I am going to be more accurate – I am a sous to the nth degree chef, actually to infinity degree, and possible negative infinity. In other words, in finding my way around the kitchen, my mother, who was an exemplary cook, indicated where the doors in and out of the room were.

So, when holiday time rolled around and Mother pulled out all the stops on recipes, I was recruited to do the “things anyone who could read could do”. That is sort of like learning to swim by reading a book about it, but let’s just that go. Basically, I did the scut work and when more complicated steps were involved, she would talk me through it. It could get fairly nerve racking for the both of us.

I think I would almost prefer to defuse a bomb that deal with the tension of adding just the right amount of ingredients at just the right temperature and time. I would rather watch grass grow that stare at a supremely elegant jello-based salad that required things to be added at the proper stages of the jello setting up. No, that’s wrong; watching grass grow would be boring. Working for Mother was to feel like an med student working with the top surgeon at Johns Hopkins.

However, now I miss the fancy dishes and sometimes exotic ingredients and the extra steps she took – such as we had to rice the potatoes before we mashed them and the butter and milk added had to be heated first. The potatoes, of course, were the last thing to be prepared so they would be just right. Oh, the performance anxiety.

I again commented to Der Bingle what I have mentioned for fifty years that why go to all this trouble when people were going to EAT it. Do people eat artistic masterpieces or world-changing inventions. Hey, lets go grab a Michelangelo and make short work of it? They do not. Or how about smashing light bulbs for the fun of it? No.

Der Bingle replied I was supposed to get pleasure from watching the happy faces of people scarfing down the multi-layered crushed pretzel crust, cream cheese, jello holding suspended fruit, whipped cream and artistically placed strawberries. I can’t quite see it like that.

So, and era has ended and with no granddaughters who take after their great-grandmother, I have a very large number of cookbooks and stacks of recipes cut from magazines and newspapers. What to do with them? Set them out for grabs?
I wish I knew some young women who like to cook and would cherish the cookbooks of Sarah Shimp Grismore.

And a fraction of the jello molds.

I have been listening to an audio recording of the YouTube video mentioned below – over and over and over again. When I was alone here, I actually hooked it up to a SPEAKER and put the volume up. While puttering around I let my mind wander from vignette to vignette, all inspired by the lyrics. Ah, so many stories I made up in my head.

Sometimes I stop to think if I were to convey the stories to someone else, they would be overwhelmed by the combination of characters and backstories . . . and they would look at me incredulously.

Ah, Der Bingle is on ichat, so so long oolong.

I can’t stop listening to this:

I have always said Thanksgiving as if it were the name of an event, a proper noun. I knew, of course, what the two words that made up the one word meant, but I always just said it with the idea (thanks to FDR) that it was the fourth Thursday in November.

A few years back, I was reading an entry in a blog by a young woman who was from rural Texas. She wrote that people here in the Midwest looked at her strangely when she said Thanksgiving, because she didn’t run it all together but pronounced it as the action the word described: THANKS GIVING. I’ve always remembered that.

We take so much for granted, especially in this country where we pretty much have it everyday. In fact, we hurry it along, so we can get on to the shopping for the next month’s giving which seems to have taken over even the slightest nod to mangers and a star and wise men.

Be it a bandwagon or a Radio Flyer, there are always people eager to climb on for the ride. Well, I’m standing firm in my admiration for George Herbert Walker Bush and firm in my belief he is an upstanding man.

To steal a quote form Martin Luther: Here I stand; I can do no other.

And how many “grabs” is it going to take to get rid of mounds of leaves?

I can’t cite where this picture is from because it popped up amid a lot of Google images about leaves.

Saturday I worked for several hours on the last wave of leaves to come down. I found myself thinking of Joyce Kilmer and grade school and trees in a slightly different way – sort of “God, you made these trees, how about a big wind that sweeps away from my house.” Yes, I know, it’s selfish, but my neighbors are younger and one has a tractor with an attachment that sucks up and mulches leaves.

There’s a little more to my tale. After I had blown and raked a lot to the curb, I turned and looked at the driveway that curves around to the back. Ah, cement, no friction; the leaves should have slid along. They mocked my leaf blower.

And so I decided that since I needed a new snow shovel I would get one the next day and just shove those babies down to the street. That next day, yesterday, it started out with rain. I figured the snow shovel could still handle them; I looked at later and saw SNOW flakes.

This just threw my big picture plan to the wind (although the leaves stayed). I had intended to clear the drive with the snow shovel and when the first light snow of the season fell, you know, a wee bit, I’d go out and blow it off with the leaf blower.

Foiled again.

A BIGGER SIGH.

In fact:

SIGH

I just got a message from USPS:

The package is delayed and will not be delivered by the expected delivery date. An updated delivery date will be provided when available. Your item arrived at our FORT WAYNE IN DISTRIBUTION CENTER destination facility on November 11, 2017 at 3:35 am. The item is currently in transit to the destination.

Could this be because it spent two full business days in that distribution center in Florida – you know, the one that’s name sounds like a swamp.