Cooties

(Okay folks! I'm back again and will attempt to Dishin' it Out a la Ginger, our fearless founder!

I write historical novels. Some are romances, some fantasies, some straight out bio-fic, like A Master Passion, which is about Alexander Hamilton and his Betsy. The settings I work in range from the Middle Ages to the American Revolution to 1870's Pennsylvania, just after the Civil War, so sometimes I'll talk writing and sometimes history. Seems my own childhood has lately become "historic" too, so sometimes I'll reminisce and/or grumble  about "nowadays."   :)

Lizzie helping me write

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Remember when we were little girls, and boys had “cooties?”

Now, I wasn’t a prissy child. I played with frogs, pollywogs, and worms. I did outdoor tasks, such as pulling weeds and mowing, and I knew the correct flip of the wrist to toss dog poop into the acre of weeds which surrounded our house. In summer, when I was little, I made “roads” and built little towns and set my plastic cowboys in the gravel of the driveway and then flooded them with the hose to create a flash-flood disaster upon those dusty plains, like the budding writer I was. Whatever, the point is I was no stranger to grub, grit, and sweat.

But little boys were definitely a level-up gross. They smelled funny, like members of some other tribe—which, of course, they were, especially in the 50's. Hair was cut short in those days, so their big heads and pink scalp was always in view. Lots of them picked their noses. They sneezed and burped and farted—and then laughed about it. Their ears might be full of wax. (A girl’s ears might be full of wax, too, but she at least had hair to hide it.) Boys were rough and loud, likely to start pushing and shoving when they were asked to line up, instead of just stand and wait for the bell sensibly like the girls did.   

Then, the inevitable change. Suddenly those scalped boys—some still not as tall as we were—became, for the first time ever, extremely thought-provoking. Friends started to-- “like” was the euphemism--some of these boys. High School Romances began. The participants traded each other like cards, one by one, entering the lists of drama & heartbreak. Sometimes a girl was popular and sometimes she was not, mostly depending, back in those days, upon how dreamy/eligible her boyfriend was or whether she was a cheerleader. Boys became men and girls became women. The mating game began in earnest, with all those triumphs, tragedies, ecstasies, and Nymph-and-Satyr-Aphrodite-in-her-Nightie lusts and longings.

I’m sure you remember all that—some good, some bad, some bleeeh--so I’ll fast forward, because it’s easy to forget now, too, here in my Crone age. Maybe, in my case, it’s because all the organic bits that made the other sex desirable have been chopped out, for one pretty good reason or another, by surgeons.

Many older women, I know, do not share this experience of aging, but frankly, I'm back to square one. I have looked in the mirror and what I see reflected there is no longer any sort of goddess. The same holds true for my male age mates. Testosterone burns (and burn-out) have scarred these long ago super-cool, motorcycle ridin', guitar pickin', greased-lightning heart-throbs.  

 

I have one of these senior gentlemen at home, who, despite 50+ years of marriage--Purple Hearts all around--and despite pleading and wiles, has remained steadfastly impervious to domestication. I'm still living with a “Bear with furniture.” I have to sneak his outer clothes, those vests, jackets, and gym clothes into the wash, because little matter that these garments are about to achieve sentience and walk on their own, they "aren't dirty yet."  

His principal lair is a special chair in the living room, around which I may not clean because I’m can't return it to the exact spot. Daily, there are certain paths that he walks, this old caged bear, TV breaks to the fridge, or into his sanctum sanctorum of a workroom filled with sawdust, tools and firearms, and or to his computer, or to the liquor cabinet for a late afternoon libation said to be in honor of a certain deceased uncle of mine who introduced him to this venerable Celtic practice.

Male and female have never been reading from the same instruction manual, particularly when we attempt to express our feelings to one another. Books have been written on the subject of communication between male and female. Even so, on top of the ordinary Mars/Venus thing, for me, the old otherness is back again. We're in hitch--we're used to it--but we're just by nature a tad alien to one another. 

