Too Much Stuff?

This morning I opened my off-season closet, which also houses our vacuum cleaner and things destined for the Social Services League thrift shop, and spied seven summer shirts stored there last fall. (The white one isn't in the photo.)

I had remarked to Dennis earlier that my summer wardrobe seems spare. I've been wearing mostly t-shirts, but had wanted a loose button-up shirt. I had totally forgotten these shirts, but immediately embraced them as dear old friends and newer acquaintances. 

Now, I ask you, do I have too much stuff? Maybe so, but not as much stuff as many other people.

Last Sunday a recently-married young couple showed us around the country home they are building. The walk-in closet in their master bedroom is as large as my entire bedroom. As all four of us were standing in the closet he husband said, "She will have this filled up in no time."

How, I thought, could one person wear all the clothes that would fit in this closet? Would she wear something different every day of the year, maybe changing for dinner? Or does she keep every garment she has ever owned, creating a clothing museum of her life?

When one goes into an old farmhouse one often finds no bedroom closets, but a few hooks on the wall for clothing. The 1920s bungalow I grew up in had two bedrooms, each with a tiny closet two-and-a-half feet wide.

Now we have a surfeit of clothing. Our closets are stuffed with it. Thrift shops are jammed with it. Department stores are burgeoning with it. We send huge bales of it to poorer countries, where a Ugandan boy ends up wearing a K-State t-shirt.

Instead of investing in clothing we could be educating children, building and repairing bridges and providing a safe living environment for the mentally ill who are homeless. We could be doing these things and more if we had tiny closets or only a few hooks on our bedroom walls for clothing.

Goodbye To The Sleeping Elephant

A mountain just down the road from The Trading Post is known as Sleeping Elephant.

We waved goodbye to the Sleeping Elephant on Saturday morning as we headed to Fort Collins, then south to I-70 where we turned east toward home.

As soon as we turned east, with the Rocky Mountains in our rear-view mirror, I breathed a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong here; I had a happy week at The Trading Post with family and friends, but I'm a woman in love with the plains. The wide, wide sky and the undulating topography give me a sense of peace and belonging.

Kansas is infamously known as flat, flat, flat. That description is inaccurate. Kansas rolls up and down – gently at first, if you're facing east, and then dramatically through the sixty-mile wide Flinthills. These rolling hills are deceptive because as we travel east the elevation is continually falling. Our destination, Baldwin, is more than 4,000 feet lower than Denver and 7,000 feet lower than The Trading Post. The Kansas' landscape is rolling and tilted.

Mountains seem ominous to me, the prairie benign and peaceful. The prairie is an abstraction: black cattle grazing on green and tan grass, backed by a swath of blue; dark green crop circles formed because of irrigation.  It is a feast for my eyes, a simple meal, whereas the mountains are a giant smorgasbord, a surfeit.

I love Paradise, drought or not. It is in the transition zone between prairie and woodland. I love the creek, the thousands of trees, the prairie-like pasture with its wildflowers and grasses. It is the one place on earth where I feel balanced and whole, where I know myself.

Every person has a Paradise, I hope, either physical or imagined. It is the one place on earth where we feel most comfortable, where we find solace and inspiration, where we can be who we are. Paradise is worth hoping for, worth striving for, worth attaining. For some it will be on the prairie, for some the city, for some the small town, and for some at the foot of Sleeping Elephant. May each of us find our Paradise.

Colorado Reflections

Since coming to Colorado ten days ago I have been reading James Michener's Centennial. It's about the northeastern part of Colorado where the Platte River flows. I've been grateful to Michener for beginning the book in prehistory when diplodocus lived here, when the Ancestral Rockies rose out of the earth to thousands of feet and eroded to nothing through the millennia.

I found this perspective comforting. It made me realize that human beings are miniscule blip in time and that inhabitants of the earth, if any, will be vastly different from us. Many life forms have become extinct. We probably will join the ranks.

This summer I've felt that climate change is increasing exponentially and that we can't change it now. We might mitigate it a little. We might start preparing for the day when the oceans rise and wipe out coastal habitations. We might restrict our use of fossil fuels and pour effort into increasing renewable energy sources. We might do a lot of things, but we won't.

Here in Colorado forest fires have raged this summer and some are still smoldering. As it happens both of my Colorado destinations are partially burned – Colorado Springs and the Poudre River Valley. I've seen a lot of skeleton trees, scorched earth and foundations of burned houses. I saw the Poudre River run black after a rain.

These scenes have only reinforced what I've been living through – one of the worst summers in eastern Kansas history. We Americans have fouled not only our own nests but the nests of people all over the world. It saddens me greatly.

But here I am, breathing cool mountain air, enjoying the family gathering and enjoying walks along the river. Sorry, no photos until I get home. I'm at a wifi access cafe ten miles down the mountain. The connection is too slow to upload a photo. Wish I could show how beautiful it is. Wish you were here.

A Family Tradition

Family traditions begin almost by accident, at least ours did. Thirty-seven years ago Dennis recalled visiting the Rocky Mountains with a friend's family when he was 11 years old. They went to the Poudre Valley and stayed at The Trading Post, a collection of cabins beside the Cache de la Poudre River. He wanted to go back to try his hand at trout fishing, so we did.

