Christmas past update

Jan read the Christmas Past post and flashed back to kindergarten, where she played with a refrigerator and stove and told the kids “These are mine.”  In reconstruction, she surely is right. 

The  kitchen goods, on thinking back, were given by Grandma Rolf.  Our house was small and toys we weren’t playing with had to be put away.  My brothers’ model airplane collection hung from wires suspended across their bedroom ceiling.    There would have been no place to put the refrigerator downstairs and upstairs would not have worked.  Our unheated bedrooms were too cold for play in the winter and in summer we were outa there.  Our ever practical mother would have schlepped the playthings up to Forest Hill Elementary School at the first sign of boredom.

Jan and I had a good laugh.   

The fridge AND the stove.  Same jammies.

Christmas past

Christmas gifts were not the big deal in my house when I grew up.  The day after Christmas we probably sported a new pair of boots, and we definitely had new underwear.  I do remember getting a wastebasket for my bedroom one year. A pretty green metal wastebasket, with open work around the top.   At Christmas the joint children toys such as Lincoln logs, Lego’s and the erector set appeared.  And one year I asked for and received a mohair sweater.  I was about fifteen.

We prepared for Christmas.  We put up the decorations and Mom baked cookies.  We didn’t anticipate the holiday for the excitement of gifts, but for spending the day with one set of cousins or another and having a wonderful meal with bits contributed by all the mothers, aunts and grandmothers.  One year Aunt Flo’s dessert included squares of vanilla ice cream with green trees in the center.  We could hardly believe it.

All the women in the kitchen distributed jobs among themselves.  Aunt Flo’s mother, Grandma Froelich, always shook the aluminum can with water and flour to make gravy because she was proclaimed the only one who could produce lumpless gravy.  Grandma Cox always made yeast rolls that pulled apart in three sections.  If we were at Aunt Helen Rita’s, dinner included wild game.  If we were at Aunt Laura’s, Uncle Frank played the organ.  And we kids did our best job, too.  We played.

Things changed a little my sister arrived, ten years after me.  If Christmas was becoming more commercial, we three older children didn’t notice.  I do recall my mom saying she’d never go downtown on the Friday after Thanksgiving as it was a “madhouse,” but I had no idea why.  Our change was a baby in the house.  Babe, as we called her, right up to that day she stopped in the middle of a supermarket aisle and said to my brothers and three aisles on each side of her, “Don’t call me Babe any more.”

Jan - 1955

I have no recollection of Santa bringing these gifts to Jan.  And, neither does she.  Our brother Walt tells the best Christmas story on her.  We guess she was perhaps five, and came downstairs when she knew she heard Santa.  She woke her brothers, who slept down there.  Melvin told her to go back to bed, but she only made it to the living room, where she sat down to wait for everyone to get up.

Jan - 1956 (Noteworthy jammies)

She was found in the morning, sound asleep in the red chair, right next to a doll as big as she.  Until the family woke her, neither knew the other was there.  Jan tells me she loved that doll and remembers her shoes fit her best friends’ little sister.

I can’t believe my Christmases were significantly different from the usual.  Our parents were children of the Depression and survivors of a great war.  There probably were no memorable holidays for my dad.  My mother’s memories were of family and friends and token gifts to acknowledge both.  Mom carried on exactly as she had before marriage, and those comfortable traditions surely pleased dad.  Our Christmases were never about the gifts, but family and food.  It was a warm, good, fun day.

It’s been raining since spring

I was cleaning drawers a year or so ago (and not since!) and found a Vermont Weather Stick I hadn’t given away or put up.  I took it to work and gave it to the road guys.  The road super was skeptical, the assistant cynical.  “When it rains, the stick is wet.  When the sun shines, the stick is dry.  Ha Ha.  We get it.”  I had to nag them to hang it up, but eventually the super went out the door, around the corner, and nailed it to the window frame.

The weather stick is real science, but you have to take your choice among several theories.  My favorite is the balsam fir adapts to climate, drawing in when conditions are dry and reaching out for moisture when it’s wet, producing a layer of cells that do just that.  The best part of this theory is we hang them upside down so the stick points up in dry weather and curls down in wet.

I looked out the road garage window this morning at the stick, drooping, drips falling from its tip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  “Poor thing,” I said.  “It’s hung down for weeks.”  “Actually,” said the super, “It’s been raining since spring.”

