I Didn’t Know

                My father-in-law had always disliked his given name and everyone knew him as Bud and called him Bud. What caused him to use and choose the name of Bud was his older sister had been named Elma Jean. Bud always said, “My mother must not have gotten that name out of her system, because she named me Elmer Eugene.”

                Bud was the groundskeeper and general duty man for a small Christian camp in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Children from churches in Pittsburgh would send their kids out for summer camp. Adults would come out for retreats and whole families would have a week that they could come and relax. (The camp had once been Killarny Park and families would ride the train from Pittsburgh to spend the day boating, swimming, and picnicking.)

                Bud had a fantastic memory for names. We could be several states away and he would start to talk with them and find someone who they both knew, was from a family they knew, or was friends with someone that they knew.

                One day, as camp was closing, Bud was saying good-bye to friends who had been coming to the camp for years. He leaned in the driver’s side window and said, “Drive safely.”

The man responded, “I have my Wife and Mother-in-law in the car with me, one preaching and the other praying. We should be safe.”

Kiddingly Bud said, “Which is which?”

                The man replied, I’m not going to answer that. I’m in enough trouble already,” and they drove off.

***<>***

                I had been dating his daughter for almost three months. She invited me to stop over after church for Sunday afternoon meal. It was a great meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, baked corn, and homemade bread rolls. We had almost finished with the meal and were sitting around the table, waiting for the slow eaters to finish. I was sipping sweetened iced tea, when Bud asked me a question. I can’t remember what he said, but when I opened my mouth to answer, a little burp escaped, “Erp.”

I felt even worse when Bud said, “How dare you burp before my wife?”

                I had two choices. I could crawl under the table and slink out or the house being totally embarrassed or I could try to cover it up by saying something funny. I chose the latter. “I didn’t even know it was her turn.”

                It was like a freeze frame in a movie when everything stops. My heart stopped. I swallowed hard.

                All at once, Bud started to chuckle and I was part of the family from that second on.

Where the Long Grass Grows

Subtle, sibilant sounds sing as the night wind hurries by

Songs in native tongues once echoed beneath the prairie sky.

Twinkling stars overhead sparkle in the black velvet night,

Undulating waves of long grass ripples in the pale light.

Prairie grass, long grass, growing in swathes both green and wild.

Roots sent deep for water and fed by bison dung thick piled.

The moon’s soft silver glow illuminates each rustling wave,

Once home to buffalo and the hunting ground of the brave.

 

Bison are all but gone; braves are on the reservation,

But the high grass still grows as it has done since creation.

Where the grass dulls with dust, intermittent rain washes them clean.

The wind whispers softly with sighed words that are felt and seen.

The settlers came, turning over grass with bright iron-clad plows

Planting wheat, corn, and beans; killing buffalo, bringing cows.

Prairie grass retreated before the pioneers’ onslaught,

Long grass hid in pockets, going where the white men could not.

 

I lay in the tall grass, watching the heavens overhead.

The prairie’s night breeze comes whistling over my outdoor bed.

My bedroom’s open plains; the sky’s a stormy canopy.

Seasons come and go, seedtime and harvest will ever be.

The long blades make my bed; its soft mattress fresh and fragrant.

The prairie grasses wave in each breeze, sweet and abundant.

I stand on rolling knoll; long grass surrounds me like the sea.

I’m a ship set adrift still feeling lost and yet so free.

The Christmas Pie

Between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas falls the deer hunting season in our state of Pennsylvania. The first day of buck hunting is a holiday for the school kids who want to join in the hunt. My mother-in-law had always relied on someone in the family to harvest a deer so she could claim some of the fat, tallow, and bits of the venison flesh to make the filling for her mince meat pies. She would bake the meat pies for the Christmas holiday meals. She would occasionally use beef products to make the filling for her pies if there wasn’t any venison available, but that was something she would do only reluctantly.

Usually my brother or I would get either a buck or a doe or both. We frequently hunted together with our father and usually managed to bring down at least one deer and quite often more than one among the three of us. We didn’t allow any of the deer meat to go to waste and we would harvest as many deer as we had licenses. We liked the flavor of venison.

After we would spend hours in the outdoors hunting in all kinds of weather to find and to kill a deer, we didn’t really want to turn our hard-earned prize over to a butcher who might or might not salvage all of the meat from the carcass for us. We had heard stories about unscrupulous butchers and we were worried that all of the meat from our deer might not be returned, the meat might not be handled properly, or we might not get the meat from the deer that we had turned in to the butcher to be returned to us. We also did not like the fact that butchers used band saws to cut through the brittle deer bones splintering them and leaving slivers of bone in the meat.

When we were younger, we helped our uncles and our grandfather to butcher several hogs and a young bull at granddad’s farm every year. We had learned the basic skills for cutting up meat and it was only a small step from that to actually doing the butchering for ourselves. Our father had a garage/ shed at the back of his property. We would skin the deer and allow it to hang inside to cool before quartering the deer and eventually dividing and slicing the meat into the desired cuts.

If we found a stray hair we knew who to blame. Our cuts of meat may not have been as fancy or as perfect as those that a professional butcher could do, but we would first cut around the bones and remove them before slicing the meat. What was left for us to cut was all meat.

My brother liked to divide his deer to make steaks, deer sausage, and cold pack the smaller non-descript pieces of venison. I liked to cut my deer into steaks, cold pack the smaller pieces, and make deer jerky. Usually I could collect enough meat and fat from the rib cages to give my mother-in-law enough meat to make at least two mince meat pies and often more.

Following a recipe that she had used for years she would mix the raisins, currants, apples, citrus products, and spices together. Once they had cooked, she would put the mixture into glass jars and store them in the refrigerator until the filling was needed for the making of her pies.

It would be only one of the flavors of pie that she would bake for Christmas.

The Christmas Cactus

At the top of the stairs in my grandmother’s rambling old farmhouse sat a huge stainless steel container. It was the top chamber from an old milk and cream separator that Granddad had used on his farm. The raw milk had to be poured into the top bowl and a centrifuge would separate the milk from the cream as it flowed through the machine; milk to drink and cream to be churned into butter.

The shiny metal bowl was nearly thirty inches in diameter and eighteen inches high. It sat squarely in the center of a large wooden desk. The desk was built in the style of Shaker or Mission Oak, designed to look like a library table with open shelves on each side and a wide desk drawer in the center.

The steep wooden stairs with its long curved handrail climbed the distance of twelve feet from the first floor to disappear into the dark reaches of the second floor where Grandma kept her Christmas cactus. The large stainless steel container was converted to be the planter for that old Christmas cactus. The plant had long ago filled the creamery pot container and had eventually spilled over its full rounded sides, cascading in long green streams. It was an enormous growth like a queen sitting on her throne and ruling the one end of the hallway.

It was cool and dark where the plant was located on the desk. The window behind the desk and cactus was covered by a green, room-darkening shade that Grandma kept pulled nearly all the way down allowing a small amount to light to slip through the eight inch space.

This monstrous sized plant had started its life as a snippet shortly after my grandparents wedding. Year after year it grew and grandma would transplant it into larger and larger containers. The progression of the containers matched the growth of the cactus.

The last and only container that I can remember as I grew older and made visits to Grandma’s farm house was the enormous stainless steel, cream separator. As the plant grew its stems became thick and gnarled paralleling the thickening and gnarling of my grandmother’s arthritic, feet, hands and fingers.

The flat-green, oval-shaped, ripple-edged leaves tumbled in thick masses over the edge of the steel separator pot and flowed down its sides in waves. The leaves almost hid the entire container beneath its thick foliage.

Just before Christmas, that dark corner of the hallway would suddenly explode into color. The cactus would spill its blossoms in colorful waterfalls that floated on a sea of green. Each bloom looked like a series of colorful trumpets stuck one inside on another. The colors ran the gamut of hues from a deep watermelon pink through a hot orange-red, and even into a pale yellow. They looked like small fiery torches blazing in a dark green sky.

The myriad of colorful blossoms would only last for several days. One by one they bloomed, showed the glory of their beauty, and would then slowly wilt and drop to the floor like a plague of dead insects, their colors fading to a ghostly white. They waited until Grandma would sweep them up and toss them into a trash grave.

When my grandmother could no longer take care of her large rambling farm house, she decided to have an auction to get rid of all the things that would not fit into the mobile home she had bought. I am not sure who bought the massive Christmas cactus, but I hope that it still fills another person’s home with its beauty each Christmas season.

The Christmas Corsage

I was going through boxes that had been stored in closets after Mark had died. I was trying to sort through my emotions and the tears of accumulated things; boxes of books, old clothing, and souvenirs stored over the many years. Near the bottom of a box I found a much smaller box that held a dried up souvenir wrapped in thin white tissue paper.

My mind immediately went back to 1949. I was a senior in high school and had accepted a date with Mark. Mark had volunteered, joining the Marines. After the war, he was discharged and returned home. He was considered a man even though he was only nineteen. He was often somber and held the memories of the last two years tightly inside.

 

Our date was for the high school Christmas dance. I needed to find a fancy dress to wear, but it wasn’t going to be easy for me. Money was still tight and formal wear wasn’t readily available yet. Mom decided to take me shopping to see what we could find.

We searched through the several stores in town. Either the prices were so very high, the designs didn’t fit my body, or the color of the material didn’t go well with my hair and skin color. We were almost out of options when my mom said, “Let’s try one last store before we give up and go home.”

It just happened to be a store which sold recycled clothing. I had walked by that store many times in the past, but I had never gone inside. It seemed that the shop had been there forever. Pushing open the wooden door with glass inserts, we were greeted by the soft tinkling of brass bells hanging on a thick cord from the door handle.

Across the narrow sales floor I saw a mannequin wearing a dark emerald green gown with a full, flowing skirt. I somehow knew that it would fit. I nodded to my mom. She smiled.

The tall, gray haired sales lady came from behind a sales counter and asked, “May I help you?”

Mom said, “Yes. We’d like to look at that green gown.”

“It is a lovely satin gown.” The sales clerk replied as she removed it and handed it to me. She pointed out the dressing room near the back of the store.

I quickly slipped out of my clothing and carefully climbed inside of the gown. I loved the feeling of the smooth silkiness in the material as I slid my hands over the skirt. I stepped out of the dressing room for my mom to see the dress I had on.

I heard my mom gasp. “Honey, that gown looks like it was made for you.” She eased the zipper up on the dress.

The sales woman said. “Come here.” Reaching beneath the sales counter, she pulled out something shiny. She slipped the narrow rhinestone covered belt around my waist, cinching the dress tighter. It looked beautiful.

The clerk said, “I have one more thing. It’s been around the shop for awhile and I will make a great deal for you. It will make you look stunning.” She disappeared into the back room returning with a short garment bag. She unzippered the bag and withdrew something white. It was a white fur stole. Draped around her shoulders, it completed the outfit.

Mark had bought a corsage of white carnations and holly. He pinned it on me just before we went to the dance nearly sixty-three years ago. Although the carnations had withered, my memories had not.

Baby It's Cold Outside
     When we were young, I can remember long cold winter days and much more snow than what we've had for many years. One memory was riding in the back seat of my dad's car. I was sitting tightly against the door with my face pressed against its cold smooth surface. I had to press my face to see the sky. The snow had been plowed to a height that it was necessary to look up to see anything but snow.
     I can recall several times when one us kids were sick that we drove to Dr. Eleanor Morris' home to be seen. We were greeted by a sign at the end of her drive that said, "Pair o' docs." She and her husband were physicians.
     The snow was always neatly plowed from her long drive, but what impressed me the most was that she had her groundskeepers cut the snow in blocks from her walkways and haul them away. There wasn't the snow moved to the side of the walks, it was gone and the snow was waist high on my mom.
     At my grandfather's funeral, the snow was so deep and the temperature was so cold that there were no graveside services. While we were there, one of my cousin's kids was commenting that her friends wouldn't believe her when she told them about the snow. She was from Florida. I got the bright idea to take her boots and to place them on pieces of kindling from the fireplace. I stuck the kindling in a snowdrift that was nearly six feet high. The photo looked like she had jumped or had fallen into the snow and only her boots were showing. It made her laugh and I hope it impressed her friends.
     There were days that we would spent hours sledding on Coal Bank Hill Road. It was steep, windy, and covered in snow, ice, and cinder clinkers of the anti-skid material that the road crews spread for traction. Most of the times we'd avoid those clinkers, but occasionally, the runners would grind on one and the sled would do an immediate stop and the unfortunate kids would slide off into a face filled with snow. That wasn't bad enough, not only did he have to clean the snow off his face, he usually had to search for one or more buttons that had been torn from his coat scooting off the sled.
     It's a wonder that we were still alive. When we'd sled there, we had to dodge cars, shooting off the road into drifts or into the woods. When we reached the end of Coal Bank Road, we had three choices. The first was the most dangerous. It was to shoot straight across the bare concrete of Rt..711 with sparks shooting from our runners, praying there was no traffic. The second was the most skilled route. That was to swing your sled hard and run the berm of Route 711 without going into traffic. The third was the safest and most used. That was to throw yourself from the sled into the plowed snow at the side of the road while hanging onto the sled's tow rope to avoid choices one and two.

The Christmas Card

Even though her eyes were failing, she had an inner feeling telling her today would be special. She had a rough year, especially since Harry had died six months ago. She sniffed back a tear when that thought flitted through her mind.

Everything she did now seemed to take longer to do since Harry wasn’t there to help her. Of course, most of the time Harry didn’t physically help her with the household chores, but he was always nearby. He would say or do something that would amuse her. With Harry around, it was almost impossible not to smile.

He would sidle up behind her, wrap his arms around her waist, and tell her that he loved her. She would lean backwards against his chest and smile. They’d stand that way for several minutes before he would kiss her neck and she would return to her chores.

Harry had a way of soothing her. One thing that Harry had taught her was, “No matter how hard the road, keep your feet moving. Eventually you’ll get to where you need to be.”

Since his death, that’s what she tried to do, putting one foot in front of the other and moving ahead one day at a time. She’d trudge up the steps to her empty bedroom every night and then she’d stumble back down the stairs to face another day. Without Harry, each chore now seemed mountainous but she managed to climb each one. Oh how she missed his arms around her, his chin nuzzling her neck, and his soft kisses.

The mail was in. She walked through the hallway to the front door. Harry’s jacket still hung on the coat tree. That was one mountain she decided not to climb. She wasn’t ready to sort and dispose of Harry’s belongings. His side of the bed remained empty and his side of the closet and his dresser drawers were untouched.

She paused when she came to the coat rack. Sometimes she would press her back against the hall tree and wrap the sleeves of Harry’s jacket around her waist. His scent lingered. She would pretend that he was still alive and had just kissed her neck. She shook herself free from her dream and the sleeves of Harry’s jacket before going to collect the mail.

She plodded down the walkway. She rested against the mailbox to catch her breath. Somehow the walk seemed to suck away all of her strength. She tugged at the door, the latch grating as it popped open. Reaching inside, she lifted out the contents. After pushing the door closed, she ambled back toward the house. Browsing the mail as she walked; electric bill, credit card application, advertisements, she saw only the usual mail.

As she neared the porch steps, an envelope fell out and fluttered to the ground. The envelope was tattered and much worn. She stooped down, picked it up, and turned it over in her hands. The ink was smudged. It was addressed to her, but it in was her maiden name. The post mark was Korea, October, 1952.

“Lands sakes, this letter was mailed almost sixty years ago.”

She sat, her legs suddenly felt weak. She pulled her glasses from her apron pocket and donned them. She unsealed and opened the flap. “It’s a card, a Christmas card.”

Removing the card from the envelope, she could see it was a white heart decorated with green holly leaves and red berries. With trembling fingers, she pulled its edges apart.

The inside read, “Merry Christmas, my dear. I’ll love you forever, Harry.”