Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Week 40 of 2017 - Halloween on Fritz Drive

We had a neighbor lady, Miss Collins, who never married and lived alone accept for a small dog that she had...a little ankle biter and the breed of the dog now escapes my memory. It was a barker I remember! She was an avid gardener and her yard was the best yard in the neighborhood to hide in for Hide and Seek but her dog often gave you away or she did did when she yelled at you to get out of the yard because you were making her dog bark.....but all that is for a different blog. 

Miss Collins seemed to like the neighborhood children and we liked her too. We often visited her on weekends...several Saturdays afternoons before Halloween, she would invite all the neighborhood kids over and we would make our own Halloween treats. Not all of the kids came but each year six or eight of us did! The first Saturday we would arrive promptly. She would have the taffy all made and it would be ready to pull. “Go wash your hands! “ she would remind us. So we all lined up at the kitchen sink and while standing on a stool we washed our hands. She divided the taffy into child size balls and gave each of us one. “Be Careful, it's still warm but we need to start pulling it." she would tell us.  It was a bit like playing with Stretch Armstrong (who came along many years later). We pulled and pulled until the taffy cooled and changed from a rather transparent color to a cloudy one...As you pulled it, it became harder and harder to pull as it cooled. Miss Collins knew when the taffy was perfect and with one last pull we would hand over our strings of taffy and she would get to work cutting the taffy into bite size pieces on a butcher block! Sometimes taffy would shoot across the room as she cut it. The kids would burst into laughter as we scrambled to find the piece. She had wax paper cut into squares so we could wrap the taffy pieces as she cut them. Looking back on it she had a fairly small kitchen for all the neighborhood kids to pack into... For never having children of her own she sure was patience with us all! She would put the wrapped taffy in a bowl. We could hardly wait til the next Saturday when we would come to see her again!

The next Saturday, she would have a couple of roasting pans over flowing with pop corn and a large pot of taffy like candy cooking on the stove. After we arrived and washed our hands, she instructed us to get some butter from the butter dish and rubbed it all over our hands. And as kids always do, we teasing each other with our greasy hands! Next she would pour the hot candy liquid over the pop corn filled roasters. She stirred it up a bit trying to coat all the pop corn and let the candy cool some with six or eight kids with greasy hands who can't wait to dig into the pop corn mixture. When it was cool enough we all gathered around her table grabbing a hand full of pop corn at a time and making balls out of them. As is always tempting with kids, you just wanted to throw that pop corn ball when you got done shaping it but we would wrap each ball in wax paper instead. We would make enough pop corn balls for all the kids in the neighborhood. She allows us to pick our favorite and she marked them so that we were sure to get the right one.

On the final Saturday before Halloween, Miss Collins would have us come over again. This time we were to help her stuff the Halloween bags that she would hand out to the neighborhood kids on Halloween. When we arrived, she would have lunch size bags open on her kitchen table all ready for us to stuff. Each bag got a pop corn ball, taffy, chewing gum, a sucker and a plastic Halloween spider ring or wax vampire teeth or a similar Halloween themed item. The kids who participated wrote their name on the bag that they wanted and then we wrote names on the rest of the bags for each of the kids in the neighborhood!

Now we patiently or not so patiently waited for Halloween. There was still lots to do. If we had not gotten our new mask, it was time to do that. We did not get new costumes each year. We did get a new plastic mask and found clothes that we had in our dresser draw which completed the costume. A black cat mask with black pants and a black turtle neck sweater was my favorite costume when I was six or seven. I was a clown several times too. Mom had a tendency to steer us away from scary costumes and toward the happy fun ones. 

Matt and Mark - Halloween 1966
And then there were the pumpkins. On the Sunday afternoon before Halloween, my Dad would pile all the kids in the station wagon and take us to a local farmer or fruit stand that had pumpkins. We would pick out the biggest one we could carry!!! That was the key...we had to be able to carry it.

Mark trying valiantly to carry his own pumpkin and Sharon helping Matt - 1966
  
Keeping a close eye on their pumpkins while waiting to pay for them - 1966
After we selected and purchased our pumpkins, we took them home to carve them. Dad supervised the carving and gave us ideas when we had none. He was extremely creative!  

Jan, Sue, Matt, Mark and Sharon all carving pumpkins on newspapers on the Family room floor - 1966
We all had Halloween parties at school during elementary school so we took our costume to school and got to put it on for a Halloween parade and a party. It was not a very productive day at school since every kid wanted to get home to go trick-or-treating.

When we arrive home on the school bus and all we could think about was trick-or-treating. We only went in our neighborhood of about twenty houses and only to the houses who had the porch light on (and of course they all did). There were no street lights but we had to patiently wait for it to get dark before we could head out. And everyone had to eat a good dinner or you could not eat your candy! While we waited we decorated a brown grocery bag to use for collecting our candy. You made sure you put your name on it so everyone knew it was your bag of candy!

Eventually, Mom could not take anymore “Can we go now? Can we go now?” and she would send us on our way. We ran across the lawns from house to house yelling “Trick-or-Treat!!!!” impatiently waiting as Theresa Randall or Dee Hughes or Dee Jacobsen to give candy to each kid standing at their door! The amazing thing was that they knew each child so if you pushed to the front of the line you would be in trouble! Miss Collins was usually one of our last stops since we knew what we would get from her! and then it was on up the hill to Ludkey's house. 

