Monday's Harvest Moon seems a fitting time for this weeks activities and the somewhat sporadic entries here. (sorry Ron, but better late than never :)~)
Amber has been getting right into figuring out the canning process now that she has all the equipment, researching recipes to the letter and having all the "why's" and "why nots" of canning all figured out before the set up all began.
Today she and Camaron borrowed Betty's truck and got a load of pine for me from Mary. (Thank you Mary!) Their tree was another casualty to the harsh summer of '11, but it is a good start to my wood pile and I am very thankful for it! After that Amber had all the ingredients for canning salsa so we went to work on that once we got back.
There is so much involved in canning, a simple process really but a lot of timed and choreographic efforts in the kitchen that's not an easy task for just one person. I did my part cutting up cilantro, garlic, onions, peppers...Amber blanched the tomatoes and chopped those up...Camaron cut up the jalepenos and wax peppers... It just all came together so nice :)
It reminded me so much though of Sundays at Grandmas, when sometimes it just happened that lots of aunts and uncles and cousins seemed to pop into Grandmas and Grandpas all at the same time. The usual Sunday dinner was a pot of beans with salt pork, the famous fried chicken, corn bread, and probably fried potatoes, green beans. The smells of Sunday dinner at Grandmas are imbedded in my dna and my psyche. But all the rest of it are memories..some strong, some distant and fleeting.
The hustle and bustle of aunts running around the kitchen like ants. The cousins, boys and girls alike trying to sneak in the ice box to get a glass of the sweetest ice tea ever made, always at least two pitchers ready made and ice cold. And of course while we were there Grandma always had candy hiding in the ice box for grandkids :). Orange peanut candies, those chocolate drops that us kids weren't allowed to call what the adults called them (for obvious reasons), those pink wintergreen candies, all were fair game since Grandma put them there.
With so many cousins, aunts, uncles, moms and dads in and out of the house, doors wide open, every fly swatter was being put to good use by us kids. Sneaking into the kitchen to see if the fried chicken was done..pretending to not be looking and going on into the laundry room. As if they didn't know.. The old wringer washer Grandma used for so long was always in that musty smelling laundry room. Eventually Grandma got a "modern washer".
I'll never forget when the family got together and put in an indoor bathroom and no more outhouse! Yay! The outhouse may be the source of past childhood trauma.. I'm not sure...
All the uncles, dads, older boy cousins on the front porch talking, waiting for dinner to be done. The summer heat was never as bad in the shade of the front porch. From there you could watch everyone coming or going down the street. We could listen to the adults talk..discern how much time we had before dinner...take a walk with cousins down the alley, taste a little bit of wild licorice that was growing, go to the little store that had penny candy when it was 2-5cents, and they would take soda bottles we found along the way as trade ins. Marveling at the cost of a payphone going up to a dime!!! But then, it was time to get back home with our candy and see if dinner was ready.
And it was..everyone grabbed a plate...got in line .. in antlike perfect disorganized chaos. And it was good... so very good...
But the clean up process.. now that was what got me started on the whole kitchen situation. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that if the lady of the house opened up her kitchen to family, the ladies of the clan never left the kitchen with even one dish dirty. That was just how it was. The hustle and bustle of cooking was one thing...but the hustle and bustle of cleaning up afterwards was the finale'. I remember vaguely boy cousins helping out now and then, but I mostly remember standing at the sink (vague memories of standing on something to be tall enough to reach the sink) one dishpan of soapy water to wash, one dishpan to rinse, grumbling because the boys got to hang out with the uncles and not have to help... ("why did us girls always have to do all the work?") But the aunts always had such stories going on in the background for us to try to pick up on :)
The old dish water was strewn across the garden area, or just the yard. Same as the scraps since there were no chickens. But once the kitchen was clean... the dishes dried with old flour sack towels then left to hang on rusty nails to dry over emptied old enameled dishpans. Aaahhh... now the aunts and other girls could visit on the porch with the boys now that the work was done.
There usually wasn't enough time by then to go swimming with the big cousins at the canals but we could walk around the small town of Traver, California, at least until it was time to go home. We left after a nice Sunday visit of lots of family, wonderful food, wonderful girl -family-kitchen interaction (which is the most amazing bonding interaction from generation to generation)
Girls gathering in the kitchen just didn't seem to know they were passers on of girl secrets to the next generation. We just didn't know it was all being passed on down to us at the time. But we were just part of the girls if we helped with the washing and drying. It's just the way it was back then.
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