But in January, you have to be good. Here are some of the yummies, we’re making:

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I (Xan) really just starting baking a few years ago. Baking is one of those things that one does with one’s mother, and since mine died right at the brink of my adulthood, I didn’t really feel confident in doing it. Plus, it made me sad. But when I changed my food buying habits and diet a few years ago, I had to learn to bake, or no bread. And I really did kinda figure it out. I’m slowly figuring out bread, am something of an expert now, or at least fairly fearless, at scones, and last year I taught myself to make pies (including the crust). Here is one them, and it fits in with last Tuesday’s post about baking with my mother.

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Well, I (Sincerely, Emily) had wonderful intentions of making some cookies over the past few days….   ahhhh, that just didn’t happen.

So, the only sweet treat you are going to see from me is in the post I did yesterday about the Pecan Pie Bars that I made. Oh, and there is the batch after batch of zucchini muffins and bread that I have been making over the past few montsh (and stashing in the freezer – and other people’s freezers too).

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What sweet treats have you been baking? Comment and add a link if you posted about them.

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Baking a memory

When I was a little girl, and well into high school, my mother and I would make gingerbread people every year for Christmas. And not just any gingerbread people. We would make a list of everyone we knew, and make portraits of them in gingerbread. I carry in my head a memory of every surface in our kitchen covered with gingerbread people.

Every year we would open up the cookbooks and search for the really good gingerbread recipe since we could never remember which one it was. Finally, in a moment of facepalming, I remember my mother writing “this is the one!” on the proper recipe.

After my mother died, I can’t remember if I kept this up, although I have a vague memory of trying to revive it with my own children. However, for whatever reason, “kids these days” or my ambivalence about baking, or a sense that people didn’t really appreciate the gesture, the tradition fell off.  I revived it a couple of years ago, making some for Wei’s church ladies, and my office mates.

When you lose someone you love, you hold tight to little things like notes and their personal belongings. My mother’s cookbooks are among my most treasured belongings, and her notes, in her precious hand, make me feel like she’s still here. I want to restart this tradition, maybe with my borrowed grandchild Tete, maybe with my daughter (or both of them).

So I started writing this and I pulled out the book with the gingerbread recipe, but…

No note.

No “this is the one.”

In my mind’s eye I can see the writing on that page. I have all my mother’s cookbooks, and yet it isn’t there.

So the tradition, in its entirety will continue. My daughter and I will see if we can identify the “good” recipe, just as my mother and I searched for it every year. I can see where this will become a family story, of the search for the best gingerbread recipe. It’s one of those things that makes holidays real.

Do you have a recipe for gingerbread men? Link it in the comments! Maybe I’ll use yours!

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Photos full of memories

In October I went up to Minnesota and Wisconsin to visit my mom and family. The plan was to help my parents put their gardens to bed for the winter, but instead I managed to overdo it before I even left home, rendering my back useless to the garden work plan.

Emily (the young monkey!) – Hollywood, FL

My mom and I always seem to have enough to do whether it is at their home in Minnesota or over at the lake in Wisconsin. I was able to help do a few garden projects and we did manage to transplant a few rhubarb plants over at the cabin. I had a chance to spent a fun night with my second cousin and I also spent some time with my brother and my two nieces. Go Go Go. Never a moment of rest! But that is why I go; to help out and have some fun along the way (if time permits.)

My brother at the lake

Over the past 7 years, my mom and I have been going through boxes and shelves, sorting and deciding what to do with all the “stuff.” Every time we came up any sort of photo or slide, we labelled the box and put it with the rest of the photos on one shelf. We knew that would be a big project, but wanted to stay focused on other “things” first.

Because I was unable to do much of anything, we spent time going through photos and slides. The first box I grabbed was a lot of fun. It was a mix of many years and full of photos I haven’t looked at in a long long time. As I went through the box I took some quick photos of a few to put them on the computer. It has been so much fun to email them to my brother or friends that are in those photos. We are all getting some good mileage out of them.

My Gramps had a Trading Post and gas station in Wisconsin. It was fun to come across some photos from that time. He also sold alumicraft boats and motors, LP gas, concrete statues and birdbaths. I can still remember the bog cow trough filled with water where he would set up the boat motors so he could run them, work on them and also show customers. He also traded a lot when people wanted a bit of gas for their car. His trading post of packed full of treasures. He hung a lot of them from the ceiling because the floors and every nook and cranny already had something in it. The front window was filled with fishing lures – again hung. I vividly remember a ventriloquist doll that hung from the ceiling.

Out front, sitting between the gas pumps was a totem pole. When we sold the station and house we took the totem pole down and moved it to our cabin where it still stands. My mom and I restored it twice since then and it is time to work on it again… next summer.

Mom and I had a chance to set up the old slide viewing rack and go through several boxes of slides. What fun that was. Sailing slides, travel, lake slides, slides from when my brother and I were babies and growing up. Slides of trips my grandparents took to Cuba and Puerto Rico and Mexico too. Lots and lots of slides. I brought many of them back to Texas with me in hopes of getting them converted to a digital image on a little converter that I have. It just takes time, but I hope to work on them little by little so we can all enjoy them for years to come.

Do you look through old photos every now and then?

Sincerely, Emily

P.S. As we gear up for the holiday season, the contributors at NDIN are hosting a series of giveaways. Be sure to check out Miranda’s post yesterday to see what she is offering and be sure read all the posts over the next few weeks to see what else we have in store for our faithful readers.

You can see what else I am up to over at Sincerely, Emily. The topics are varied, as I jump around from gardening to sewing to making bread or lotion and many things in between.

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A million to one

It’s a trope– the million to one chance. We use it to describe unlikely scenarios, that probably are 100 to 1, or 1000 to 1 possibilities. I’m sure there are statisticians whose teeth are set on edge by these phrases, especially the more exaggerated of them.

A million to one.

Last week I lost a new earring while walking to the local movie theater. It’s a 2 mile walk, so I didn’t even think about trying to recover it. I had no idea where along the walk I lost it, or even if I’d been wearing it when I left the house. In fact, earlier in the day I’d been downtown (that’s downtown Chicago), and wasn’t entirely sure I’d been wearing it when I got back in the car.

After we got home I realized it was gone, and went to bed in a teary snit. The next morning I found out my darling husband had retraced the entire 4 mile round trip at midnight, with a flashlight, trying to find it.

And still I thought–not even going to try, it’s completely ridiculous.

But the next day I thought about that darling man, walking through the not-all-that-safe neighborhood in the middle of the night, looking for my earring. So I retraced the route.

Million to one.

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