Welcome, March Wind

At last they’ve come, the howling winds of March. Hang on to your car door or it will slam into the adjacent car. Forget keeping your hair from blowing into a new arrangement. Tie on your hat if you don’t want to go running across the parking lot to retrieve it before it blows into traffic. Put off planting lettuce seeds until the gale dies down. Hang laundry out to dry if you don’t mind a wet sheet wrapping around your head while you underwear takes off for the neighbor’s cornfield. In short, batten down the hatches and wait it out.

We’re caught in the vortex between cold air approaching from the northwest and warm air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. We’re excited because these conditions are ripe to bring us desperately needed rain. It's so dry a handful of garden soil sifts through our fingers like salt from a shaker. Our gravel road’s dust coats our cars inside and out. Fifty pounds of grass seed are scattered over the yard and they need a good drink of water from the sky. The only good thing is that the hens don't get their eggs dirty by stepping on them with muddy feet.

Bring it on, March Wind, bring us the water we long for.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

Grieving for Galveston

I’m grieving today for poor old Galveston Island, beset by yet another major oil spill. This time a barge carrying almost one million gallons of marine fuel oil collided with another ship. Approximately 168,000 gallons of this thick oil leaked into the Houston ship channel near Texas City. The ship channel passes between the east tip of Galveston Island and Bolivar into Galveston Bay and on to Houston.

Galveston Island once was a major port and point of arrival to emigrants from Europe, but after two major hurricanes had devastated the island and port at the beginning of the 20^th Century, the ship channel was dug to Houston, which then took Galveston’s place as a point of arrival for goods and people. Now the port of Galveston is primarily used for enormous cruise ships to board and disembark passengers.

Beyond its port Galveston Island was a salt-grass covered island, home to rattlesnakes and myriads of birds. Much of the island was devoted to cattle ranching, the cattle feeding on salt grass, accompanied by cattle egrets. A few primitive fishing shacks went up along the bay and on the gulf side. But even as Houston replaced Galveston as a major southern port, the cattle ranches were slowly, inexorably replaced by vacation homes on stilts,

Gradually these vacation homes have grown to mansions and high-rise condominiums have risen on the west end of the island. Canals dug into the island made it possible to build hundreds of vacation homes with access to the bay, as well. Today only tiny remnants of the cattle ranches remain.

Galveston’s greatest attraction was its beautiful beaches that stretch from the city of Galveston to the island’s tip. Millions of seashells, water birds, crabs, and other life forms gave the beach vitality and contributed to its beauty.

First hurricane Katrina, then the Deepwater Horizon oil well spill devastated the marine life of Galveston. Beaches once covered with seashells now are almost bare. The crabs have vanished. Only some of the birds remain. Now this marine oil spill will take its toll. It is another nail in the coffin of Galveston Island, a place I have loved.

I’ve know for a long time that we humans would spoil everything we touch, but I never expected to live long enough to see it happening. Now we read of oil spills and toxic waste contamination of waterways nearly every day. Will we never learn?

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

Hurrah for Saturday, Baking Day

Saturday is the traditional homemaker’s baking day, the day she baked loaves of bread and cookies or a cake or pie for Sunday. Baking is my favorite activity, so I love the Saturday chores. Actually, I bake several times a week. Sometimes I bake biscuits for breakfast or corn bread for supper. Whatever day we finish a loaf of bread is the day I bake another one.

Dennis once said that in retirement every day is Saturday, and that certainly holds true for me when it comes to baking. Today, which happens to be Saturday, he requested zucchini-carrot bars, a kind of cross between carrot cake and bar cookies and I was happy to oblige. He made a special trip to town to buy a zucchini and a package of cream cheese for the frosting. As desserts go, this is about as nutritious as they come; it has 3 ½ cups of shredded carrots and zucchini along with English walnuts.

It seemed an appropriate way to celebrate Saturday, baking day. I would include a photo but guests came by and the bars are more than half gone already. I won’t be able to wait until next Saturday to make another dessert.

Someone asked me what day was cooking day for the traditional homemaker. Cooking day was every day, three meals a day – breakfast, dinner, and supper. And where did all the other chores such as canning tomatoes or spring cleaning fit into the week? They doubled up with other chores.

