Category Archives: family

Grandma and Sweet Olive

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The butter started to brown in the pan as I was frying eggs. Whoosh! Instant time travel, and I was back in my grandma’s kitchen about 50 years ago.

Browning butter is only one of a dozen smells that bring her to mind. Stock flowers, juniper bushes, lamb chops on the grill…even the combination of hot coffee and a certain quality of morning air one breathes in summer near the San Francisco Bay.

My sisters and I would go by train to visit her in the summers of our childhood, and stay for some weeks. Truly, I don’t know just how long we stayed, but in my consciousness those visits are huge, even if they were only a fraction of total hours and days.

The long and quiet days on our farm, where I wandered along the river nearby or read books by the hour, were certainly just as formative, but the events during those summer vacations with our mother’s mother made a more noticeable impression for two reasons I can figure out.

The first is the common one, that when you are in a new and different place, your mind is stimulated to remember a larger portion of the sensory information it receives. I’ve had this experience on other vacations my whole life. And my grandmother was a very different person from my mother. Her town, her house, the climate, were like another world for me.

From the window of our bedroom in that world we looked out at night on the Bay, the bridges all lit up, beacon lights always scrolling the sky from somewhere down below and dissolving into the darkness above; street lights, skyscraper lights, traffic. There was so much happening. At home, if you’d looked outside at night, you’d see: nothing. It was pitch black, and no sound but the dogs’ breathing.

A kitchen is another world–or universe. Grandma rarely used frozen vegetables, but sat us girls at the kitchen table to string beans or shell peas. Grandpa was at another table cracking walnuts. We would drive an hour east to buy boxes of apricots from the farm, of the sort that are so juicy and yummy they don’t ship well. Grandma used real butter, whereas we were used to margarine, because it was cheaper. Lamb chops belonged only to her world; as a child I never knew them elsewhere.

Food differences bring me to the other reason for my piquant memories: my nose. Back home, the atmosphere was permeated with the smoke from my mother’s cigarettes, and I think it deadened my olfactory receptors. When they got a respite from the fumes, they woke up and flooded my brain with news of the aromatic world. I can still bring her to mind in all her loving dedication just by thinking of Palmolive soap, the smell of the tiny backyard lawn when the sun shined on it, and the face cream she would smooth on her ever-silky skin at night.Grandma died, 103 years old, the year that my eldest child married. She passed her behind-the-wheel driving test when she was 100 so that she could renew her license, the same year she visited the house she was born in and had this picture taken.

As I said in a rhyme to her at one of her birthdays, “I’d like to write a book of her life…” She was the most important person in my life for a long time, and there are many other aspects of her long stay on the earth that make a good story.

Today is her birthday, and I only want to post this small bit. And as delicious smells are so often linked to her sweet memory, I will also share with you a bush that didn’t grow in her yard, but does grow in mine: osmanthus, or sweet olive. When it blooms several times a year, a few feet from our front door, the fragrance is like dew from a benevolent Heaven, or incense in church. I know God loves me, when I walk out the door and that smell greets me.

There’s nothing flashy about the flowers visually. They are so tiny, I never notice them until they announce their bloom by their perfume. When I first caught that scent on the air, it wasn’t coming from this bush, which had just been planted, but was on a path in our neighborhood. I said to the children, “Ooooh, someone is baking an apricot pie!” Funny thing was, a few days later they were baking pies again. Eventually I located the source of the fruity smell and realized that we also had it growing by our house.

 

I’m pretty sure the osmanthus is blooming this week in honor of Grandma’s birthday.

Meadow and Trees

family, nature, travel, , ,

When I went to the northernmost reaches of California to deliver the quilt I wrote about in my last post, I was able to hang around a while afterward and get a tour of the house my daughter recently bought with her husband. The outdoor setting and my nature walk are the subject of this post.

Living in suburbia as we have for nearly 20 years, I’ve noticed that trees more often than not are a problem, because they are too big for the small spaces allotted to them. But this property had plenty of space for trees to grow for 30 years, into their majesty. In the center of the photo above is a Douglas Fir with a cave-like space underneath where I told Pippin I could envision children playing.

It’s like a park, what with the forest next door, and the tall trees nearer the house. Here is a Blue Spruce.

The house was unoccupied for more than a year, but the deer included the yard in the territory they considered home. This fellow is one of a family of the critters that live here, whom the new owners call Spike.

Spike and his kin watched as The People moved some pots into a sunny spot in the back yard, and a few weeks later they watched some fruits get big. One day they ate all the topmost barely-pink tomatoes.

The People made a wider fence so that hungry animals couldn’t reach the next fruits that ripened, and in the middle of September two of the Belgian heirloom variety called Ananis Noir, or Black Pineapple, were finally ready.

 

I was on hand to enjoy their really good flavor!

There are some outbuildings on the property, such as this one that is begging for some chickens or goats to move in.

And “next door” is a huge meadow, where I rambled with Pippin, my nature girl. We went through some forest on the way. I hope you will come along on our exploration.

 

 

This is the fence through which we trespassed.
In our yard at home we have a pine tree that always looks dry and scraggly, so I was immediately impressed with the robust green needles on this Ponderosa Pine.


My guide let me know that it is hard to tell a Ponderosa from a Jeffrey Pine, they are such close cousins. But the barbs on the Ponderosa cone point outward and prick you when you hold it. The Jeffrey cones slant inward.

 

 

 

The forest floor is dense with needles and cones. Is that a blue jay feather I see on the left?
All over the woods were little piles where squirrels had made a meal of the Ponderosa cones and left the remains.

Sugar Pines are spindly, but their cones are bigger, like this.

We came out of the trees to see the expanse of meadow, with clouds blocking our view of the peaks. It looks pretty monotonous, doesn’t it? But there were a thousand different plants waiting to be discovered by a patient eye.
The ground under our feet felt odd. I looked down and saw this. The floor of the meadow is spongy, with a papery crust–the dried-up bog that makes walking out there difficult for most of the year.

Yarrow is one of those plants that blends in with the general golden tones of a California summer.

This looks like a member of the pea family.
The darker swath through this part of the meadow is where a stream ran in the wet season.


I guessed by the distinctive minty smell that this was a type of pennyroyal.

A tiny yellow flower seen only by God and us.

This plant below with tall purple blooms Pippin had never seen before. I hadn’t either, but that is more to be expected.

When I first glanced down at this plant, I thought of wild strawberry. But upon closer inspection, it didn’t have that kind of leaf.

My daughter knew that it was actually a type of ceanothus called Squaw Carpet. As I was taking these pictures, the drizzle was becoming rain, and we were headed back.

Less tame animals come around their place. This bear scat was fresh when they first saw it near the house, not long after the bear had gorged on manzanita berries.

Incense Cedars grow in the neighborhood. This little fruit is all the cone they make. But they aren’t true cedars.

Douglas Firs make these cones with “rattails” sticking out. But they aren’t true firs.

I’m happy that among the imposters stand trees that are true to their name, like this fir. See how its needles stand upright? True firs, and not the Douglas kind, make good Christmas trees.
Remember my first picture, of the tree branches arching over a cozy den? Spike was resting there later, and didn’t mind me taking his picture. I wonder who will next be enjoying that spot, his grandchildren or mine?

The Quilt Revealed

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(Warning to all skilled quilters: You might want to skip this blog post, as it will probably be too painful to see!)

Darling Daughter Pippin is expecting a baby soon, so a couple of months ago I decided to sew a quilt for this grandchild, using the simple pattern of two tied quilts I had done in the distant past.

But I couldn’t remember quite how those were put together, so it took some scribbling before I could remember the fundamentals of this design.


After I figured out how many colors to use, I went to the quilt store
with farm or outdoorsy theme in mind. We don’t know the sex of the baby.

I thought there would be a plethora of possible fabrics, but after looking for an hour,
these seemed to be the only ones that would work for me.

I washed the cotton cloth in hot water and hung it to dry…

…then cut the pieces out.

You can see how my initial design calculations were off! Also, I made a goof in measuring and cutting one of the fabrics. Methodical, I am not. Woe is me.

But in sewing I tried to fudge everything together. Two of my children said,
“Aren’t quilts supposed to be kind of folksy that way?”

I zigzagged the seam allowances to give me confidence
that things won’t fall apart in the wash.

Here is the top all completed.

It takes a lot of pins, held up by Chinese quints, to put the three layers together. I used polyester batting and Minky backing. Then I tied it with an orangey-brown embroidery thread, using all six strands. Before tying, I thought, “I bet there is something on the Internet about the proper knot to use.” And on my first hit, I found a short and sweet video that showed me how to tie my quilt with a surgeon’s knot.


After begging advice from several crafty friends, I ended up with binding along the lines of what my husband had recommended. I would have preferred something a little darker, but nothing else seemed to be “it.”

Mitered corners were my plan, but of course I didn’t want to take the time to study the online lesson of how to do them properly, so I did as I have done in the past: sewed fake mitered corners by hand, with mostly blind stitches.


Then sewed the sides with the machine.

Voilà!

What I did have left over was some of the binding fabric, so I made a gift bag from it. My intention was to make it a drawstring bag, but I ran out of time. It has a black-and-white checked bottom, with a cardboard insert.

Everything was finished in time for the baby shower this past Sunday, a few weeks before Baby is expected to arrive. All the ladies, and the dad, seemed to like the quilt.


I also like it, now that it is a quilt, and not a series of iffy decisions, a collection of design elements. Thank you all who helped me and gave encouragement!

Back at home, kitty Malcolm is already enjoying the new blanket!