The Reindeer Keeper

  I loved playing TEA PARTY when I was a little girl. Most of the time they were tea parties with pretend friends I named Chunny and Winnie. Our tea parties were always held in the summertime, on an enclosed back porch where the sun and a nice breeze came through the screened windows. My favorite dolls and stuffed animals would join us. They loved being served pretend chocolate chip cookies. So did Chunny and Winnie. So, did I. I wish I had photos of those tea parties, but I don't. There were no cell phones way back then. That's why I was so excited when finding the above photo of another Tea Party, not with Chunny and Winnie but with my cousin Carol and my older brother, Johnny. The tea party was held just outside my grandparents' farmhouse. If you look above my cousin, you can see a bit of my grandfather's barn. At that time, the barn was home to cows, horses and chickens. When we were older, we played up in the hay mows in the barn and in our grandfather's nearby...

The season of squeezing lemons for lemonade is back again! Granted-these days all you have to do is go to the frozen food aisle, pick up some cans, bring them home, open them up, put the frozen concentrate in a pitcher, add water, stir, add ice if you want, and there you have it-Lemonade. You can purchase pink lemonade or limeade-even ice tea. Or-You can buy all those varieties packaged in a carton or glass container. No concentrate to bother with-it's ready to serve. Even the Paul Newman brand offers lemonade, limeade and ice tea. But my favorite brand remains Homemade Lemonade. My grandmother made it as did my mother and aunts. They each had a favorite glass pitcher for lemonade that never came from a can or container. It came from slicing real, hold-in-your-hand lemons and squeezing the juice out by using a thick glass-lemon-squeezer thing. It was odd-shaped but it worked.That's what they all used. You'd hold on to it with one hand and...