The Reindeer Keeper

When I was growing up, most Christmas presents were wrapped and sealed together with Christmas stickers instead of scotch tape. After all, it was Christmas. Those stickers looked more like Christmas than strips of sticky cellophane tape. But they didn't stick as good as the tape. My mother had a specific box in which she kept gift tags and Christmas stickers. I loved going through them and hinting which ones I liked the most. Getting the right stickers on one's gifts was quite important. I'm sure my mother thought so too. Besides making gifts look like Christmas, there was another reason why I loved it when my mother used her Christmas stickers. You see, depending how many she put on the tissue paper to keep a gift sealed until Christmas morning and depending on if she was in a hurry putting the stickers in place, some of the stickers weren't sealed as tightly as needed. After a while, some would pop right up. Others would still stay in place until gently encouraged to

  When I was little and I didn’t feel good, my mother would take me to a particular doctor. While I didn’t like going to see the doctor, a big cabinet sitting in his office with lots of small drawers would distract me. There were so many drawers. Little spaces for little things. Spaces to put things in. Hide things. Arrange things. Each had a label. I couldn’t read so I never knew what any of the labels said but it didn’t matter. My imagination took over. Once I reached a certain age, my doctor changed. But my infatuation for such small spaces remained. When I was going into the fourth grade, we moved to the country and playing in my grandfather’s barn with my cousins became a constant. By then, my grandfather had stopped farming. Gone were the cows and horses— and the chickens. Left behind were the small, three-sided nesting boxes where the chickens would lay their eggs. The boxes remained intact. Some still had a bit of hay and a fe

 Well here we are again. It's that time of year when three major holidays come at us one right after another. And the decorating has begun. With Halloween behind us we are heading toward Thanksgiving. We can put away the witches and ghosts but keep the pumpkins and gourds on display. The cornstalks too. And then after Thanksgiving, put the pumpkins and gourds away. Throw out the cornstalks and get on with decorating for Christmas. Some people keep their outside lights in place all year long. Some use Thanksgiving as their marker to put their outside lights back up. We all do it differently.  Some decorate for Halloween. Leave those decorations in place and add their Thanksgiving decorations to the mix. Then top all of those decorations off with Christmas decorations. It's fun to drive around and see what others have done. I've come to enjoy seeing witches next to Pilgrims and Santa Claus with his reindeer. But I'm one who needs space between the three holidays. I need t

I've always loved Autumn. September and October amaze me. Every thing about them The colors. The briskness. The breathtaking leaves. The way the clouds clump together over the fields. The cider and donuts and wearing sweaters and having hot cereal for supper. Candy corn. Those orange pumpkin shaped candies that make your teeth ache. More coffee. More homemade soups. More French goulash with corn muffins. More squash. Casseroles. Apples. Homemade applesauce and apple pies and apple pan dowdy. Cinnamon. Candles. Marvelous moons. Even rainbows.   Once September slides into October, my thoughts turn toward Halloween. I've always loved Halloween. Probably when I was a kid, candy was the reason. But as I grew older I realized my love of Halloween was all about Anticipation. Anticipation of getting out Halloween decorations, some homemade and some from dollar stores. Some, hand me downs. Anticipation of going trick or treating. That never grows old. I love trick or treating. And if t

Way back when I was a little girl I remember a few summers when my older brother and I would be called back inside the house by our mother in the afternoons. She would make us rest on the back porch for a few hours. She'd pull the blinds to stop the sunlight from coming in. We each had a daybed to rest on. We couldn't talk to each other. We were allowed to look at books which was fine with me. I can't remember much about what we were told other than something called polio was going around and if we didn't rest we could get it. I still didn't understand what "it" was but from the tone in her voice I understood polio to be quite scary. Our mother was a nurse. A very dedicated nurse. We loved it when we were put in the backseat of the car and we'd go along with our parents as our father drove our mother to the hospital to work the night shift. I loved seeing her dressed in her white uniform with her starched nurses' cap, highlighted by a black ribbon

