Another Discovery and a Bit of History

When I wrote to my parents in 1967 that we were going to have a baby, my mother did what all self respecting English women did at the time. And many still do. She pulled out her knitting needles and bought skeins of fine while wool. And knitted. It wasn’t long before a package arrived with a number of lovely “matinee coats” inside. Matinee coats, booties and bonnets were the traditional gifts for a new baby. A baby arriving in Detroit at the beginning of July doesn’t really need a bonnet or booties and I am pretty sure she didn’t make any.

The coats were lovely. Such small gauge and perky white ribbons to keep them tied round the neck. I did’t know much about babies back then, but I did realize that they were messy creatures and that any garment they wore would need constant washing. So I kept most of the coats for “best” and used the same rationale with subsequents babies.

Over the years I have passed on to my daughters some of the coats I was saving for posterity because the were just too nice for daily use. I was clearing out my sewing room last week when I came across this beauty. It is the very last of the coats. No ribbons, but a pretty smocking detail. I certainly didn’t know baby number one was going to be a boy: maybe she just added this detail after he was born and sent it on. It is a little grubby round the neck, but I am not going to try to wash it. Its putative wearer will be 50 years old this summer. I love to think of my mother sitting down to knit for a grandchild she would only see twice. (The first time he bit her.) I am also sad that we were unable for many reasons to have us all spend more time together. Those pre-Skype days presented so many obstacles to families like ours.

I remember once reading an article that claimed that with the advent of knitting as a pastime countless babies' lives were saved. The warmth provided by a tiny sweater was enough to combat sickness brought about by damp and cold. I tried to find the article again but couldn’t. I did however find numerous accounts of the role of knitted hats in preventing pneumonia in newborn babies, two million of whom die every year according to the Save the Children Fund.

A well researched and illustrated post on war time knitting I found on a Canadian blog appealed to my sense of nostalgia and my interest in war time history. And the blog certainly gave me a source for many more hours of reading pleasure. It also reminded me of my schooldays in the late 1940’s at St. Georges C of E primary school. Mrs. Wilson and Miss Freshwater presided over our class as we spent hours with big needles and thick wool as we attempted to learn the secrets of knitting. By then the war was over and no service man or woman had to wear the mangled articles we made. Actually, I don’t remember making garments. Just misshapen squares.

And I have not improved much since then.

The Gardening Wisdom of Ella Mae O'Neill

We moved into this house in 1969. Our next door neighbors were the Kuhns, with four children about the age of ours, and Jim and Ella Mae O’Neill.  Several years ago I wrote a post describing them and how we cherished them as our neighbors.

I came across this photo the other day in my relentless effort to clean out and cull. Here are the O’Neills at Elizabeth’s birthday party. I think it was her fourth: note the cast on her arm. She learned the hard way that if a baby sitter says “Stop climbing on the footstool”, she has a good reason for the request.

I have been thinking of the O’Neills lately, now that I can acknowledge that the days of spending hours outside in the blazing sun working in the garden are over. While I, with my British reticence, and my neighbors, with the good manners born of experience and maturity, often didn’t make eye contact when we were working in our adjacent yards, out of our sense of a kind of insularity and mutual regard for privacy, there was one time of day when I was aware of what they were doing and even watched them as they went about their lives. After lunch, with small children taking their naps, I would stand at the kitchen sink cleaning up the debris of the morning, and through the kitchen window I watched Mr. And Mrs. O’ Neill walk out of their back door for their afternoon round of errands. He would turn left, walk to their garage, then back the car down as far as their door to pick her up. It only took a minute or so, but she put that minute to good use. She would bend over and start weeding. I wondered why she would bother when her time was so limited.

Now I know. It’s the old elephant joke:

Q.   How do you eat a whole elephant?
A.   One mouthful at a time.

I will emulate the monks who spend a finite amount of work on each daily endeavor, I will follow Mrs. O’Neill who knew that a small task, repeated often enough, achieves a worthwhile result.

And those weeds between concrete slabs in my driveway? They were no match for me yesterday as I walked from the car to the back door after brunch with friends.

A Nice Cuppa

Why were cups of tea always nice? I grew up thinking that the word for the water in which tea leaves were steeped was “nice cuppa.” Now if I am correctly parsing the British Show I am ashamed to say I watch with some degree of regularity it is a mostly called a brew. A nice brew?

When I first arrived in the States in 1963 I abandoned tea and became a coffee drinker, but as the years have gone by I have partially reverted to tea. Still can’t bring myself to add milk and certainly not sugar. But tea, at least during the day, is my beverage of choice.

