HOW IT USED TO BE

The dictionary describes snacks as food eaten between meals. I know that having something tasty to eat between meals has been an important part of my life. The snacks I had as a child are some of the same ones I have now. But there was one my mother made that I just never wanted to continue making myself.

The snack my mom would make was one that she had as a child. It was made of ordinary things found in any cupboard. Milk, bread, sugar, and butter were the ingredients. Butter on the bread, sugar on the butter and milk over all of it. It took hunger away but I did not particularly like it.

We did have chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies fairly often but there were always those occasions when there was nothing to snack on and we’d be starving. These times required creative thinking. We’d have cereal (so what if it was close to bedtime) or we’d open a box of Lipton Noodle Soup and add some additional noodles. These were OK snacks. I don’t know when we discovered the recipe for Minute Cookies. But it became the standard answer to our often asked question, “What can we eat?” Now my children make these for their families.

Minute Cookies are perfect when there is an emergency snack craving. They can be made from start to finish in about 15 minutes, and they are yummy. They taste like a piece of fudge with oatmeal. So they are good for you too. The only problem with them is it’s hard to stop eating them.

In case you have never had the good fortune to find this recipe, here it is and remember don’t eat too many at one time.

Chocolate No-Bake Cookies
¼” cup cocoa            ½ cup peanut butter
2 cups sugar            3 cups oatmeal
½ cup butter             1 tsp. vanilla
½ cup milk
Boil the first 4 ingredients for 1-2 minutes. Add peanut butter and vanilla to the mixture. Add the oatmeal and mix. Drop by spoonful on a cookie sheet. Let cool. Makes about 2 dozen.

No Comments »

I guess if you camp now you are “sleeping out” but this term was not used to describe camping when I was young. Sleeping out meant exactly that- sleeping outside.

One particular time I slept out was when I was about 10 and my younger brother was about 7. We were going to be in a pup tent in our back yard. By this time in my life, my father had installed a beautiful picket fence that separated the lawn from the woods. The tent was just outside the fence on the woods side.

Pup tents are small little tents with short sides and only room for 2. We had a wood floor in our tent so we wouldn’t be sleeping on the damp ground and of course we had our sleeping bags. When darkness was approaching our parents settled us in the tent. We tied the flaps together and were ready for a wonderful nights rest in the outdoor air. We talked for a bit, shone our flashlight on the walls of the tent and eventually fell asleep.

And then we were awakened by the sound of a meow. This one meow was followed by several, followed by several more. Waking up from a sound sleep, outside in a tent by the sound of an animal made our imagination roar to life. And I do mean roar. I do not know how long it took for the meows to sound like mountain lions but that is exactly what we thought. What to do, what to do. The tent door was only a small flap held in place by two ties. Not enough to provide any protection. We must make a run for it. But the fence was to be navigated. We had to find the opening quickly and run for all we were worth. Now we knew the back door would be unlocked but we would have to climb the steps. And we knew the mountain lions would be in pursuit so we couldn’t err in navigating. We decided to go in the cellar door. It was a straight shot into the house. Except it was locked when we got there.

I don’t remember what we did then. I felt sheer terror, mountain lions were on my heels. I probably screamed and ran to the back door with my brother on my heels. (it was every man or kid for himself!) Or I may have pounded on the cellar door till it was opened by my parents. However we got in to the house is not clear in my memory but I slept the remainder of the night in my own bed where animals could not get me.

Now the next morning I did not expect to find a lion sitting on the doorstep waiting to devour me but I also didn’t expect to find what was there. Three little kittens were playing in the yard. I guess they were hanging around so we didn’t have the misguided notion of mountain lions in the backyard with us the next time we slept out.

No Comments »

The town I grew up in was small enough that to be 2.5 miles out meant you were living in the country. And we enjoyed country living. I’m not sure everything we did was a good thing, like the time my older brother decided we should do some trapping. I think he was about 12 and I was 7.

I do not know where he got the trap from. It wasn’t a bear trap but it could have done some damage to a body if you stuck your hand, foot, or limb in the jaws of it. Our house sat on an acre of property with the back half of it wooded. But that’s not where we went trapping. We went further into the woods and set our trap up by a small crick. Crick is what we called a small stream, in Georgia it’s called a branch.

Setting the trap didn’t take too long. I watched as my brother did the work, after all it was his idea and he was older. Baiting the trap was next and I can’t remember what we put in the thing. We really didn’t care what we caught we just wanted to trap something. I guess now PETA would stage a demonstration.

The waiting for some unfortunate creature to get caught in it was next. We would have to walk to the trap every day and check. It stayed empty for a good while until one day there was a raccoon in it. What excitement! We caught something- a raccoon. Then came the realization that we had an animal to deal with. I guess my brother knocked it in the head because it was quite dead when we carried it home. We tied the legs together and found a sturdy stick that we ran between the legs. We each took an end and proudly walked home. It wasn’t heavy but it was an ugly dead raccoon hanging upside down swinging between us.

As we walked my brother talked about making a coon’s skin cap, after all he had an actual coon to skin.

But we hadn’t figured on my mother. She was horrified. She was angry. And she was adamant that the coon had to be buried immediately, the trap had to be thrown out, and we were never to trap anything again. Let me tell you, when my mother decided on something it was a done deal.

I guess she didn’t fully embrace “country living” like we did.

No Comments »

Now that summer is here and the children are out of school, you see kids everywhere. We were at the mall the other day and the place was packed. There were grandmothers, mothers, and children everywhere I looked. I was amazed and said so. My daughter looked at me and said “It’s what families do in the summer!”

Well let me tell you, it’s not what my family did in the summer. At least not while my older brother and I were growing up. My father grew up on a farm, the youngest in his family. That youngest position sometimes means easy but not in my dad’s family. The farm setting meant everyone worked hard. And he wanted us to learn to work as well. Since we didn’t have a farm he invented work.

Every summer for about 5 years running, my brother and I would move a pile of rocks from one part of our 1 acre property to another part of it. We used a wheelbarrow that was made of steel with an iron wheel. It was heavy. When we were smaller it would take both of us to lift the handles and move it along.

This was our summer job. I don’t mean we didn’t play and have fun but the rock moving was something that had to be completed during our school vacation time. We were the only kids in the neighborhood that were trained up this way. Every day we spent some time on the rock pile job. By the way, we did not get paid any money but we did have a house to sleep in, food to eat, and clothes to wear. We never dreamed of getting paid!

And how did this work out for us? Well, I personally never used this technique with our children. In fact I have been known to leave rocks I find in my flower gardens for accent. But I can start a project and finish it no matter how boring. All in all it was an unusual but effective way to learn about something we all have to do- work.

1 Comment »

I had to go to the grocery store today to get milk and bread. Now back in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s it was a lot easier to get these 2 items and save on gasoline as well.

When I was very little, my mother had a bake day like most women did. I really don’t remember this clearly and sometime in my young life this changed. The change was the Bread Man. Every week he would roll his truck into our driveway and my mother would purchase the bread, rolls, hotdog, or hamburger buns that we needed. He would make his way down the street, going into every drive that welcomed him. The transactions were conducted quickly and without fanfare. He sold bread, we bought bread. He also sold those wonderful little chocolate cupcakes with the cream filling. Sometimes we would manage to “find” a dime lying around the house and use it to buy these delightful treats. I still buy these things and they still taste as good as they did when I was a kid.

The Milk Man also made his appointed rounds. He came twice a week, if I remember correctly. My mother would leave the emty glass bottles on the porch and he would pick them up and replace them with full ones. (Conservation and recycling at work again!) He came fairly early in the morning and once a week he would leave a bill. If we needed more than we normally got my mom would leave a note for him. Milk men were delivering into the mid 1970’s in my home town and some folks would still like to see them coming down their drive.

Milk and bread were not the only things that were available at your door. The dry cleaners had a pick up and delivery service. Once a week we would send out the dry cleaning and the following week it would be back at which time he would pick up more. I have no idea what we were getting cleaned because my father did not wear a suit to work but we helped keep the cleaners solvent.

The Jewel Tea Man and the Fuller Brush Man completed the shop at home experience. These guys each had their niche. The Jewel Tea Company had all kinds of neat stuff from jewelry to knicknacks. My mother was for some reason leary of our Jewel Tea guy and would only open the door a crack to speak to him. I wonder if she heard some awful story about him. At any rate, she bought very little from him. Now the Fuller Brush man sold cleaning supplies and of course, brushes. This company started in 1906 and is still around today.

So you see how easy it was to shop from home. That’s how it used to be.  Now we sit with our computers and shop but we still have to go out to get the milk.

No Comments »

Well I’ve been so busy that I did not realize that we have slipped into summer. There was no fanfare, no farewell party for spring, but it’s gone- history. And I have failed to accomplish what I witnessed and participated in every spring while growing up. Spring cleaning.

Spring cleaning would begin as soon as you could store the storm windows. Storm windows were the answer before thermal panes. They helped insulate the windows and cut down on heat loss. Every fall they were brought out of storage and installed on the outside of every window in the house. In northwestern Pennsylvania 50 years ago, the winters were harsh. Once the real cold settled in, like an unwelcome house guest, it stayed. But when the weather warmed enough to take the storm windows off, cleaning began. And it was an all encompassing endeavor.

The windows were washed, inside and out. This meant ladders because you could not access the outside from the inside. The screens came from they were stored and yep! they were washed too. Of course, washing windows meant washing curtains and drapes- in every room. Wash days (Mondays) were longer and sometimes another day was added to accommodate the extra laundry.

Any walls, like the bathroom and kitchen were scrubbed down. All the ceiling light fixtures were cleaned. Closets were emptied and then cleaned and put back together. The kitchen cabinets were also a target and so out came everything and after a thorough cleaning it was all restored to order. From the top of the house to the bottom it was torn apart, cleaned, and put back together.

The hardwood floors were the most time consuming and the hardest. Back then there was no polyurethane. The floors were finished with shellac and for some awful reason that was never fully explained to me, shellac needed to be washed and waxed. So all the area rugs had to be rolled up and the floors were scrubbed. Not mopped, scrubbed on hands and knees. Then the new wax was applied (because we just scrubbed the old wax off). That was applied by hand with the socks and underwear that were thrown out when you cleaned your dressers. It was Johnson’s Paste Wax and it had to dry before you could buff it. I don’t remember how long the drying time was but the buffing was so laborious. I think that’s why people had kids back then- so they had help wax and buff hardwood floors!