Doesn't mean we can't get along and work together, though, which, I guess, is the change from childhood. Sort of like this amazing old photo:

Kenya, 1929

~~ Juliet Waldron

http://amzn.to/1UDoLAi    Books by JW at Amazon

Sisters Series, #2, Pretty German girl hopes to find herself a nice Pennsylvania husband...

http://amzn.to/2gvXVxl  Butterfly Bride    B01MEENIRA

Constant Reader

 

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As a kid, I read to escape a less than ideal reality. I read behind sofas, in closets with a flashlight, under the covers with flashlight, in tents at the summer camps to which I was sent. I wasn't choosy as I am now. I read everything--even the otherwise  forbidden comic books on rainy days at camp. I was amused and thrilled, too, when I discovered how much Marvel had ripped off from Greek mythology and from the thousand page book called Fairy Tales of All Lands which I had plowed my way through during my bout with the German Measles. Later,  my parents assured me that I had "ruined my eyes" by doing so--along with all that "reading in the dark"--although, the fact was my father couldn't see his hand in front of his face without his glasses. Heredity probably had more to do with my nearsightedness.

 

 

I read in corners of bars, out of the way of the staff and the feet of patrons, in the West Indies, where my mother went for her health during the winter. I fished books out of wastebaskets in the sitting room of the Hotel St. Lawrence, which has probably fallen into the sea by now, or been replaced by a mega-story Sheraton. That was how I found The Tales of Hoffmann, The Daughter of Time, and many books by Georgette Heyer, mother of the fan fic Jane Austen, and Jean Plaidy, who wrote many, many historicals, which even at thirteen I found rather dull, but read because they were historical. There were also books which scared me to death, like Something of Value, full of race hatred, murder and torture. (Don’t think ETA Hoffmann didn’t scare me, too. I was as frightened by the idea of a young woman who would die if she sang, as I was by the real-life Mau-Mau.)

 

We had one used book store in my small home town with a grumpy old proprietor and his even grumpier fat old gray cat, who mauled me every time I tried to pet him. Despite the efforts of both owner and his cat to discourage me, I haunted the place, poking through the shelves, sitting on the bare boards and reading. I found Victorian and Edwardian novels. Their slow pace, elegant descriptive paragraphs and carefully crafted world creation drew me down like quick sand.

 

 

 

My parents both brought their childhood libraries with them, and I read Tom Swift and An Indian Boyhood by Charles Eastman which belonged to my father. The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley and Kidnapped  and all those Twin books (Colonial Twins, Scotch Twins, Cave Twins ad infinitum) which had belonged to my mother.

 

I still read in the bathtub. Did you know you can take an e-reader into the tub if you plastic bag and seal it? A long time ago, I had a Rocket with a back light, so I've continued the practice of reading while others sleep. I like to read at night, which I do more and more as I grow older. It's a perfect time, quiet, and with no interruptions except for the cats, who can still drop their fannies unerringly upon the one paragraph I'm trying to get through. Still, a cat in lap, a cup of chamomile tea and a good book in hand are just about perfection.

In the '90's, with my sweet Hammie

Thanks so much, Ginger, for hosting me on Dishin' It Out, and, from my Possum Tracks blog,  on your Sunday Snippets & Stuff blog.  Maybe we'll all work together again, us BWL writers. In the meantime:

Onward, Into the Fog!


~~Juliet Waldron

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http://yesterrdayrevisitedhere.blogspot.com/

Girl Scout Cookies

Juliet Waldron's Amazon Author Page

(Dishin’ It Out—Ginger’s title for this blog—keeps me talking about food. You’d think I was on a diet or something, the number of times I’ve blogged about food lately. While it's past time for a diet, I’m too much in the “Garfield” frame of mind. The chubby cartoon cat explained that “'Diet' is just

'Die' with a T.” For this story, though, the cookies are just the lead in.)

 

Riding my clunky step-through “Granny” bike the other day I crossed town, the first cycle ride of the year to the grocery store, 4+ miles away. It’s usually an odds and ends journey for obvious reasons, but it’s an errand I can run without firing up the car. On a bright spring day, it makes sense.   I pulled up, locked the bike, collected my stuff and headed in.

At the door, I was met by a brightly smiling young lady carrying a sign announcing that it was the cookie time of year!   And there they were, boxes and boxes of cookies stacked on a table just inside the door, surrounded by cute kids and tired-looking moms tending their display. I promised to purchase some on the way out, but the sight of those girls, badges on display, made me remember my own cookie seller days.

My Scout cookie sales were few because I lived in the country. We had exactly three families nearby, one of whom was just so stone weird we mostly ignored them.   This left me the kindly dairy farmers across Route 20 and the pleasant couple who ran the little motel which lay two alfalfa fields beyond our house. Of course, my mom bought a few boxes and some of her bridge friends also purchased a few from me, but we didn’t have any local relatives, and most of the people we knew had girl scouts of their own.  Still, I always made the effort, and effort, sometimes, it truly was.

