Pie for One

Next week is Thanksgiving. I won't be making pie, but some of you might. While you're at it, you might as well make some of these:

Pies in a Jar.

Aren't they adorable? And you can freeze them and give them as gifts. I think they look scrumptious. If you like pie. Plus, did you notice the free labels? There. The work is already done. Oh, except MAKING the pie. Yeah, that's a biggie.

Small Town Traditions

Small towns have traditions. In Mapleton, Utah where we moved from, the fire trucks would circle around town at 6:30 a.m on July 24th with their sirens screeching. It was to wake everybody up for the Pioneer Day celebrations.

Here in Lander, Wyoming, they set off cannons at 6:00 AM! to commemorate Veterans Day.

Oh, how I love small towns.

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I grew up in a small town: Preston, Idaho to be exact. Yes, home of Napoleon Dynamite. Only I lived outside of town. I was a country kid. See, in our small town there were city kids and country kids. You were a city kid if you lived in town. Our town had fewer than 5000 people. Hardly a city, but still we made that distinction.

We probably made it because we felt different. Our families were mostly farmers. We got up early, had chores, and listened to the commodities report on the radio. We went to church and high school basketball games. We never ate out. The most we could hope for was a stop at the gas station--the Will-0-way--where my Dad would buy a Mars bar and cut into seven equal pieces when we got home. About once a year, we'd get shakes at the Arctic Circle.

The city kids were different. Their Dads were bankers or salesmen or supervisors at factories. The city kids slept in on Saturdays, played golf, and shopped for school clothes in Salt Lake City. Their families owned their own VCRs. They ate chinese food and seafood and knew what they were going to be when they grew up.

We, too, had a small town tradition: Rodeo weekend. Rodeo weekend was big. A parade every night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday followed by the rodeo. There was a carnival, too. You could see into the rodeo arena from the ferris wheel and you could hear the carnival noise from the rodeo stands. The rodeo grounds smelled like hamburgers, cigarette smoke, and cotton candy. I was a country kid, not a cowboy, so the rodeo was thrilling to me. I loved rodeo weekend. Even now, the thought of it fills me with memories and nostalgia.

Lying in bed, at 6 a.m. with cannons going off every 20 seconds, I thought how a rodeo and a parade and a carnival are really the perfect small-town tradition.

Mostly because nobody wakes you up.

Party Line

My daughter, age 9, warned me that she might want a cell phone. Not yet, but sometime. Perhaps in a year or two. She just wanted me to be forewarned.

How nice.

I did what any reasonable parent would do. I told her about the “olden days.” I’m 35 and yes, according to a 9 year old, even I lived in the olden days. Here’s proof:

Up until I was five years old, I lived in town. Town was laid out in blocks. It had neighbors and modern conveniences. When I was five we moved to the farm. The farm was exactly 8 miles from the only stoplight in town. The closest neighbors were a mile away. We had a party line.

A party line, I explained to my daughter, was when the whole rural road we lived along all shared the same phone line. We all had our own phones in our houses, but they were all connected to one, singular line. Only one of us could be on the phone at once. Someone miles down the road might be using the phone when you picked it up and you’d have to wait until they were done talking. And yes, you could listen in on other people’s conversations.

My mother taught us that this was very, very rude. She never did it. If someone was on the line, she’d hang up so quick it was like she’d dropped the phone. My mother was patient and polite. But there were occasions when she’d need to actually use our party line.

Every party line had one: an Odessa. Odessa was a neighbor who lived 3 or 4 miles closer to town than we did. She probably wasn’t that old at the time, but as a child, I thought she was old. She was a heavy woman and she was LOUD. So loud, that all you had to do was lift the phone from its cradle at arm’s length. If she was on the phone, you knew it.

Odessa was ALWAYS on the phone.

She also always knew everybody else’s business. (There was speculation in our house that she “listened in” on the party line).

I remember only three occasions when my polite, patient mother quietly asked Odessa if she could get off the phone because my mother desperately needed to make a call. Most of the time, my mother just waited, checking the line every hour or so until she heard a dial tone instead of one of the neighbor’s voices.

