The first recorded baby shower in the world, perhaps, was when the Magi brought to Joseph and Mary, and their new baby, Jesus, three amazing gifts from their traveling treasure chests.
The aged sap of the boswelia bush, obtained by beating and cutting it, frankincense was considered as precious as gold. Okay, so Jesus is more precious.
Frankincense was both appealing and purifying. As is Jesus.
Priests burned frankincense to mingle with prayer; it is a symbol of prayer. Jesus is our High Priest and ever lives to pray for us.
Joi and her husband were poor. He was a sacker in a small grocery while she raised their four children in a two-bedroom house and they both worked on college degrees at the same time.
Although we were good friends, Joi was a constant source of inadequacy in me. Her scratch cooking, home canning, crocheted doilies, and hand-sewn quilts, all worked on my sense of accomplishment. She would even blend soy beans in her blender for soy milk.
And then turned it into ice cream.
How did she always fill the gaps among their possessions with cheer? How did she know all about healthful eating before the age of computers? How did she know about herbal healing before the herbal renaissance? How play piano beautifully? I would never catch up!
The day came when Joi and her husband completed their degrees and moved to the land of employment. I lost touch with her, but not exactly; I still can feel Joi’s cheer in my life.
One time, for my birthday, she brought me a huge surprise. Simple and cherishable, just like Joi, the gift brought me happiness, that day. Enveloped in kitchen linens was an enormous steaming loaf of bread. You’ve never seen one that big. I was so excited. With it was a bag of spinach from her own garden, immaculately cleaned.
What fun we had loving that sweet gift to pieces, literally! These delicious additions to my birthday supper may seem like an odd gift to you, but Joi knew what it would mean to us, and we saw the love in it.
If I had washed and washed a big bag of spinach and then given it away I’d be missing it. But Joi just smiled her cheery best. If I’d had the aromas of homemade bread floating through my house, for naught, if I’d known that bread was going to someone else’s house, I’d have handed it over very longingly, not cheerily like Joi.
The second-most-viewed post on my site. I cannot figure this, but have loved seeing nearly every week, someone else coming to read this.
Have fun.
My gramma had a laundry wringer. And for a while, so did my mom. I always loved these machines that squeezed the water out of clothing so graphically and intriguingly.
Click to View Water Running Off
Back then, washing used only one load of soapy water, beginning clean, with white clothing, and proceeded to gradually dirtier and darker clothing and water, until the last thing washed was the dingy dungarees worn to protect the good clothing from animal chores.
No Longer Dripping
After washing came rinsing, or some said, “wrenching,” which surely they thought referred to the old way of removing extra water, by hand wringing, making the arms and hands feel nearly wrenched out of socket. My gramma put bluing in rinse water to make whites look whiter. I never could understand this substance, bluer than a computer screen, that made things white.
Gramma used homemade soap on clothes. I mean: natural lye made from last winter’s wood ash combined with natural trimmings from natural meat, and yes, she made it herself, on the wood stove in her woodshed, and stacked it everywhere in there to cure. Then she grated it for flakes. It all smelled so fresh and good.
To this day, aroma from homemade soap makes me think of birds calling and locusts scritching combined with comfy sloshy sounds of laundry done during warm laundry days. And my gramma’s voice explaining . . .
The washer, and its accompanying rinse tubs on platforms, rolled creaking out onto the bumpy concrete porch around Gramma’s woodshed. A hose ran first to fill rinse tubs, and later to empty them onto the enormous strawberry patch.
Only large pots of scalding water went into the washer, itself, and yes, heated on that wood stove. All the concrete porches got a scrub-down with used laundry water splashed on, pure and natural.
There were manual and electric versions of the wringer. My gramma had the kind she had to crank and disdained the electric, which could swallow up an arm or break off buttons. She fished clothes out with a stick; the water was that hot. My auntie had one and I didn’t like the noise of it. Besides, cranking the wringer was an honored chore because you had to be old enough to reach and strong enough turn it without let-up.
The wringer and its tray were rotatable to provide also for two tubs of rinse water. Every article of clothing went through the agitation in soapy water, wringing, pouring and dribbling, to kerplunk into the first rinse, and then into the second, before finally being wrung into a laundry basket for hanging on the line.
It seems like so much work, and it was. No wonder laundering was an event with its own day set aside. Imagine dragging all that production outdoors on a daily basis for just one load! Yet, all this was such an improvement over lugging all the laundry to a stream, or boiling it in a huge pot over an open fire.
Yes, it was good, honest work, but that woodshed and that porch were my gramma’s gym and she stayed fit, even into old age. And although she belonged to a gene pool that proved a tendency to plumpness, she always remained trim.
I am so accustomed to being wrong. People tell me I am wrong all the time.
They say I pronounce words wrong, and I shrug.
I am a linguist . . .
They say I load my dishwasher wrong.
I offer them the job . . .
But in the kitchen, I am usually right. I love to cook from scratch and invent recipes. I love to eat and watch others loving eating. Since all my kids are spoiled with extraordinary food, they all have learned how to cook, at least the basics of my secrets, and have begged for my recipes, freely given, before they would move out — even all four of my sons.
So-o-o-o, when I get it wrong in the kitchen, I am miffed at myself. No excuse. You know how to do this and you just didn’t do it.
That’s how I talk.
How ironic that since I believe in no excuses in the kitchen, today the photo challenge should be “wrong”. Sighs.
Today I burned a whole pan of rolled sugar cookies. These are the fiddly ones you bake only when the grandkids are present, but I volunteered to donate these for a charity function, so had a nonchalance that proved expensive:
What can I say?
I could make excuses about an important phone conversation,
but I know to take the timer with me on such occasions.
One of my sisters and I were able to go to the doctor’s office with my parents for the latest MRI results.
They’re not good.
The cancer has spread to the meninges (the membranes that cover the brain & spinal cord).
Okay – backing up just a bit.
For the last several weeks, my Dad has been struggling with pain from an extruding disc in his back, which has nothing to do with his cancer. He can’t sit or stand for very long, and spends most of his time lying down. He has also been dealing with nausea, headaches, and lack of appetite that he thought might be related to pain meds. It’s not.
So the MRI this week. The cancer in the meninges. Those symptoms are directly caused by his cancer. It’s all throughout a good part of his brain & spinal cord, and that is very concerning. The…
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