Tag Archives: family

by

Want some taters

T for taters in the Blogging from A to Z challenge and for Ronovan writes weekly Haiku challenge: this week’s words are want and tatters. I suppose I have cheated by changing the tense. Tatters brought up taters and I am hungry and a bit insomniac. I am back at work, have less time to write, but apparently writing eventually trumps sleep…. want to write, too.

want some taters not
too tattered on a platter
save me gravy do

I made the most delicious potato salad the other day. Potatoes from a local farm: they have a 24 hour walk in buy vegetables, on the honor system. They have the best potatoes ever: Colinwood Farm.

Cut potatoes into 1 cm approximate chunks
Steam the potatoes until just tender
Sprinkle with the vinegar of your choice while hot
and a little hot chili oil.
Wait 10 minutes. (I failed on that.)
Add mayonnaise, not sweet.
A chopped dill pickle.
Salt and pepper.
Whatever else you want, but that is all I added.
Eat while warm…. I couldn’t wait for my daughter to get home….

The photo is from Thanksgiving at my cousins’ in 2013.

by

Egg

E for egg and Easter egg. I was up very early this morning, excited about returning to work tomorrow, and am dying eggs. When my mother was in hospice in 2000, she said, “This will be the first time in 42 years that I have not dyed eggs.” My sister and I looked at each other and went to buy dye and eggs. My mother was staying in bed most of the time, but she got up and came to the dining room, to dye one egg. We hid the eggs and baskets on Easter and she watched out the window while her three grandchildren searched for the eggs. My daughter was two, niece was one and 1/2 and my son was seven. My mother died in May. I remember her every time I dye eggs.

by

Cousin

A to Z and I am a little behind…..

The photo is me and two of my cousins, at Lake Matinenda in Ontario, Canada in the 1960s. I am the one on the left. We were in cabins or tents, drank the lake water, used propane or camping stoves, and had aladdin lamps for light, as well as flashlights. The mysterious padded garment that I am wearing is a life jacket. My sister and I had five cousins on one side and seven on the other, all within reasonable age range that we played together and still stay in contact.

I just went to stay with my mother’s cousin, my Great Uncle. He also went to the lake in his teens and told me stories about my mother, my uncles and my grandparents. It was delightful to see him and hear another set of stories.

Hooray for cousins and hooray for family.

by

Choice dream

Very soon after the angel dream came back I dreamed this:

I was in a house doing something and I realized suddenly that there were a lot of people present. It was a party. I had been so engaged that I had not noticed. It was not my house.

I saw my maternal uncle. I went to hug him: “Hello Uncle Rob!” He withdrew with his fierce expression: “I am not sure I want to hug you.” I shrugged.

I saw a female maternal cousin next, across a counter. We have been on opposite sides of a family issue. I reached across the counter and hugged her. She looked sad and disapproving, but she let me hug her.

I was hungry. We were going to have dinner, but it was not ready yet. I had a chocolate bar and pulled it out. Dark chocolate. A two year old curly headed blonde boy was eyeing me and the chocolate. I smiled at him. He smiled back, cautiously. “Who does this little boy belong to?” I asked, “And may I give him some chocolate?”

A large blond curly haired man turned and smiled at me. “He’s mine and yes you can.” he said, grinning.

I said to the boy, “I am going to pick you up and then I will give you some chocolate.” I picked him up. He was still being a little careful, glancing at his father to check in. I thought that the party was going to be fun, with the little boy and his father, and I woke up.

by

Family rebels

On my father’s side, his father’s branch are English. Most families would boast of the illustrious ancestors, but mine boast about the black sheep. I am related to the last man to be publicly hanged for poaching in Sherwood Forest. My father’s father’s sister’s child, who is my age, went to Nottingham to check this legend and said that it appears to be true. I do not know his name. After his hanging, there were still hangings but they were not public. You couldn’t gather up your children and a picnic and go to see the punishment and gruesome death.

My father’s mother’s side are the Scots. My greatgrandfather is in the 1901 census in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in his late teens, with his father, a French stepmother and many half siblings. He played saxophone in John Phillip Sousa’s band and toured the world. Links in the Sousa website lead to a book with my greatgrandfather in the index. I have a very newsy letter that he wrote to me in the early 1970s.

My mother’s grandparents were Congregationalist Ministers, at least the males. The women were ministers’ wives. They were in Iowa and one was part of the Iowa Band, a group of twelve ministers from Andover that went to the wild frontier to spread the gospel: the frontier was Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. They started Iowa College that later became Grinnell. I have lots of relatives that went to Grinnell, including a first cousin. My mother’s mother’s father went off to Turkey with his family to help start Anatolia College, that moved to Greece at the start of World War I.

morris temple and cornelia

The photographs are Cornelia Temple and Morris Temple “about 1860”. They were in my mother’s father’s lineage, and my middle name is Temple.

by

Rotary Pirates

I just read this:

Selfies! Try it! If only for a bit if high tech indulgence!