Cookie Time is traditionally March. Here in South Central Pa we had a single humdinger of a snow storm closely followed by 80 degree weather—in short, not at all like my childhood experience of winter.  Back then, in the fifties, in Skaneateles, New York, we could literally have feet of the fatal white piled all over us straight through March. Route 20, which my parents jokingly said they could tell time by – the grumble and grind of the snow plow’s passage, every hour on the hour during winter -- was a narrow twilight corridor hedged in by mountains of ice-glazed accretion.

I remember going out to deliver my cookies, lugging the big brown box that held them, and hoping I’d get to where I was going before a truck or yet another snow plow came along. I’d see the headlights approaching and have to struggle up and onto the snow bank to get off the road. Some years those banks were frozen so hard that I'd skin my knee right through the leggings if I fell while trying to get out of the way. Some years, the banks had begun to melt, like a Pleistocene glacier, filling the road with melt water torrents and my boots with grungy snow if I broke through during a climb to safety.

Either way, the plows were fearsome, about as big as machines got in those days, with huge upswept blades, blinding lights, and a driver peering out a small window high overhead. If they caught sight of me in the twilight, a small figure perched on the nearby bank, they usually appeared surprised.  Eventually, I’d arrive in one or the other family’s warm kitchen with snow and gravel inside my boots, make the delivery and then trudge back home again, always alert for the clink-clink-clank of tire chains, ready to escape up the bank again.  

 

Juliet Waldron

See all my historical novels @

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS

You Don't Know Beans

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But you probably do know a little about them, even if it’s just those sad cans of beans and franks at the supermarket, or the kidney beans that show up in chili, or the tomato-sauced ones that appear at summer picnics.

Beans taste best cooked from scratch, but when Mom and Pop both work, this appears to take too much time. I used to be in this boat, but I was also in the boat with the folks who don’t get paid much for their 40 hours a week, so I couldn’t easily leave beans out of my weekly grocery equation. They were and are cheap food that is good for you and your kiddies.   (Way back, when I first learned about bean cookery, we lived in the back of beyond, so there was no fast food temptation around—not that there was anywhere the amount of what foodie Michael Pollen calls “corporate food” in supermarkets and beside the highways to expand everyone’s waistline.)  

I’d make a big pot on Sunday, using bones and drippings from our once a week chicken. In the fridge, those beans would last for days to be reheated and served in various combinations. They might be curried, dressed with sunflower seeds, chopped apples and raisins and poured over rice, or chili-peppered and served, with a little ground meat and cheese, over spagetti. 

Nowadays, I start my beans with a good wash in a strainer, followed by a hand sort—back in the good old days there was sometimes rat poo as well as stones and dirt in among the beans.  (Blessedly, it’s been several decades since I’ve found this unsavory additive.) Then, put them to soak overnight.  You may add bay leaves now, onion flakes, pepper, dried celery and other aromatics. Originally, back in my wood stove days, I’d just put them straight away onto the back where it was warm, not hot, and leave overnight.  

If you want to hurry the process, you can boil for five minutes, then cover and let them stand for an hour. After, you discard the water and begin again—especially if you are feeding someone who complains that beans make them gassy. This parboiling will hasten the cooking process.  (BTW the more frequently you eat beans, the easier they digest, as your body learns the trick.)

But all that basic advice may be found on the back of the bag or in your "big fat" cookbook. There are many kinds of beans, and they'll give you a world tour of eating—and that’s the interesting part to me. Currently, I’m working my way through several different kinds, because each lends itself to different recipes.

 

Kidney beans, big and red, can be cooked and used cold in green salads. If cooked with onion, garlic, oregano, and chili powder, and mixed with browned ground meat and onions to make chili. Red beans cook faster than pintos, but likewise can be used for refritos—mashed with a wooden spoon and cooked again in oil in a heavy pan, you’ll end with a basic south-of-the-border taco stuffing.  

Limas, a.k.a. “butter beans” in this neck of the woods, fresh or dried, are delicious when cooked slowly in chicken stock, with celery, onion and parsley. They make their own creamy sauce.   
Split peas and lentils cook fast. The former are made to be cooked with a ham bone, a pig’s foot, or just lots of carrots, potatoes and onion.  The yellow and red varieties are delicate and will cook to a mushy nothing if you aren’t careful.  Yellow lentils, mixed with yogurt and curry powder, approximate Dal, an Indian favorite. 

