The Reindeer Keeper

Amazing how coffee is such a phenomenon. So many brands and so many ways to serve it besides the standard hot cup of coffee. Now you have choices with strange names like frappuccino-latte-caffe mocha-macchiato. Then you can choose to stir-whip-steam or shake-and drink and drink some more! Some of these brands are so recognizable that their locations are sought after destinations in metropolitan centers to rural locations and every place in between . When I think of coffee, I think of my aunt who loved to go out for breakfast at local diners or small eateries. She'd savor every bite and enjoy every drop of her brewed coffee served in a thick, milk-white ceramic cup with a saucer. She'd add a bit of milk and sugar and stir it until it was "pretty"-as she called it. The waitress would fill her cup up a few more times as we'd linger and talk and watch people come and go. It was always fun being with her at these places which, to my aunt, were more enjoyable than ...

Digging through a kitchen cupboard the other night I came across two cake tins that symbolize the celebration of birthdays out in the country. They're pretty worn but then they were used for every birthday when we were growing up. They're not very deep but they're not supposed to be. Both are shaped like Christmas trees and when stacked on top of each other-with icing in between-they make the perfect sized cake especially when you are young and it is your day on which the Christmas tree cake is made just for you. It didn't matter in what month a birthday fell. The cake was always the Christmas tree cake. On the morning of a birthday my mother would get the tins ready, coating them with butter and then covering the butter with a layer of flour. It seemed to me the making of the cake was an all-day procedure but I now realize my mother certainly did much more leading up to the celebration after dinner than just bake a cake. But I only cared about the cake-making goin...

It was the glitzy box that caught my eye just as it was supposed to do. I'd run in the store for a few things and ended up in the aisle loaded with all sorts of craft kits for kids. I was surprised to see so many kits designed to stir a child's imagination. I was also taken back by memories of doing funstuff when I was growing up in the country and doing projects with my child ren when they were young. But aside from the kits I bought my daughters to make pot holders out of loops on a grid and those bags full of colorful plastic crystals which they used to fill-in wired shapes the best their little fingers could and when ready I'd put them in the oven to bake with the end result being a pretty flower or butterfly or rainbow suncatcher-the rest of whatever was created was purely out of what nature provided-with a little help from crayons and glue made from flour and water when in a pinch. Most of the time imaginations were stirred by what was around. Rocks were always gr...