Fun!

Except I have not done a selfie that I actually like, and the last that I did was in a santa hat. It’s nearly February.

So, instead, I am posting my Rotary Pirates picture. We were selling hotdogs at the Wooden Boat Festival to raise money for our Sunrise Rotary Group. We present dictionaries to all the third graders in the county every year, help with the work to eradicate polio internationally, have an incoming and outgoing exchange student each year, meet every week and in general have a grand time. I had bought a pirate hat at the festival and we found various pirate stickers and eye patches and things among the hot dog stand supplies. We both put on head gear and started new barker language:

“Rotary Pirates! Get your Rotary Pirate Hotdogs! Real hotdogs four dollars! Virtual hotdogs for your avatar for five dollars!”
and so forth. It’s always interesting to see what makes people look up or stop. We were parked in front of the Legion, right outside the festival. The 20-something set tends to alert at the “virtual hotdogs” and study us if we say the word “avatar”, since clearly we are too elderly to know what that means. The kids look for pirates. Our age group looks up at the combination of Rotary and Pirates, since that is not their impression of the Rotary…..

So this is not a selfie. We handed someone our phones and had a hot dog stand photo taken. We had fun and raised funds.

by

Twisting words

My sister got mad at me many times, but sometime in the last year of her life she said that I’d “twisted her words”. I don’t know if it was on email or on the phone, but I felt hurt. I do take people’s words seriously, I do look them over carefully, I do ask questions about what they say. The memory training as a small child, to memorize all the verses of songs, means that I have an excellent word memory. Combine that with the medical training, where you have to present an entire patient history from memory: chief complaint, history of present illness, past medical history, social history, medications, family history, physical exam, labs, xrays, specialist opinions, assessment and plan. One boyfriend complained that I would remember what he said and ask questions a week later. He’d say, “I don’t remember what I said.” But I remembered and had thought about it. It’s hard to discuss if only one of us remembers….

After my sister died, her husband got mad at me and was yelling at me on the phone about my niece. I said I would talk to my niece’s father. My brother in law continued to yell and said that I “twisted his words.” Oh.

Later an old family friend, who has known me since birth and was a huge and kind support to my sister, practically a second parent, got mad at me. He said that I “twisted his words.” I felt grim.

Then my cousin disagreed with me. We were disagreeing by email. She cut me off, saying that I “twisted her words”.

No one not intimately connected with my sister has ever said that I twist words.

So this has been hurting and now my sufi reading led me to go close to the place that hurts. Say yes.

Yes, I twist words. Words and books and songs and music were my safe place in a scary childhood. That is where I went to hide myself. I would play in mansions and palaces and forests and space stations of words. I feel safest in the real woods and sleeping in a tent…. people are what I fear most, that they will hurt me. But I say yes to twisting words: I twist them, I knit them, I paint with them, I play with them, I find joy in them, I misspell them on purpose, I adored Walt Kelley, Edward Lear, Robert Burns, Don Marquis, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, nonsense poems. Both of my grandfathers loved nonsense poetry and scurrilous poetry and they both memorized it. My father would read the Book of Practical Cats to us, and when I was little he would read Chaucer in Old English. I just threw away his note cards on Old English from college, though I wish I’d mailed them to Princeton. Never mind, I still have 20-30 boxes of my parents’ paper. I am sure that there is something that I can mail to Princeton. They, after all, are still sending him mail at my house. I memorized poetry that my father would quote and then in school, anything that I liked. “What a queer bird the frog are….”

What a queer bird, the frog are
When he sit he stand (almost)
When he walk he fly (almost)
When he talk he cry (almost)
He ain’t got no sense, hardly
He ain’t got no tail, neither, hardly
He sit on what he ain’t got hardly

I loved that poem and copied it laboriously and took it home. That is the first poem that I remember finding on my own out in the wide world, not from my parents.

I twist words. Not with malice, but with play. And that was why it hurt, my sister’s saying that I twisted words with meanness. I can let that go now. If another person who knew her says that I twist words, I can say, “Yes. I love words. I love to play with them,” and if they are angry, I can let them go…..

Let them go…..

Round of “What a queer bird” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHwwJkKp7Oo&index=1&list=RDUHwwJkKp7Oo

Passenger Let her go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBumgq5yVrA