It’s hard to believe that it was well into the 1980’s before we got our own phone line. Now, that . . . that day was a party.

Let it WHAT?

Isn't he cute?

Yep. That's the white stuff. And it's a flying.

My kids got to use their snowman kit (I'll have to post about these later). They were so excited. I think it will melt. I don't think winter is here yet. But then again, I've been wrong before.

The DMV

As a new Wyoming resident, I went to get a Wyoming driver's license. The routine is a fairly simple one, until January. (It gets more complicated in January). Now, though, in 2009, you only have to present an old license, pay $20, and take an eye exam.

I hate eye exams. An eye exam was the first test I ever failed. It was 2nd grade and I had to get glasses. I've had glasses ever since. Year after year, I fail eye exams and my prescription gets stronger and stronger. You can't study for an eye exam, you know.

At the DMV I looked into a machine. There were tiny little numbers in there. Teeny tiny ones. I could make out the first and last and took a guess that they went in order.

"6 7 8 9 10," I said.

I passed.

More little numbers.

Was I really supposed to be able to see these? I guessed. Half wrong, half right.

More little numbers.

"I can't read those," I admitted.

Maybe I can hire someone to drive me around, I thought.

The screen clicked. The numbers got bigger. I passed.

I drove home, passing speed limits signs with great big, bold, black numbers on them.

Sheets

I used to be in a writing group with Lynne. One day she was reading a piece about clean sheets and how good they smell when they've been dried outside, on a clothesline.

"Wait," I said. "Is that how they get that smell?"

I'd been wondering why, all these years, my sheets never smelled fresh and new after a washing like they did when I was a child. It was one of those fleeting mysteries of childhood; a moment I tried to re-create every time I washed my sheets, but it always fell flat. Somehow, my sheets never smelled the same as I remembered. I used the same laundry detergent my mother did. I used the same dryer sheets. Still nothing.

I dry my sheets in a dryer. I dry all my laundry in a dryer. Hanging clothes on the line was one of my most dreaded chores. I didn't mind taking the clothes off the line so much, because it went much quicker. But hanging them up? No thank you. I served an LDS mission to The Netherlands. No dryers. We hung our clothes on racks in our apartments. When they dried, my clothes were hard and stiff. I couldn't wait to use a dryer again. I love when my clothes come out of the dryer, soft and still warm.

But I'd give anything for my sheets to smell like they did when my mother washed them.

We've moved to Wyoming.

It is different here.

The houses are older. There are mature trees. We have a clothesline in our backyard.

After I washed our sheets, I hung them out there to dry. The clothespins were cracked and sun-bleached. The air moved like a whisper around me, barely a breeze. I pinned some of the worries I've carried for a long time up there with those sheets. I didn't take them down again.

When I slept that night my bed smelled like earth and sunshine. I breathed deep and felt almost young again.

Butter 2

Another essay on butter I wrote at the BYU WIFYR Conference:

My grandpa spread butter on his waffle slowly and carefully, so that it sank into every hole. He topped it with thick maple syrup, pouring slowly row by row, filling the indentations with sweet stickiness.

 High cholesterol runs in our family. We shouldn’t butter our bread or fill the holes in our waffles with golden pools of butter, but Grandpa did. When my mother expressed worry over this unhealthy indulgence, Grandpa scoffed. Butter was natural. Pure. Better watch out for those other, fabricated foods; things that could not be tied to the earth. Those who live off the land understand these things. Besides, he’d say, he’d probably outlive most. He has.

 

My mother asked him, when she was dying, if he would help carry her casket. He nodded. I saw tears pooling, like melted butter, in the corners of his eyes. Mom patted his hand—my father’s father.

            “It’s not right,” he said, shaking his head.

            He couldn’t finish, so my mother finished for him, “No, it’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Nope. Parents are not supposed to bury their children,” he said. He stood up. I knew he’d go outside to the farmland where he felt most at home. I knew he’d go to be alone. He’d walk past the barn, the machine shed, the haystacks. He’d open the gate, leave the fenced yard, and walk through the wheat field where the stalks were tall and golden, and waved like a sea of shiny butter.