After an hour or so we would go home and dump our candy on the living room floor to see what we had. We often tried to barter with each other...for our favorite candy....I'll trade you a black jack for a bit of honey or sucker for a tootsie roll! I remember the year that Sweet Tarts came out because we all wanted them.   It was often a losing battle because we all like the same candy and no one was about to give up their favorite candy. Almost no one handed out chocolate when I was a kid.

So I hope this blog gets you thinking about your fondest Halloween Memories. Happy Halloween!

Love, Jan

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Week 36 of 2017 - Angel on my Shoulder.

It is Week 36 already...wow...

This week I have been very busy with the garden. We have had a cool summer this year but we had rain on a regular basis. So as you can see the garden is flourishing! I purposely planted later in the spring so all the produce in the garden would not be ready during our late August vacation this year. Now that it is the first week of September the coolness of fall is in the air. My beans are just starting and the tomatoes are getting red but very slowly. 

The tomato plants are weighted down with lots of green and light orange fruit. The fruit is so heavy that sometimes they fall off too soon and drop to the straw covered ground beneath the plants. So my patio table is full of tomatoes in all stages from green, light orange, dark orange and red with green spots! I place them there for a few more days of sunshine hoping that they will ripen just a bit more.

We, the tomatoes and I, are hoping for some more summer warmth and sunshine. My gardening skills I got when I was a strong young woman in my twenties. I had a neighbor who had an acre of land between my house and his. He grew a large garden on it and one year invited me to help him. Looking back, the things I learned that summer were life altering lessons....that is for a different blog. My garden is smaller and I am older. That is good.

I have to try to rein myself in when planting time arrives. I see all the empty space between the rows and I try to convince myself that I can fit one more row or one more squash mound!  I try to plant too much in my small space. I have plenty of room but I need to use it wisely. 

So this week I am preserving all the produce from my little patch of heaven. Some of you probably think I am crazy because it is a lot of work but it is rewarding. Each year as the fruits of my labor appear, it take me back to a time when my Mother canned everything she could get her hands on and made jam that we would eat all winter.

In the 1950 and 1960's it was not easy to feed a household of eight. So you learned how to buy, barter or just obtain the extra (or as in my case, grow...) bushels of fruit and produce that you in some way would preserved. I remember sitting at the table licking the spoon of foam that was carefully scraped off the top of the strawberry jam when Mom made it. When we got older, we were recruited to go pick berries with her for her jam making adventures. We were instructed that we could not just pick and eat!

Later in the summer she would buy bushels of fruit. We especially loved that time of the year because we would sneak fruit from the baskets as they waited to be canned. I vividly remember a year where someone ate so many plums that they ended up spending the next day on the toilet. Ops...learned that lesson. That was also the year when Mom figured out that we were snitching from her baskets! Plums were a favorite along with peaches and pears. For years she threw the peach pits and the peels on the same spot in our side yard and before we knew it we had our own peach tree. She did not realize it but all the fruit and vegetable waste she put on that pile made for a perfect place for that peach tree to grow. Mom was not a gardener but she knew how to put thing up for the winter.

Fast forward to the 1975...alright, you don't have to go too fast...I have my first little cracker box of a house and a wonderful neighbor who, as I said, had this big garden. I am helping him...really he is teaching me. I have two children and all the produce I could handle and now what do I do? My Mother came to my rescue! We collected jars, lids and rings from every source that we could find but especially garage sales and estate sales. She helped me find the tools I needed; a water bath canner, jar lifters and a canning funnel. In the spring, she showed me how to make jam, her famous strawberry, after we picked the berries ourselves. I saved up enough money to buy a second hand freezer so that we could freeze what we could not preserve by canning.

Raspberry Jam
By midsummer, the neighbors raspberries were ready and we made jam again. I had never eaten raspberry jam before and it soon became my favorite. We never had enough peas to freeze because my children ate them fresh out of the garden before I could get them to the house. Once the beans started, Mom showed me how to blanch them and freeze them. Then we went on to the tomatoes....lots and lots of tomatoes. We had so many tomatoes that we bartered tomatoes with the neighbor to our south for pears from her pear tree. We each did up a bushel. Mom had not canned much since our moved to Imlay City. Her family was shrinking as the older three girls married and move out. Now they were a family of five. We found peaches at a good price so we did some of those too. I think we had that water bath canner boiling for about 5 or 6 weeks canning everything we could get our hands on. 

Pickled Beets

 Stewed Tomatoes
















At this time of the year as I am canning things from my garden, I hear my Mom telling me how to do it...”don't forget a little salt...” she would say when we canned tomatoes. “Get all that air out of that jar.... clean off that rim before you put the lid on...make sure the lids and jars are hot...be sure to let them cool on the counter ...make sure the hot jars don't touch...” 

 All through the process, I have a little Angel sitting on my shoulder, who reminds me of all the things I learned from her and all the fun we had that year.  So just maybe that explains why I do this every summer and fall. I certainly can afford to go to the store and buy jelly, tomatoes, fruit and vegetables but I would miss the visit that I get from my Mom! And the store bought goods do not taste as good as my preserved items!

Love you Mom...we are at it again this year!

Love, Jan