The Reindeer Keeper

With the snow and the wind and below zero temperatures, I sometimes fix something simple for myself when suppertime comes around. This doesn’t happen every night but when it does happen; whatever I fix not only warms me up but fills me with an even deeper appreciation of winter. I’d never think of having hot cereal for supper in the summertime. But I do during the winter. And I enjoy every spoonful as much as I would enjoy a full-course meal. After the hot dogs and potato salads and the boiled dinners and turkeys, winter offers a time of slowing down and occasionally treating yourself to simple, warm and relaxing suppers. Besides a bowl of hot cereal, which could be Oatmeal, Corn Meal, or Wheatena with an added treat of dipping a piece of toast into any one of those cereals, my simple winter supper might be buttermilk pancakes with either blueberries or bananas on top. When the kids were little I had a Hello Kitty-shaped pancake skillet. Those pancake suppers were quite popular...

I've written so much about growing up in the country surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I've gone on about playing in the barn and down at the creek and in the pine grove and especially the hours my cousins and I spent in our chicken coop clubhouse. More often than not we older ones took care of the younger ones and we never knew it. We were all just playing. Oddly enough I hardly ever write about cousins on the other side of the family. That's because I hardly knew them. That was my father's side of the family. I have no clue why we didn't get together that often. It's not that they lived far away. They were close by-down another country road. Maybe it was because that side was all brothers and my mother's side was all sisters. Maybe it was because we were always involved with my mother's side since they were our neighbors. In the summers we shared our dinners under my aunt's pine trees. It was a given that every holiday we ...