Thanksgiving Prep

We're doing a (relatively) small dinner - turkey roasts rather than a whole bird, stuffing, yummy potatoes (that's what my family calls them - yours probably calls them funeral potatoes or if you're not from Utah, heart attack on a casserole dish).  I'm doing up a spinach casserole/quiche-y kind of thing, Daniel made deviled eggs for a starter, and (of course) Dixie salad.

If you're from anywhere other than Washington, Utah, you've probably never heard of Dixie salad, but it's a staple with my family.  The tradition started back in the '90s (that would be the 1890s) - salads were very elegant back east, and apparently, my ancestors found a recipe for Waldorf Salad in Godey's Ladies Book or somewhere. It called for lettuce, apples, walnuts, and mayonnaise  - which sounded frankly disgusting.  My people being a practical bunch looked out at a landscape with a distinct lack of lettuce or walnuts and put together a concoction of apples, pecans, pomegranate pips and whipped cream - it was a hit, and we've been eating it ever since. 

Some members of the family (heretics) have added bananas or other fruit, but we're purists.  We used to get the pomegranates off the trees in Grandma and Grandpa's back yard (same with the pecans), but lately, we've been forced to make do with substandard store-bought.  It's not the same, but we adapt - we're Adams women.  Harvesting the pips today, I remembered when Grandpa taught me that it's so much easier if you do it underwater - the juice doesn't get everywhere, the pips sink to the bottom of the bowl and the debris rises to the top and can be scooped off easily. We've also sunk to the level of using Cool Whip rather than whipped cream, but hey - I figure all those Cool Whip containers in Grandma's cupboard (and fridge) had to come from somewhere, and if it was good enough for her, it's good enough for me.

(Sidebar:  In searching for an image for Dixie salad, I found one poor deluded soul who actually included grapes and strawberries.  That's just flat wrong.)

Rough Week Ahead

Dixie in her normal habitat - under a blanket

That photo there - that's my sister.  My mother's constant companion for the past 12 or so years, Dixie Lynn Adams.  She was a rescue and the rescue place maintained that she was a pure-bred dachshund, but in her prime, she had a four-foot vertical leap, so I suspect there may have been some south of the border influence.  We don't talk about it, though. We just love her the way she is.  

She is definitely a dog with a personality.  I'm sure that at one point, she was a puppy, but she's been a crone so long that I can't really remember her puppyhood. She was born to be a crone - set in her ways, sure that she's right, ruler of the roost.  She even had making grumpy old woman noises down pat (and there's nothing more disturbing than hearing "gruntgrowlgruntgroan" coming from about a foot off the floor in your bedroom around midnight - it was just Dixie making her rounds, ensuring the safety of the family and the lack of any available unsnacked-upon food in the house.)

She put Mom through a scare a couple of years ago, when she lost her right eye to glaucoma, but it didn't slow her down.  She just accepted it as part of her pirate personae and kept on grumbling on.  But now, I think she's finally hit the end of the road.  For the past three or four months, she's been having trouble eating, and she's been losing sight in her good eye.  Now this past week, she's been confused (she got lost under the dining room table, unable to find her way out from the legs), and disoriented.  Mostly, though, she just seems to be frightened, and we think it's time to release her soul back to the universe.  We're going to try to give her a good send-off, though.

 

Bagby Memories

There's got to be a word that describes things that you don't need to put on your bucket list because you've already done them years ago.  Maybe the memory well list?  At any rate...

I saw this picture of Bagby Hot Springs today, and it brought back happy memories of when I was young, in shape(ish), and foolish enough to stay out all night.  This was back when I was part of the Clinton Street Cabaret group and performing at the Rocky Horror Picture Show every Saturday night.  There's only so many times you can go hang out at Lyon's after the show (although that number is startlingly high), so eventually we ended up piling into several cars and driving out past Boring, past Estacada, out to BFE, and then hiking up a 1 1/2 mile trail (in the dark, mind you) to Bagby - a natural hot spring that has been tamed to flow into cedar tubs up on top of the mountains under the stars.  It's really beautiful - especially when you can look up and watch the stars and just relax with 15 or 20 of your best friends for the night - although I would recommend bringing flashlights.  We tried it one night with a single glowstick, and it was not a good time hiking. 

Voting Day Thoughts

Of course, I don't agree with any of this, but it made me laugh (especially #4).  We all have voted, so that's two male votes to one very vocal female vote (Daisy and Moose are both strictly non-partisan and under 18, so they care not for this silly political season, but they would like people to know that they can be bought for a bone or two.) 

But for those of you who think that your vote doesn't matter, or that midterms are not important - a couple of years ago, there was a local school bond measure that passed by exactly 3 votes.  I'd like to think that it was the three votes from this house.  I tend to vote for all local school and library bonds, even though I won't have children, because I look at "government" not as a separate entity, but as all of us working together to get important things done that we can't or won't do separately.  We build our society by our votes, and I want an intelligent, well-read society. 

Saturday Grandma Thoughts

Thinking about grandma this morning... I was lucky growing up - I had 4 different grandmothers still alive when I was born, Grandma Lova (mom's mother), Grandma Clara (dad's mother), Little Grandma (Kate, Grandpa Dewane's mother) and Grandma Lula (Lova's mom).

I spent the most time with Grandma Lova as a kid - Mom had me at 17, and was divorced from Dad by the time she was 20, so she needed all the help she could get.  I spent a fair amount of time with Little Grandma too, since she lived right down the block.  I didn't realize until I was an adult that Lova must have been frustrated with that arrangement - living right down the block from your mother-in-law can't have been an easy way to spend a marriage.  But she made it work.

I remember when Grandma would come home from work (usually about 3:00 - she worked the early shift at Kellogg), she and I would have a little ritual.  She would fix us each an english muffin pizza, and we would sit at the kitchen table and count her tags for the day.  She did piecework - sewing zippers into tents or sleeping bags or whatever. She's the one who passed down the deep satisfaction of statistics to me.  You know, acknowledging each piece, watching the pile grow, occasionally comparing yourself to the others in the group, but mostly just trying to beat your own personal best.

She also instilled a love of the company of women.  I find myself hanging out with the guys most of the time, but there's something to be said for the comfort of just sitting down with a mutual project (usually a quilt, but sometimes making rolls, or canning, or whatever) with a group of women.  It's best if it's a project that's fairly repetitious and not terribly taxing mentally so that your fingers can just go ahead and fly while your brain and mouth can just enjoy spending time with friends.

And then there's the fear of throwing out anything...  Yep.  I definitely got that from Lova.  One entire closet in the basement was filled from floor to ceiling with nothing but fabric - mostly yard-ends that she grabbed from the dumpster at work.  And there was the food cellar that had canned goods (both home canned and store bought) from the 1950s on up.  She could easily have ridden out a zombie apocalypse just from her basement - it might not have been all that pleasant an experience, but she would have come out of it with some nice new quilts.