The Reindeer Keeper

Since being blessed with two beautiful grandchildren a tradition has taken hold and continues every year about this time. We pick a Saturday or Sunday to go out back and harvest the pumpkins. The only problem this year is the lack of pumpkins. I've only found seven and that just won't work. So this week my son and I went on a search for pumpkins. With roadside stands-commercial businesses and Amish farms, pumpkins are not hard to find. We chose to ride down a back road and find an Amish farm. And we found the perfect Amish farm. So perfect that I went back a few more times. They know me now. They wave Hi as I pull up in front of their sprawling mass of beautiful pumpkins. Of course having little Amish children running around barefoot adds to the backdrop. Soon we will be going out back to "pick" pumpkins. Little will those grandchildren know that most of those pumpkins are imports. All they will see will be a mass of orange ready to be touched and patted and brou

Funny how something simple can trigger memories-like the old steel manual grinder my mother would bring out from a kitchen cupboard during the Holidays. Taking all the parts out of the cardboard box, she'd give them a good washing before she attached it to a leaf of the table and put it all together. Then she'd place her big yellow bowl on the floor underneath it to catch the juices from whatever she'd be grinding. For Thanksgiving that meant cabbage and carrots-maybe an onion; for Christmas that meant cranberries, oranges, and apples. We all loved doing the grinding-especially the cranberries because they popped when going through the grinder and the juice would squirt all over the place. When my mother wasn't in the kitchen, I'd load it with cranberries and grind them as fast as I could. It sounded like fireworks-blending right in with whatever Christmas album my mother had playing in the other room. Among the vegetables my son brought home the other day from

FAMILY TREES AND TREES: Still to this day the rustling of leaves on poplar trees takes me back to my grandparents' farmhouse where stately poplars lined the cinder driveway. When Halloween came around, those trees and their skinny branches way up high became witches and black cats-goblins or monsters especially when an orange moon lit up the night, casting spooky shadows over the fields. With four houses of relatives all in a row, it became a summer tradition of joining suppe rs in a particular backyard full of scotch pines. The shade was welcomed as was the scent of those trees as salads and hotdogs-hamburgers and all the trimmings were enjoyed. Later, while adults sat around enjoying a cup of coffee, the kids would play baseball-running from one tree to another. From a big old tree sitting on the banks of sucker creek, holding our rope swing in its grasp so we could run real fast, take a leap, grab hold of the rope with our hands and situate our feet on the knot at the