Black beans lend themselves to cooking with a Spanish or Portuguese flare. Cook them with tomatoes, garlic, onions, and a big squeeze of fresh orange juice.  Serve over rice and alongside more of those cooked greens--only this supper time you'll be dining in Brazil instead of the Deep South.

Black-eyed peas and white beans are still the darlings of the south, especially good cooked with pork odds and ends and accompanied with dishes of greens and cornbread.  Cooked white beans (or pintos) can go into the bottom of a well-oiled iron skillet, covered with a cornbread mixture and then baked into that original hand-held American take-out food, the venerable cornpone.  

 

 

I think you'll be surprised if you give some of these recipes a try at how good the humble bean can taste. You can make them over the weekend, freeze what you don't use, and/or just dip into the pot for a couple of days as we used to do until they are gone. Your budget will benefit, too.

 

 



~~~

 

Juliet Waldron

See all my historical novels @

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS

 

Drop the Phone and Step Away...

Time for a granny rant, I think, but I’ll start with a pleasant trip down memory lane. When I was small, there were telephones in most houses in the town where I lived, although many were party lines. The type of ring told if the call was for you.  Some folks snooped on their neighbors by listening in. Although it wasn’t polite, people did it sometimes. If you had any sense, you didn’t share secrets on the phone.

Then we got a private line. This came even before the television did, in an old house we’d just moved into. Daddy was back from the war now and had gotten a better job, so we could leave Grandpa & Grandma’s. Post War, housing was tight everywhere, as were jobs.

 “Ma Bell” was the omnipresent phone company. Her stock was stable and her employees were many and well paid. In the mid-fifties, we moved to upstate NY and I learned to call my grandparents by dialing the operator and giving her the number and the name. You’d hang on the line until she got the connection, or, if it was taking a long time, she would call back when the connection was made.   This was an expensive service and not done casually, especially by kids. Life went on, more connections were made across the world, area codes appeared and operators disappeared, and so on, but essentially, nothing basic changed—until the arrival of the cell phone.

Through that handy portal, we entered the funhouse of now, where the cell phone has not only become a camera, but is linked to the internet. This enticing, ever-expanding labyrinth leads us along, paying no attention to where we're really going--into the science fiction belly the beast. Our fascination with the electronic world shapes us, our behavior, even the wiring in our brains.   There's no way to stop it as long as the grid stays up. All we can do is attempt to stay sufficiently objective to observe the world as it changes around us, while we watch the people on every side becoming more and more engrossed in their devices. Some people--on foot and worse, in cars--aren't looking where they are going anymore. All their attention is focused on that little box in their hand. 
 

The only thing left to do now is to occasionally be an old cow of a busy-body at the coffee shop, and remind young mothers to stop fixating on their darn phones and pay attention to the kids they've got strapped into those fancy strollers, the ones they are currently ignoring. Kids are only small, adorable and plastic like that for a very brief time. It will be over before you know it.

This is time when you are supposed to bond with them, to love them, talk to them and just as important, listen to them. It’s when they learn to be human, so now's when you've got to shine on them like the sun. Remember, too, adolescence will be here in no time, so you better forge a good relationship now. Remember, too, “the cat’s in the cradle…”

 ~~Juliet Waldron

 

 

 

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They say it's your birthday

Marie's Birthday, 2011 

 Sometimes, for those of us with a melancholy disposition, a February birthday isn’t an unalloyed joy.  This year, as mine comes around, I’m old enough to know I had better pay attention to the good times.

This year, I was looking forward to seeing a special friend on my birthday. Let's call her Pam. She was coming to town—and I and others of her old friends were truly looking forward to her arrival. She’s one of those people whose wit and humor, whose willingness to play, carries any party along.

Life, however, intervened. She isn’t coming. Like many charismatic people, she’s manic, living through huge ups and downs. We understand. However, her absence left us at loose ends in what was supposed to be a cheerful mini-reunion. You need friends around for a good celebration. As the Beatles observed: “We get by with a little help from our friends.” If loss, distance or just a bout of depression keeps them away, a birthday may end up being kind of depressing.  

 

I’m still here and it’s a year later, but so what?  Who is by my side cheering me on with a big “Go you?”