The Trading Post Office and Store

We stayed in a rustic cabin. It was furnished with a bed, a table and two chairs, a sink with cold running water, a two-burner hot plate and a gigantic wood cook stove. Calls of nature took us to the outhouse. Dennis didn't catch many trout, as I recall, but we had a grand time.

Over the years we have returned many times. Friends and family members joined us there. Dennis became a proficient fly fisherman and taught others all the tricks. Now Oz and his sons Grant and Logan are proficient and catch many fish.  My brother Holmes, too, is a regular. Sometimes wives accompany the fishermen; sometimes we don't, but regular as clockwork, male members of our family congregate for fishing the Poudre the first week of August.

Most of us now stay in the Trading Post's modern cabins that have bathrooms and real kitchens. This year will be a banner year, with three wives, one daughter and one girlfriend in attendance in addition to the male fishermen.

I'm going up tomorrow. Some are already there. More are coming. No television, no radio, no internet for more than a week. It's our family tradition.

How To Be A Dinner Table Cut-Up with Fused Wrists

Having had both wrists fused last year I've gradually learned to accommodate the loss of wrist movement and learned new ways of doing things. The first time I tried to butter my breakfast toast, I was stymied. I had not realized that using a table knife required bending one's wrist.

After several frustrating dining experiences I began to experiment and discovered a new way of holding the knife.

Here's how I used to hold a knife. The only ways to use a knife in this position I would have to either stand up or raise my elbow to the level of my shoulder.

Here's the way I hold it now, the way I hold a pencil or pen. It works just fine and has become second nature to me.

Now I can use a knife at the table without making a spectacle of myself.

In The Land of Double Rainbows

I couldn't take the Kansas heat and drought any more. I fled to Colorado to stay with Nancy and her family. Every day there's been a thunderstorm. One day there were three. This double rainbow appeared after yesterday's storm. I took the photo standing in Nancy's front yard facing the Colorado College campus.

Only now do I realize how stressful the prolonged heat and drought have been. Back home no one has much appetite and they're not sleeping well. It's a wonder they are keeping their sanity. They are tougher than I am, that's for sure. I hope the rain reaches them soon.

Pie Crust 101

Grant called the other day and asked, "Grandma, have you posted your pie crust recipe?" Well, no, I haven't, although I've posted a lot of photos of pies. A flaky, tender pie crust depends not only on ingredients but also on technique, which is hard to describe.

Let's start with ingredients. Pie crust has four ingredients: flour, salt, fat and a liquid. I use unbleached flour, preferable Hudson Cream, which is milled in Kansas. For the fat I urge everyone to use an expeller-expressed vegetable oil instead of solid vegetable fat or butter, neither of which is good for one's arteries. I've always used the "Stir and Roll" pie crust recipe from this old book. It calls for milk as the liquid. Maybe water would work as well, but I've never tried it.

Stir and Roll Pie Crust
for an 8" or 9" pie

2 cups unbleached flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup oil

1/4 cup milk

Whisk flour and salt together. Pour oil into a liquid measuring cup and add a little more than ¼ cup milk to it. Do not stir the oil and milk. Pour the oil and milk all at once into the flour. Mix with a fork to moisten all the flour. Form dough into a ball and divide it in half. Keep skin contact with the dough to the barest minimum, as the heat from your hands will warm the oil and make the crust tough.

Roll out half the dough between two sheets waxed paper into a circle larger than the pie pan diameter, keeping outer edges as even as you can. Peel off the top paper and, holding the bottom paper by the bottom edge, invert the crust over pie plate. Peel off the remaining paper and adjust edges to remove any trapped air. Roll out top crust. Remove top paper and, with a sharp knife cut a slit in the middle of the crust. Set this aside.

Add fruit filling to bottom crust and dot with butter. Moisten the rim of the bottom crust with cold water and invert the top crust onto the pie. Lightly press the top and bottom rims together. Trim overhanging edges. Flute the crust edges. Sprinkle with a little sugar for sparkle.

Bake at 400º until filling begins to bubble in the center of the pie. The amount of time depends on the temperature of the fruit and other factors, but count on a minimum of 25 minutes. If the crust begins to brown too much, reduce the oven heat to 375º and continue baking until the filling bubbles.

Additional tips:

Fluff up the flour before putting it in the measuring cup. Always measure flour in a dry measure and level it off with the edge of a knife.

Some folks don't know the difference between a dry measure and a wet measure. The dry measure is on the left. The wet measure is on the right. Colorado peaches are in the background. They make great pie.

The amount of milk needed to bind the dough together varies with the amount of moisture in the flour. In a dry climate or air conditioned building, more milk is needed. In a damp climate the 1/4 cup called for in the recipe will be sufficient. After mixing the dough if you find it difficult to gather into a ball, add a little more milk and mix lightly again.


Mix and handle the dough as little as possible. Recently my nephew made a pie for a family gathering. "I used your recipe, Aunt Shirley," he said, "but I mixed it in the food processor instead of stirring it." Oh, boy, was that crust tough! The crust will be tough even if you just stir the oil and milk together before adding them to the flour.


After inverting the crust onto the pie pan slowly peel off the waxed paper. Start at one corner of the paper and be patient as you loosen the dough. If this proves too difficult, dust the bottom paper with a little flour before you roll out the crust.

Keep practicing until you get the hang of it. Even your mistakes will be edible, maybe even delicious.