thisendoftheswamp

My BFF recommended The Jackal’s Mistress to me, and boy! am I glad she did.

Jackal was the name Southerns gave Yankee soldiers during the American Civil War, and the story revolves around a wounded Yankee soldier, left to die by his unit, and the Southern woman who reluctantly rescues him. That’s all I’m going to tell you, other than the fact that I devoured all 300-some pages in one sitting.

The author is Chris Bohjalian, and your local library should have a copy.

Mary Ann, over on https://ajoyfulchaos.blogspot.com/ was talking about bean soup, and it brought to mind a recipe that I happened to stumble upon one day when I was looking for something quick and easy to throw together. As it happened, I had all of the ingredients on hand, which made it even better!

2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 onion, diced
1 teaspoon caraway seeds (optional) grated zest of 1/2 orange
2 cups grated beets 1 1/4 cup stock
14 ounce can lima beans drained and rinsed 1 tablespoon wine vinegar

Sauté the onions, caraway seeds and orange peel until soft but not colored. The Squire does not care for caraway seeds, so I omit them. Add the *beets, beans, #stock and vinegar and cook over low heat for 10 minutes longer.

*If you can find canned shoestring cut beets it saves a lot of time and mess.
#The original recipe called for beef stock, which we don’t use in our house, but mushroom stock will serve just as well. Suit your family’s taste.

Spoon into bowls, and top with a dollop of sour cream or plain yogurt, and sprinkle with parsley. Theoretically, this serves 4.

When I took out our trash this afternoon, I discovered the sad, sad end to a long life.

This is a small community, so I was aware that one of our number had died, but it is jarring to see that family members have simply dumped a lifetime into the trash.

Being the waste not, want not type that I am, I pulled out two door hangings – a pretty little Valentine’s Day heart-shaped wreath and a pocket trimmed with lace and paper flowers. There was also a rolling pin that looks to have been from the 40s or 50s, possibly part of this lady’s hope chest. A pretty little towel, still in the wrapper, that read “Bless this Kitchen”.

I found a sweet little teapot, trimmed with grape vines, six Pyrex custard cups, a canning jar suitable for homemade jelly, and a hinged glass trinket box (which I propped open with a bit of silver card). Plus, a working surge protector.

I’m keeping two of the custard cups, but everything else will be packaged and taken up to a local thrift shop. There might be more treasures buried in there, but even I have my limits. Besides, it was getting dark.

Maybe I’ll look again after church tomorrow.

My faithful readers remember the battles we’ve had with Comcast over the land line. They claim we can’t have it because if we called 911, the emergency vehicles would come to the wrong place. Everything I’ve ever had occasion to call 911, they always ask for the address. Let’s face it, if the place is on fire, I can find the desk phone a lot more quickly than I can stumble around trying to find my cell phone. The really weird thing is that we can still make out-going calls and if you have a 679 exchange, you can still call us on the landline.

Back when Eldest Daughter brought her poppa a new Smart Phone, I was bullied into taking his old one. I still prefer to use my ancient flip phone for any number of reasons. For one, I can open it and use it. I don’t have to fiddle around unlocking it – it is always ready. But the new one has some really neat games, and Eldest Daughter added the Yuka app, which is wonderful. If you’ve never heard of this app, it allows you to scan the bar code of most foods and many cosmetics, and it will show you what’s good and bad about the product. If something has too much salt but is high in protein you can decide for yourself if you want to eat it. Some stuff – positioned as “healthy” – is anything but. OK, I never expected a candy bar to be good for me, but that energy bar I grabbed at the health food store ought to rate higher on the scale than it did.

So – back to my story. I lost the hand-me-down Smart Phone. I honestly lost it. I didn’t put it down someplace, walk off and leave it or drop it in the offering plate at church. I lost it. Didn’t bother me one bit, but both The Squire and Eldest Daughter were upset. She sent me a new phone. It is small and seems flimsy to me, and I like it even less. The Squire bought a case for it, which outweighs the phone by about six to one. It has a coin pocket, slots for cards – and a strap. I can’t carry my hairbrush or my little flashlight or . . . so I stick it in my purse.

Both The Squire and Eldest Daughter are really pressuring me to use a phone I simply do not like, and it bugs me no end.

Now, quite often the new phone won’t talk to The Squire’s phone, so I have to use my old flip-phone anyway. I can hear him talking, but he can’t hear me. If I have it on me, I just dig around and find it so I can call him back, but a few days ago we had a bit of a set-to. I had to run into a store for something simple which only took a few minutes. Normally, he parks the car where I can see him and waits for me to come back out. This time he couldn’t find a parking space so he was parked “out in left field” and I couldn’t find him. I pulled out my phone and dialed. We did the old “Hello, hello, can you hear me” routine. I tried again with the same results, so it was back to the flip phone. As far as I know, he ONLY has this problem when I call him, so he had to know it was me. And he had was -presumably – waiting to pick me up. If I’m calling and he’s waiting for me, why didn’t he just come get me?

To quote my oldest and dearest friend, I must love him. I didn’t kill him.

Borsi is fascinated with ice cubes, especially those in a glass, a fact which we sometimes forget, much to our dismay.

This evening The Squire and I were working a jigsaw puzzle when I heard a distinctive “thunk”. We had not put our half-empty drinking glasses in the dishwasher after supper, and Boris had decided to investigate. He’d pulled one glass over and was busily pawing that the second one when I pounced on him. Water all over the table and on the dining room rug.

Oh, joy.

The entire condo is carpeted with wall-to-wall beige pile. I don’t know whose idea this was – probably some man’s – but it is the devil’s own to keep clean. We took the Karastan out of one of the bedrooms and put it in the dining room here, but the amount of water Boris had dumped soaked through and got both the rug and the carpet wet.

We had to get out the carpet scrubber to draw as much water as possible out of rug and then had to lift the rug off the carpet and drape it over the table and two chairs.

OY!

Last Wednesday I drove up to Loysville, Pennsylvania to visit my Amish friend.

The parents take turns bringing lunch to the school. It was Linda’s turn, and she wanted me to bring up my bag of Colonial “stuff” to show the students. No problem – I’m always up for a chance to show off.

It started bucketing rain about halfway up. I found her road but could not find the house. I stopped at another house – one I recognized as being Amish – and asked two very nice young ladies if they knew where Linda lived. As it happened, they were members of the same congregation, so she was able to give me directions with no problem. (This area is House Amish, rather than Church Amish, and they had met in Linda’s home.)

Things went downhill from there.

When I got out of the car, I had slammed the door. When I ran back to the car, it was locked. With my purse, my phone, and my car keys inside. One of my hostesses, Laura, had a smart phone, and she googled Triple A for me, and between asking Laura and Roselynn where I was and explaining why I couldn’t give the agent my membership number, we got that straight. And then I had to wait about 45 minutes. The sisters were kind enough to let me use their phones to call The Squire and Linda to tell them what was going on, so that was a help.

Laura and Roselynn are sisters, and Roselynn had just had a baby boy on Sunday, so Laura had come over to lend a hand. We sat and talked about new babies, and life in general. Bless them, they fed me lunch; it was obvious that they had stretched a meal for two to feed me, too. I’ve never met two nicer, kinder people.

Once Triple A came, I went on my merry way. I went directly to the school. There were maybe twenty students, from first grade to seventh, and they were absolutely silent while the teacher was speaking. One class went up and gathered around her for a reading lesson, and the rest of the kids either eavesdropped or quietly did their own work. No passing notes, no chit-chat. After that, she announced the class would sing for me, and they all stood up and filed to the front of the room, got into two rows, and opened their books, all without a word being spoken. They sang three delightful hymns and then filed back to their seats. I did my “Colonial thing”, Linda passed out sandwiches for lunch, and then we collected her three younger children and left.

I had to use the “facilities” while we were at the school, and that was a bit of an adventure. There are two outhouses, one for the boys and another for the girls, each a two-seater. Because they are for schoolkids, they are VERY low. I thought I’d never make contact! This is made even worse by the fact that the condo has handicapped toilets, which are higher than normal, so I was expecting to “hit bottom” much sooner. As it was, I was beginning to feel as if I’d contact another bottom – one much less pleasant.

We stopped at a farm to buy milk and eggs, and on the way home one of her boys threw up in the back of my car! Linda asked me if I was ever coming back again after such a day. I told her that as long as I kept my cell phone in my pocket instead of my purse, I’d be fine.

Ah, my cell phone! When we got to Linda’s house, I couldn’t get any service. I figured we were so far out in the boonies there simply wasn’t service, but that didn’t make sense because Linda and the girls both had service. I kept trying all the way home, but no luck. Turned out I had gotten it wet in my dashing back and forth in the rain. It finally started working day before yesterday.

. . . Where no cat has gone before.

This morning, Boris leapt from my shoulder to the pie safe to the cornice. Our ceilings are nine feet tall.

Not really surprised that he did it, but that he didn’t curl up and take a nap.

On Saturday, The Squire and I went to the memorial service for one of the finest men we have ever know, my brother-in-law, George Stiegler.

Karl gave a wonderful eulogy for his stepdad, thanking him for all the material things he had given him – the chance to live in a nicer neighborhood, to go the private schools – first at Emanual Lutheran and then at Mt. St. Joe’s, and finally Penn State. But he also gave Karl a firm sense of being loved, and that his mum was loved as well. There was no more shouting, no more door slamming, no more hiding under the table. Even though George was about to be an empty nester, with both of his own children ready to fly on their own, when he married my sister, he accepted Karl as his own child, and that didn’t change even after he and my sister had Brian. Karl was never the “stepchild”; he was simply one of George’s children.

Of course, it wouldn’t be us – mostly me – if things went according to plan. In spite of Brian having sent us several emails outlining the plans for the day, including the fact that the burial would be a 9:00, with a private brunch to follow, and the memorial service in the afternoon, yours truly somehow got it into her head that the burial would be at noon. We actually arrived at the cemetery office at quarter to twelve and paced back and forth for a while. When the clock chimed 12:15 I asked the receptionist if she knew anything more than we did. Ah, yes, the burial had been at 9:00. She did not tell us that the brunch would be held there, so we dashed off to the church, expecting to be late for that, too.

As it turn out, the memorial service was at 1:00, not noon, so at least we were on time for that!

George had picked out his own hymns, which included the Navy Hymn, Eternal Father. This hymn was played at my dad’s funeral, and to this day I come completely unglued when I hear it. Fortunately, The Squire warned me, and I sat on the outside of the pew, so I could leave the service unobtrusively. I stood in the ladies’ room, sobbing into a hanky. Twenty-five years – you’d think I’d get over it.

After issuing Winter Storm Warnings that amounted to nothing for weeks, we finally got some snow. We woke up this morning to about three inches of the stuff. The condo crew is already out – it’s only a little after 6 AM – plowing the roads and using the blowers on the walks. Sleeping in isn’t an option, but Boris and I can always take a nap later.

The forecast is for more snow between 9 and 11, and then more snow later on this evening, so I suppose they’ll be back at it tomorrow.

I did take a cup of coffee out to the fellow who was doing the walkway in front of our building. One of our grandsons used to be a lineman for Baltimore Gas and Electric, so we have a soft spot for the guys and gals who have to work in this sort of weather. I always add cream and sugar; if you drink your coffee black you can still drink it doctored up, but if you take your coffee with cream and sugar, there’s no way you can tolerate it black.