Who will eat cake with me or laugh and caper around to The Safety Dance?

 

Well, okay, my husband is still taking me to a special lunch at one of our local breweries. Here in the German part if PA we are well supplied with new, good ones. They have many varieties of beer and some nice dinner plates and all kinds of bar snacks. My favorite is a local bratwurst, which comes with red kraut and horseradish-y potato salad, which seems the exactly right accompaniment for a draft. A special new friend will come along with us, one with her own life-time fund of stories to share.

 

And then there are my sons. They can’t be here in person, but they are kind enough to call and send presents and all that good stuff we do on family birthdays.  I appreciate the attention, because, as the pop poet said, “it’s a drag when you’re rejected” and most especially a drag when the rejector is your own kid.  

 

So most of what’s happening will be on the plus side. And, actually, it’s quite a lot. I’m well fed (!), reasonably healthy for my age, more or less secure, and still breathing.  That I don’t get the bubbly fun of that senior version of girl’s night out shouldn’t be a total buzz kill. Still, all of us will miss our friend. It was a chance to laugh together one more time, a thing that the obits in the daily paper remind us should not be lightly passed by.

So there’s regret, but it’s not going to be a spoiler. Here I am, in my seventies, still relearning the lesson of one day at a time.  

 “I will make this day a happy one, for I alone can determine what kind of day it will be.”

  

~~Juliet Waldron

 

See All my historical novels at:

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GODS AND GROUNDHOGS

 

A Groundhog Day teaching 

 

In various traditions the beginning of February contains: Candlemas, Imbolc, St. Brigid’s Day and/or The Feast of the Purification of The Virgin. Chinese New Year, which sometimes coincides, is a little late in 2016, because that observance is tied to the arrival of the new moon. Therefore, on February 8^th, we will enter The Year of the Red Monkey.  (Look out below.)

 

Here, however, in my neck of the woods, this festival celebrating our sun's big Northern Hemisphere Comeback is about the groundhog and whether he/she sees (or doesn’t see) his/her shadow, either predicting the dreaded six more weeks of winter or an early spring. This year her prognostication will (we pray) be for an early spring. Weather World from the Penn State Department of Meteorology has just forecast of a "Groundhog Heat Wave,” for it’s supposed to be a sultry 46 degrees on Tuesday. If Punxsutawney is overcast and shadowless, there will be an early spring. Whatever happens, this warming trend should help melt the snow left after our recent humdinger Nor’easter, which dumped 30 inches of the fluffy white stuff.

 

 

Credit: Steven Earnshaw, Imbolc Celebration in West Yorkshire

Occurring at the mid point between the shortest day and the spring equinox, this is also one of the ancient “cross-quarter” days. In the middle ages, people hired workers, made contracts and paid debts at these seasonal markers. There were fairs, and a saint's festival in the Christian calendar to mark the occasion and to conceal a pagan past where the sun was a deity and closely observed. We seem in the heart of winter, but actually, if you check times of sunrise and sunset, you’ll see that the days are speedily lengthening.

If you are a sheep farmer, you know that the lambs are here and coming, dropped into an inhospitable world. Other species give birth as well. I’ll never forget watching a calf being born during a February snow storm and finally dropping into a lanky, steaming pile atop frozen mud.

(Happy !#@%* Birthday...)

In fact, the groundhog sticks his head out of the burrow around this time because he's looking for love. He needs locate the nearby ladies and to size up the competition. The young (called pups) will be born later, when there's plenty of yummy green stuff growing.  

 

It is sometimes jokingly asked whether “red or white” goes best with groundhog. You won’t get an answer to the question here, even if my Depression Era Joy of Cooking does explain how to clean, stuff and bake Marmota Monax--but, Lord, I hope things never again grow so dire that I have to!

Although I know they can be a menace to equipment and livestock, I can't help but like them. It's interesting to watch these chubby critters in high summer, roly-poly butts trundling between fields, or standing up, on the lookout, sounding  the shrill warning which gives them the name "Whistlepig." Groundhogs are fierce fighters, to which many a bloody-faced dog of my fifties childhood could attest. They are also dedicated parents and excellent housekeepers, carpeting their dens with leaves, and keeping both a summer den—sometimes tucked under an old barn or shed—and a safer winter den for hibernation, in the woods or in a hedgerow between fields. 

 

~~Juliet Waldron

 

Historical Novels

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http://www.julietwaldron.com

 

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS