Heavy snow possible Saturday and Sunday; as much as 30 inches to a foot of snow predicted

The title of the post is the headline in today’s Beacon Journal. The Akron Beacon Journal, my childhood newspaper. The repository of funnies and Ann Landers. Even back then my dad would occasionally task me with circling all the grammatical and spelling errors in the day’s edition.

It’s a very slim edition these days and most stories are from the wire.  They do cover the local news, which oscillates between crime and road construction, with a high probability of high school sports every weekend, and our major sports teams, the Cavaliers, the Browns, the Indians. It’s often called the Reekin’ Journal, which is not fair. Transposed information is not new for them.

Good news for those of us pretty far west in the eastern time zone, it’s daylight for about half an hour past five in the evening. On the first day of winter, December 20, more or less, it is dark at 4:59! But the big snow storm Saturday probably obscures our eclipse event.

Here’s another thing that annoys me. Newspapers and magazines that cannot keep track of subscriptions. I was following a thread in the Reekin’ Journal recently, and the article would fade to grey and tell me my subscription was run out. “Well fine!”, and I'd move on to the next paper in my in-box. Eventually I was fed up, subscribed, and went to Wisconsin for Christmas.

I tried opening the Journal when I came back. My password had expired; check my inbox for a new password. Days went by. Then one day, the Journal opened. Go figure.

But how about a big, important publication, The New Yorker. I got the brand new tote last November or December, just to show I’d responded to the renewal notice. I read a current article, What it Felt Like when “Cat Person” went Viral. A flyer at the bottom of the screen informed me I had three articles left this month. Not to worry, when their knickers are in a total twist I’ll just sign in and release the hold.

The article was about the author’s original piece, Cat Person, going viral. I’d not read that, and there was a link to it, back at the beginning of the piece. I scrolled up and clicked on the link.  And, I glanced at the flag at the end. Now I have two articles left this month.

Cutting on the lights

I’m listening to the book, Running on Red Dog Road by Drema Berkheimer. It’s a simple memoir of Appalachian childhood. I am selecting this type over and over these days. I don’t remember the names and authors, of course, but in the last couple of months I have read the opinions and recollections of several authors of the meaning of their early years. How their character was formed by the mines, by housing, by nutrition, by money, by education, by prejudice, by religion, by relatives.

In this book the author casually relates entering a building and cutting on the lights. Two friends sprang at once to mind; Nina and Starlett.  You know Nina, of course. Put her name in the search box; it’s worth the detour to read about a town stalwart. I asked Nina why the phrase was cutting on and off for lights. Her explanation involved the electrical circuit and starting and stopping the flow of electricity. I let it go.

Starlett was a child of Appalachia who grew up in its suburb, Akron, Ohio. Child of the post World War II industrial boom, yet enmeshed in her parents’ dream of returning to the homeland, rural Tennessee.  Starlett died this week; she succumbed to the worst of Appalachia.

My sister Jan was the big sister to Star, who grew up on the street behind us. Jan is ten plus years younger than me, and Star probably five behind Jan. I know her birthday was last Thanksgiving, so let’s say Star got sixty years from life. She always was looking for it to be better.

Star’s father worked in the tire factory. Every Friday night he and Shirley put the two kids in the car and drove to Coker Creek, Tennessee. Over the course of Star’s childhood, they built a house there, and retired to it. Starlett and her brother spent every summer in the very big extended family. Jan remained Star’s friend, all her life, and I tagged along for visits.

Star married Donnie while she still lived in Akron. She was the love of his life and his aim in life was to save her from herself. For, Star fell victim to the curse of her age, drugs. When she was sober, she held promising jobs. For the longest time of all she worked for Arbegast, a fly fishing lure manufacturer. Her flies were exquisite; the company gave her a set. But they fired her too, for excessive absence.

Finally Star moved back to Tennessee, where she met Mark. Such a wedding. Her daddy built a bridge across the branch in the yard and shaved his beard to walk her across. Jan and I went into the mountain and cut rhododendrons and azaleas to fill the buckets up each side of the aisle. Mom hemmed the bridegroom’s trousers; I took pictures.

Jan kept in touch. We visited. There was a little boy, Jordan, who grew up in the tin roofed house in a holler. The water to the house was one of the many natural springs in the mountains. Star and Mark both smoked, and Star moved heaven and earth for any narcotic. Then Jan learned Star had moved to Seattle, with a new husband, hoping to make a new life.

Of course they came back, drifted about, settled down on property of her parents. Occasionally Jan heard from Star, or from Shirley. Star was revived more than once with narcan. But her death was a quiet event in her sleep; cutting off the lights.

Coker Creek and Tellico Plains, Tennessee

A quiet day

I often tell people I have nothing to do and all day to do it. That generally means I'm up for anything that hits the table. I use google's calendar. It fits on my phone, so I can add appointments, commitments, notes on the spot. I try to check it each night, so I am not taken by surprise the next day.

Today is one of those completely blank days. I love them. 

Yesterday was all sunshine, until winter moved back in with ugly clouds, big noisy rain drops.