And it has.  I drive by a loop of the Cuyahoga River going to work every day.  It’s not a violent river down in the meadows, plenty of flood plane for the water.  One peninsula near the road provides good shelter at the tip and unless the water is out of control I often see ducks breasting the current, looking quite content.  Today the water is over the banks, spreading out in the meadow.  The mallards don’t have to hop to the top of the bank, they just  stand up. And, as someone else observed today, it could have been a foot of snow.

Angus and Fiona dispatch varmits

We live in the woods.  We have critters.  Enough chipmunks and mice outside to entertain Purrl.  Fortunately for him, he never had a chipmunk fasten itself flat across his face, velcroed on by twenty tiny claws, and take him for a merry run.  That happened to a cat of Patti’s.  Anyway.

We live in the woods. We have mice in the house.  We know the cats actually brought some, back when we still let them use the cat door, and dropped them off for future amusement.  But, there are enough cracks in our old house and mice hate wintering outside enough that an even larger population brought themselves in.

Poppy II was a terrier, but not into rodent vermin.  He once took on a contractor’s German Sheppard and sent it down the street, tail between his legs.  He considered that vermin.  Handle your own mice.  So we did.  We kept the mouse traps primed and in those mousie runways, and we probably kept even.  However, we cleaned mouse souvenirs from drawers often enough to know we weren’t ahead.

When Angus arrived he was interested in the mouse traffic, but otherwise clueless.  Like running after a ball.  He’d pick it up and then look around for an idea of the next move.  Fiona sized up the situation the first time a mouse crossed her path.  She barked.  She pointed.  She steered.  She flushed.  Angus watched.  Finally Fiona kicked his butt.  Listen, fool.  We’re terriers.  We have a job.  I’m going to flush that sucker from behind the dog food can one more time and you’re going to snap its neck.  Got it?  Don’t make me do everything!

Fiona would have preferred the neck snapping job herself, but she let Angie go into action when she had the varmit in the open.  It was to bolster his ego. You could read it in every muscle, tail up, front quarters down, keeping that mouse trapped right in the middle of the floor while she urged Angus to do it now!  Then she’d turn to him, standing there with his mouth in a little O before, pthooi, he spit the corpse on the floor.  Well, she’d say, I got another one.

Angus and Fiona hang out

In the beginning Angus’ separation anxiety was heart rending.  He would not be separated from Jan.  He was a lucky dog; Jan worked from home and he was seldom separated.  We were lucky people; because he needed to know where we were at all times, he never ran away.  Tom taught him the boundaries of the yard in one evening and that was that.  Even when the groundhog popped out from the culvert under the drive.  That was a game.  The groundhog knew Angus knew where he had to stop.  So, Angie wore a path across the lawn and pounded a hard dirt path in his skid down the hill to the culvert, where he braked and stopped on a dime while the groundhog hurried through the pipe and came out the other end.  On someone else’s property.  Flipped Angie off and ambled down the road.

Fiona was the brains of the pair.  She would have been the alpha dog except for the unfortunate fact of showing up second.  She grasped almost from the outset that terrier antics such as running off didn’t happen in Angie’s house.  In fact she did run once, for a half mile through the woods to the next street and terrorized herself so that when someone brought her back she admitted her mistake and never repeated it.  Running alone was scary and stupid, when you could run up the street with Mom every morning to Uncle Skip’s or Uncle Joe’s, accompanied by all the cats, get a biscuit from Uncle Joe and an amble around Uncle Skip’s field.

Tom and Jan went to Canton one weekend to visit Tommy T.  They took Angie and Fiona, who were always up for a ride.  At Tommy’s house they left the two in the back yard with Tommy’s dog, and went to see a ball game.  Coming back up the street hours later they could see the gate was open and there were no dogs in the back yard.  Tommy was beside himself.  Bad enough his dog, but his dad’s dogs too!  Jan suggested they not worry until they had to.  They pulled in the drive and saw Angus on the back porch.  They walked around the house and found Fiona on the front porch.  Jan figures Fiona went around to the front door because it was the last door she saw them go through.  Dogs and all, they piled back in the car and went looking for Tommy T’s dog.  When he hopped in, blocks and blocks later, Angie and Fiona gave him what for.