It's no secret that I have a sweet tooth. There's a drawer in the kitchen where I can go for a touch of sweetness during the day. But with summer in full gear, I now have another source of delight-a candy shop in the garden loaded with small, round, sweet, delicious cherry tomatoes. It's impossible to eat just one-or two so I don't bother trying. Sometimes when I'm hanging clothes on the line I'll bring a small bowl out with me. Before I hang the clothes I'll pick some of those delightful little tomatoes and put them in the bowl. Then as I hang the clothes I'll devour the tomatoes. I usually run out. So I'll go back and pick some more. It makes hanging the clothes a delightful reason to be outside near that little garden. Other times if I'm inside on the computer I'll have that bowl with me full of garden candy. As I go along I'll eat a tomato. Suddenly the bowl is empty once again. But not for long. I know I could throw those cherry toma

Green beans fresh from the garden were favorites growing up. Whether my grandmother was feeding a hungry crew in from the fields during haying season or whether she'd prepared some green beans for a family summer get together in her backyard, her green beans were always so delicious. When we'd gather for picnics those green beans quickly disappeared. They were consistent in their taste. All she did after cooking them was add some milk, a bit of butter, salt and pepper. I can still see her sitting outside on the back stoop of her farmhouse in her house dress and apron, cutting the ends off the beans, then slicing those beans fresh from the garden. My mother sometimes sat outside to cut the ends off her green beans, then slice them into pieces but more often than not, she'd have me do it. Maybe that's because I'd snip those ends off in record time. Slice them just as fast and enjoy a few along the way. After they were cooked, she prepared them as my grandmother did. T

My mother loved snapdragons.  When we lived out in the country she grew snapdragons along a rock wall beside our house that was painted yellow. Once the snapdragons were fully grown the colors were breathtakingly vibrant-everything from marvelous magenta to orangey orange to sunshine yellow, purple haze, and snowy white.  It was like growing rainbows. When my mother didn't have time to weed her snapdragons, she'd ask me to go out and do the pulling of weeds between each plant. I loved pulling the weeds especially when the sun was shining and a breeze was coming over the fields, across the creek and up the hill. I'd bring some cookies along. Most always I'd have to go back inside sooner than later and get some more. But while I enjoyed the cookies, I enjoyed sitting there surrounded by snapdragons even more. Especially when they started to sing. Oh I had to help them a little. And only snapdragons that had fallen to the ground joined in the chorus. The others would stand

I've only ridden on a few trains yet I can honestly say I love trains. Where I live I can hear trains passing by across the river in Canada. Listening to the chugging of the train down the tracks, hearing the whistle blowing, me wondering who is on board and where they are going all takes place as soon as I hear the movement of a train. It's especially mesmerizing at night as I'm wrapped in blankets. I listen to those sounds until they fade into the darkness. My most memorable train ride was back when I was in junior high school. My grandmother asked me to go with her on a train from Syracuse to Indianapolis to visit relatives. I was so excited, first to be asked and second to be riding on a train that would include riding the train all night long. I would be one of the passengers and maybe somewhere in the darkness someone would hear the whistle of my train and the chugging of my train down the tracks and wonder where I was going. Of course no one would know me but that di

I looked for an old photo of the sidewalk I used to play on before we moved to the country but I couldn't find one. The above photo is a stock photo from the internet. That is not me. But it could have been me many years ago when playing on the crooked, bumpy sidewalk running by our home situated alongside a lane. Being able to play on the sidewalk once spring came was as exciting as seeing robins or seeing grass or seeing daffodils and tulips or hearing the geese flying over.  Sidewalks were a playground all to themselves. Part of the sidewalk I played on was going up a slight incline. There were cracks in it. There was even a bump that you had to plan for when going down the incline full speed on your bike. It was best to ride over on an edge of the bump than take your chances riding over the middle of it. The bump would send you flying. If that happened it might have been fun soaring through the air or disastrous. I had both experiences.  Part of the sidewalk was older than the

 Welcome to Page 133 of Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cook Book printed in the 1960s. Way back when I was in Junior High/High School this page would be spread out on the kitchen counter in our house in the country right about now. After making the Funny Bunny Biscuits and Peter Rabbit Cake a few years in a row I really didn't need to refer to page 133 in that cookbook. By then I knew it all by heart. But going into the kitchen drawer and pulling the cookbook out had become just as much a tradition as making the biscuits and cake. So that's what I would do. The fun part of doing that was one thing lead to another. I'd sometimes make up my own recipes. I'd sometimes give the bunnies a body by using another biscuit and then add a small biscuit tail. I'd use the suggested raisins for the eyes and candied cherry for the nose and slivered almonds for the whiskers if my father had picked up some almonds when at the grocery store. Or instead of making a Peter Rabbi