I chased the rainbow down the road, to a school parking lot.

Today I had another slice of Boston Brown Bread for breakfast. Here it is, toasted. If swimming in butter doesn't suit you, skip ahead. Two more slices and the loaf is gone.

And my job for today is to hem the twelve towels I took off the loom yesterday. 

Then there will be twenty four assorted colors, and I can begin again finding people to send them to. 

Toby has a decent response to the snow and cold out the window.

Boston Brown Bread (and, I found the lima beans)

I prowled deeper into Kriegers, today, still in search of canned lima beans. Everything our larder lacked for BBB was on Laura’s list. I need lima beans, preferably canned. I’ll address that first. In the extremely olden days, when I still lived in Lake County, after all my cookerers were gone, I had to (gasp) prepare meals.

After little experimentation, I settled on the following recipe:

Cook one bag of noodles, drain, set aside

Melt one stick of butter in the noodle pot

Add one can each, tomatoes, lima beans, corn, peas

Add stuff in season, like chopped up peppers

Add noodles

Eat one soup bowl of above every night for supper

Go out one night per week with someone for dinner

Go to mom’s one day of the weekend for nutritious meal

Repeat

Now that I am more sophisticated, I bet I’ll figure out how to add onions, garlic and herbs.

I lived nicely this way for several years, until I fell in again with a cookerer. I do not need lima beans at once, but I will come spring. The back story is, Laura went over to her mother’s side years ago, which I always suspected. But recently she tipped her hand brusquely and I was too crushed, on reflection, to carry on.  I’ve been rowing upriver long enough. At the end of this school year, Laura goes back to mom.

Look at this! Just chop spinach or kale or greens of choice and stir in. But back to the discussion at hand:

My three bedroom unit is too much space, and I think two bedrooms are, too. I spotted the cutest little pup of a unit the other day, and asked the manager. Yes, it’s one bedroom. It’s occupied, so she can’t show me.

However, the next unit to be placed is one bedroom, right behind my neighbor, Cathy. The rent is nearly half as much! It has my name on it. When the manager is back from vacation, next week, I’ll try and finalize some details, like a ramp to the deck and a walk in shower. I could be happy for the rest of my life.

Back to Boston Brown Bread. I found a recipe for baked and many recipes to be steamed on top of the stove. Because I strongly recall baking the bread, I settled for that, first time. I’ll try steamed in a pot next time. My bread pot will go either way, I hope.

When we moved here, Linda outfitted our kitchen with anything we wanted from Alberta’s kitchen. One thing was a large “coffee cup” that Alberta used for wooden spoons and spatulas and such like. It’s resided unused in the back of a cupboard, and I spotted it. We measured it at over four cups. Bonanza.

The red tin cup went into a glass pan of boiling water and into the oven. It has its own lid, but I don’t know how well that will work. I have it well greased, at any rate. Stay tuned for a taste test report.

Boston brown bread

Random association happens to me. A sort of idle past time, perhaps. Free association may be a closer descriptor. Something I see triggers a string of associations that may form a cloud of images, snatched away almost before I see or recognize them. And occasionally, something sticks.

I was deep in the aisles of our free range grocery store a while back, simply trying to locate and memorize the location of items I might want some day. Lima beans, for instance. 

I’d located frozen lima beans, had no hope for canned lima beans, but held out for the possibility of dried limas way in the back. The far opposite end of the store from organic peanut butter, stocked in isolation with dried fruit.

Deep in the cream of tartar section of the store, on a top shelf, I saw rye flour, and whole wheat flour. And blackstrap molasses. On the way home I asked Laura if she’d ever had Boston brown bread, a wasted inquiry of a seventeen year old, of course.

“Do you have any empty tin cans?” I asked. But, she doesn’t source food from tin cans. “You made chili!” And she had, probably last September.

We had a lot of Boston brown bread when I grew up, compliments of me. I loved it, and it really was as simple as washing clean a couple of tin cans, and keeping track of them until the weekend. Probably the only ingredient that came up short was buttermilk or sour milk, and that was as simple as regular milk and vinegar and half an hour.

Mom always had wheat or rye flour on hand, and cornmeal. I see in the google recipe, the cornmeal must be fine ground. As if! I wonder if you could even buy it fine ground in 1947. Cream cheese? When federal farm subsidies fly. There always were raisins on hand, and brown sugar. And so, a couple of loaves of Boston brown bread for supper on Saturday night.

I wondered tonight if I could buy tin cans to bake round loaves of bread. So, I set out on a search. The closest I came was little tins, three inches across and an inch high. I leaned back in the chair and thought about Boston brown bread. 

Of course! It had to come out of the can by the awkward method of putting the can on its side, on something high enough to keep the top of the loaf intact, and use the can opener to get the bottom off the can. Then, use the bottom to push out the loaf.

I remember it with hot dogs and baked beans. (Boston baked beans?) With sauerkraut and pork chops. With tomato soup.

Oh no! I bet modern tin cans cannot be used.