Some of my favourite memories were formed in a rectangular bungalow in a small town. There were seasons: end of summer threshing, fall piles of leaves, frigid blowing winter, spring pussywillows. There were cousins, and long days and short nights. There were Archie comic books with advertisements promising X-ray glasses and sea monsters exchange for a stamp and a fee. There were sagging beds covered in fuzzy chenille bedspreads and mirror vanity complete with a set of hairbrush, comb and hand mirror in a musty basement There were shelves lined with rows of carefully prepared jars, filled with repeating colours like a food museum with warty green pickles and crimson beets and other delicacies I would never taste. There was a light above the work bench, illuminating an array of tools and boxes of .22 gauge ammunition, and two double barrel rifles with notched sights carefully hung on the wall.
There were fragrant turkey dinners with mountains of creamy mashed potatoes and abundant gravy. There was music, with my grandma on the piano or organ or accordian, in between being cook and clotheshorse. One time my aunt even swept me up dancing the two step around the living room floor.
For small gatherings, there were tv tray dinners and schedules of soap operas that my grandma called stories. It was a warm place. My grandma was a soft cuddly woman who smiled and squealed in delight when we came to visit. My grandpa drove us out to the farm in the back of a pickup truck, and if we were really daring we would try and sit on the edges we called “gunnels’. They drove downtown to mainstreet, literally two blocks from their house. I never even saw my grandma walk around the block, but she could drive the grain truck beside the thresher in wheat harvest like a pro, her jet black hair and glasses barely visible above the steering wheel.
Two things that I smell in my house take me back to those days. The humid basement air that doesn’t circulate in the summer, and the smell that I came home to last night.
I am a mostly vegetarian but I still eat as an omnivore when I am with Princess Pirate. I don’t want to waste any meat sacrificed by an animal, so although I am motivated to vegetarianism by my ideals, I am a practical vegetarian. I had bought a roast chicken for sandwiches this week, and the carcass needed treating. Yesterday I chopped up some rapidly deteriorating celery and carrots, added a bag of frozen leeks (Somehow I have more of those than onions these days), added some spices from my cupboard and dried from my garden, put it in a crockpot before I went to work.
When I got home, my house smelled of the wonderful aroma of my Grandma’s house.
This dog’s breakfast of now compost reminds me of those wonderful days at holidays at my grandparents’ house.
It also reminds me of the first time I made soup stock, to serve as a reminder to myself and a warning to you: I cooked it for hours and poured it into the sieve, only to realize that this was not pasta, and the water was not the waste but the product!
Too late, I had poured most of it down the sink!
ALWAYS ALWAYS put the sieve in your biggest container before you pour, and catch every last drop of the precious soup broth!
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