 All I need to make a perfect cup of tea is my teapot (though my mother would turn over in her grave if she knew that a mug and a teabag are quite sufficient) and my favorite brand of black tea. And of course, hot water. Boiling water. My family has got used to my harassing wait staff in restaurants as I repeat my mantra, “HOT water.” It is usually heated in a microwave and comes back hot but not hot enough. Panera does a pretty good job with hot water. The other problem is that even if the water is sufficiently hot enough for me to want more, if I ask for my little pot of hot water to be refilled, they never bring another tea bag. I solved that problem by taking a little baggie of tea  bags in my purse.

No one will be won over to drinking tea if they read the article in the Sunday paper a couple of weeks ago which makes it look like a good cup of tea cannot be had without these complicated (and expensive) accoutrements.

I can’t quite see the need for a programmable tea steeper for $129.99 or a $199.99 Tea Cere to make matcha tea, authentic or otherwise.

I think I will sit down now with a book and a nice cuppa.

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

I  just can’t ignore any more of the work that needs to be done around here. So I have made an attempt on the garden. Actually, I worked on it four days ago. It was a lovely day and I flitted from task to task . . .  a little weeding here, a little cutting down here, a little tying up here, all instead of concentrating on one particular flower bed. The fact is, I hadn’t felt up to putting the garden to bed last Fall, so there was twice as much work to get it ready for summer. I was  quite excited about my progress, until the next day when every muscle in my body cried out for attention. Fortunately, it rained for the next three days solid and I had a good excuse for not resuming my labors.

At Easter we had a big hand from three of the grandchildren, helping with the outside chores. Charlie was on ladder duty, going around the house taking care of windows that cannot be cleaned from the inside. Danny was in charge of removing the last of the leaves from the grass and Ellie was Vice President in charge of flower beds.

Bit by bit we are making progress. Thanks to son number 1 who came in from Virginia to get the vegetable beds turned over, thanks to son number 2 who is coming in from Maryland in a couple of weeks to mend the picnic table and mend some of the fences. We will bite the bullet and have a company do our side fence which didn’t make it unscathed through the last storm.  It is increasingly obvious that we are sliding from two steps forward and one step back to one step forward and two steps back. I have worked hard to create a garden that my family and I enjoyed. It will fall so much short this year, and next year I fear the weeds and grass will take over. As I was cleaning up my bookmarks I realized that I had kept some photos of gardens past. Here are some more.

My Flickr page seems to have fallen on hard times too, but I am glad I was smart enough to think of photographing what was growing. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Farewell to April

I have been so inconsistent about noting family birthdays on this blog. While cards and gifts do get sent off, I so frequently forget to make mention of them. So here are the April birthdays we celebrated, all in one place.

It’s easy to remember Henry’s birthday. It is April 15, the day Income Tax forms have to be filed. We usually spend the day chasing down deductions and getting the whole business to the post office. This year, however, the taxes didn’t have to be filed until the 18th, so that was the day we spent chasing down deductions and getting the whole business to the post office! Henry looks so very serious in this photo. Normally he is smiling and bubbly, but for him baseball, and especially pitching, is a serious business. It is fun to see him on the mound, staring down the opposing team. He has quite an impressive wind up and we can’t wait to watch some of his games this year. 2017 marked his twelfth birthday.

Next came Veronica, our miracle grandchild. She celebrated her sixth birthday. She is sharp and so very cute (and she knows it, look at that smile!) Now she has joined her siblings at St. Patrick’s in Rockville, absolutely none the worse for her traumatic start to life. Marcie takes her back to the NICU at George Washington Hospital once in a while to see the doctors and  nurses who took such good care of her. She’s a tremendous advertisement for their expertise and skills.

Birthday number 3 belongs to our youngest grandchild, Gladys Grace. Her first birthday and here she is chowing down on the obligatory cake. She was smart enough to know what to do with it. None of the smashing her face into the top of it for her. Her mom described her as “happy, affectionate, strong-willed and so determined.” Can’t beat that description. She is also a creature of habit, so although she ate and loved her birthday dinner she was longing for bed and  had to open her gifts the next day.

Last, but by no means least, Frederick made it through to the teenage years, giving his poor parents three teenage boys. He’s the nicest kid. Although he is one of a soccer playing family, he has decided to switch to basketball and see how that works out for him. We will be seeing him in the summer (and maybe he will switch sports again, because Eleanor is a good buddy of Frederick’s and she is sold on soccer.) We will see.

That was April. We are now into May which is exceptional in that it is the only month in which we do not have a grandchild with a birthday.  I can relax!