My father was a progressive guy and he found a motorized buffer when I was about 14. It was the greatest invention. The motorized part was his electric drill and the only hitch was securing the drill on the handle of the buffer. It was trial and error the first few times but he (being ingenious) finally found the right method. He cut up an inner tube, made strips from it about 1″ wide and tied that drill to it so as it vibrated it stayed right where it was supposed to. It made the whole “spring floor cleaning” almost fun. We’d push that flimsy buffer with Dad’s big drill hanging on it over the floor making it shine like it never did before. Now all we have to do is put a few coats of polyurethane on and get a good mop. I often scrub on my hands and knees though, it’s the only was to get in the corners!

I confess I started to clean the windows this spring but I didn’t get to all of them, and I have the poly on my hardwood so no need for the paste wax and some of my drapes have seen the inside of my washer. But hey it’s summer now, so spring is just a memory and so is the way we used to clean.

No Comments »

Writing about the whole wash day experience when I was a little girl brought to mind the only time I was on a talk radio program. Yep, that’s right. As a litte kid I was actually on talk radio or at least what I think was talk radio.

It was a Monday. I know that because my mother was doing the laundry. (no need for calendars!) I was about 5 years old and it was the good old summertime. I grew up in Pennsylvania and windows were always open in the summer. My mother and I were outside, she was hanging laundry and I was playing. The telephone began to ring and in those day the ringers were very loud. I don’t know if my mother told me to or I decided on my own but I ran in the house to answer it. When I picked up the phone there was a kind of an echo. Funny how I can still remember it but I do. The lady on the phone said “Hello! This is Dialing for Dollars!” (not exactly the Rush Limbaugh Show, but hey!) Our local radio station had a program where they would select numbers from the phone book, call and ask a question. If you answered the question correctly you won some prize. I was 5 years old and didn’t care about the question or the prize. I wanted to talk. And the echo I mentioned earlier was because our radio was playing in the background. My mother kept asking who was on the phone and I just kept trying to talk. Finally she came in the house and took the phone from me. I have no idea if she won the prize but I do remember getting a scolding. But that’s how some talk radio used to work – they called you not the other way around.

No Comments »

I got up this morning knowing I had a great deal of laundry to do. So I gathered it up, separated my colors from my whites (some things should never change) and put my first load in my automatic washing machine.  Now I know washing machines as we know them today have been around for a long time. But when I was a little girl, doing laundry was a lot different.

My mother’s laundry day was Monday. This meant every Monday was devoted entirely to getting the clothes washed. The only other thing that was done on wash day was meals were prepared. The reason for this was the enormity of the task. There were 4 children in my family plus 2 adults- that meant a lot of clothes. Now we didn’t wear our clothes like we do today, sometimes we wore things two days in a row if they weren’t that dirty but it was still a whole weeks worth of laundry.

A typical wash day, as Mondays were called, started the same as mine did today. Gather the clothes, sheets, towels, rugs, etc and separate them into loads. Then they were carried to the basement or cellar and the process began. And it was a process. The first load of laundry was put in the washer which was filled with water. This filling meant a hose was connected to a faucet and hot water was run into the drum of the washer (nothing automatic here). Once it was filled you plugged it in, turned it on and it began to agitate. Agitation in washing machines is still the process but what happened next hopefully is gone forever. The agitation was stopped and the wringer was put into action. This was a device that was attached to the washer above the drum.  It consisted of 2 rollers that you fed the wet soapy clothes through thereby wringing the water from them. The soapy water went back into the washer and the clothes went into a rinse tub. My mother would then swish the clothes around in it and then put them through the wringer again into a second rinse tub. Swish the clothes to rinse, through the wringer and finally into a laundry basket. Several loads were washed and rinsed before the water was changed out if it even was. Conservation was being practiced unconsiously, I guess.

Since every step required my mother’s attention only one batch was done at a time. We’re talking time consuming! The laundry in the basket was then taken to the clothes line to be hung up. In the spring, summer, and fall that was outside strung between 2 clothes line poles. Winter meant clothes were hung to dry on lines strung up inside in the basement. The clothes pin was the device used to hang the wet laundry. The loads were rotated off the line as they dried and more hung up. When the towels, sheets, and rugs were taken down they were put back into service.

The clothing was another matter. It required ironing (which was another day’s work) so it needed a bit of preparation. They were sprinkled with water, rolled up, and put in a bag in the refrigerator. Supposedly this allowed them to be more easily ironed. Once the laundry was washed the washing machine and rinse tubs needed to be drained, wiped down so they would be ready for next Monday.

Presently a wringer washer is made in Saudia Arabia. It can be purchased from www.lehmans.com for $899 with $175 freight. Now I personally am glad that all I have to do is go change out my laundry from my automatic washer to my automatic dryer! I’ve already done a few loads while I’ve been writing this.

No Comments »