This is the only old photo I have that shows any inkling of where the creek that ran behind my grandparents' farmhouse was located. If you look beyond my older brother, the toddler in the photo, and my grandfather passing by on his tractor, a hint of  that creek can be seen beyond that overgrown field.  When my cousins and I were growing up that creek, known as Sucker Creek for a reason, turned into a marvelous place to play no matter the season. We'd build hideaways along its banks out of the brush growing wild. We'd skate on it in the wintertime, even in the evenings. One of our uncles built us rafts out of telephone poles so using steel poles as steering devices, we'd travel about that creek on one adventure after another. And in the summertime before the creek dried up, we'd go fishing although looking back, I can't ever remember seeing a single fish swimming in that murky water. But then, it wasn't the normal kind of fishing and we were just kids having

 When it got to be that time of the year, when winter was thinking of fading into spring, my cousins and I gave Mother Nature a hand in the process as it seemed pretty slow to us. Because we spent lots of time outside anytime of the year-lots of time in the fields and pastures, whether attempting to feed my older brother's black angus as pictured above or running through hayfields or running to our clubhouse or down to the creek, when the thought of spring was in the air, we pitched in to help that happen even faster than Mother Nature had planned on making it happen. Sometimes we'd start in the driveways. We'd go into my aunt's garage and bring out whatever we could find to chop through the ice and shovel the remaining snow away. Guess we thought we'd then be able to ride our bikes. Whatever we thought we'd be out there working hard with shovels and hoes. Part of the fun was etching little streams out in the melting snow, leading that water to a bigger pool of

There's something both relaxing and exciting about cutting out cookies. It might be the anticipation after making and then refrigerating the cookie dough. Then waiting for it to be ready.  I use the same recipe when cutting out cookies. I found it years ago in the December, 1982 issue of Ladies' Home Journal with Drew Barrymore when she was a little girl on the cover. The recipe was included in a section highlighting favorite Cookie Recipes from 'Superstars.' The recipe I use is Dolly Parton's Christmas Sugar Cookies. I still have my copy of that issue. I go to the cupboard and bring the magazine out every time I make those cookies. The page the recipe is on is smeared with flour as well as grease stains from butter and remains of the dough itself. It's also sprinkled with love as that page has bought joy and fun and precious memories over the years. I really don't need to get the magazine out and turn to page 95 because I know the recipe by heart. I get the

I can't remember what elementary grade I was in when taking a morning break to enjoy a small, sometimes cold and sometimes not so cold small container of whole milk with my classmates. The Milk Break was part of the daily schedule. I do remember how good it tasted. The milk didn't come in flavors. Not even chocolate. There was no fat free or calcium enriched or soybean milk. Just whole milk in individual cartons.  The cartons were either opened by the teacher and then the student put a straw into the milk or there was a sealed hole in the carton and either the student or teacher pushed a straw through the hole. Straws were not fancy or colored. They did not have brand names or licensed characters on them. They did not have loops, making it possible to watch the milk go around the loops as a student sucked on the straw. They did not come wrapped in cellophane attached to the carton.  Instead, the teacher would walk around each table full of students, stopping beside each student

 Growing up when the snow started falling and the wind howled it became time for mittens and boots; skates, sleds, and toboggans as well as homemade soups and breads, casseroles and a favorite my grandmother used to make-Rice Croquettes.  I'm sure any of us grandchildren who sat around her kitchen table enjoying those rice croquettes never understood what a croquette was but it didn't matter. We were going by the taste, the warmth and the fun we had sitting around that table in the wintertime. Sometimes after skating down at the creek, we'd stop at our grandmother's and if she was baking cookies or making rice croquettes she'd sit us down to enjoy whatever it was she was making. Her molasses cookies were so delicious. One was a handful. I never realized until years later that rice croquettes are quite simple to make. There are only four ingredients. After mixing the ingredients together, you roll out the croquettes in flour and cook them in deep fat until browned. T