The traditional homemaker did not have an easy life. She didn’t have time to read magazines or visit the beauty salon. She worked hard every day, including Sunday, which was supposedly the day of rest. On Sunday, when others might be resting, she put a beef roast in the oven, went to church and Sunday school, and then came home to finish preparing the big Sunday dinner and to clean up the kitchen after serving the meal. If she was lucky she might get to take a short afternoon nap.

I don’t envy the traditional homemaker, but I certainly respect her. In fact, I stand in awe of her strength and fortitude. She was a better woman than I will ever be.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

Friday, Cleaning Day

Friday is the homemaker’s traditional day to clean the house in preparation for the weekend. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed house cleaning. I would rather make messes.

When I was in kindergarten I asked my teacher if I could wash the doll clothes. With her permission I made a pan of sudsy water, washed the clothes, hung them up to dry, and walked away. When she asked me who would clean up the mess I had made, I said, “Some boy will do it.” Apparently I was a feminist from the get-go, and had the idea that males of our species were supposed to do the dirty work.

When I first became a homemaker I fantasized about having a house in which all the furniture was suspended from the ceiling and the floors were made of tile with a floor drain in every room. My idea was to simply hose everything down and go outside until it dried.

Luckily, times have changed and many men participate in house cleaning. The old-time housewife would be amazed, I’m sure.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

It's Thursday – Shop

The traditional Thursday in a homemaker’s week was focused on shopping. That doesn’t mean she was going to roam around the mall looking for something cute or sophisticated to wear, but that she was out purchasing the necessities for her household – basic food supplies from the grocery store, some nails from the hardware store, or a length of dress material from the dry goods store.

I heartily endorse her kind of shopping and, in fact, I practice that myself. I visit grocery stores, the hardware store, the feed store, and the drug store. Occasionally I hit the office supply store or the modern equivalent of a dry goods store.

A dry goods store, as opposed to a hardware store or a grocery store, sold soft things and shoes. Soft things included clothing, linens, towels, and fabric, as I remember. Today fabric has split off into separate fabric stores, but department stores have taken over everything else, with the addition of cosmetics, jewelry, luggage, dishes, pots and pans, and a myriad of other things.

The only shopping I truly enjoy is at a grocery store and I do it, not necessarily on Thursday, but on any day of the week when I happen to be in town or when I make a special trip because I need to re-stock supplies. I mostly shop the perimeter and the baking aisle somewhere near the center of any grocery store. I don't buy the processed foods that didn't even exist in the traditional homemaker's day. I don’t carry a shopping basket like the traditional homemaker, but I do take two or three fabric bags with me when I shop. At the bottom line there’s not a lot of difference between me and the traditional homemaker, except that my life it a lot easier than hers.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

Wednesday, Time to Sew

It’s Wednesday. It’s time to get out the sewing basket. There’s a stack of mending waiting by the rocking chair – holes in socks to be darned, cuffs of pants to be tacked back in place, buttons to be sewn back on shirts and blouses, loose hems to be whipped down, and, if my grandmother Alice is doing the mending, as she often did, the cuffs of my shorts to be let down. She didn’t approve of young girls showing their legs and did everything she could to lengthen my shorts.

Interesting isn’t it, how the difficulty of the labor tapers off as midweek arrives? Doing the wash on Monday is hard labor and Tuesday ironing requires standing all day in one place, but Wednesday the homemaker gets to sit a spell. If the mending doesn’t take too long she may have time to work on the afghan she is crocheting before starting supper.

My 2014 Wednesday is sewing day, too, although I seldom have mending to do. I’ve given up darning the holes in socks and relegated them to the rag box. Modern washers don’t pop buttons off like the old wringer washers did, so I seldom have a button to sew on. Making my own clothes is a thing of the past. I sometimes do minor alterations, such as shortening Dennis’s pants that were too long, but mostly I sew for pleasure.

Today I’m making Alison’s potholders. I’m making them of faux chenille, using the slash cutting method. First I stacked four layers of 7” fabric squares on top of a batting square and, at the bottom, another fabric square. Next I sewed channels diagonally on each stack, 3/8” apart.

Then I cut down the center of each channel of the top three fabric squares. Because the channels run on the bias of the fabric the cut fabric will curl up without fraying. Already the hint of chenille appears, but they will not achieve their full look until the potholders have been washed and dried.

The only task left is binding the potholder edges. I’ll cut the binding from the sleeve of the old shirt I used to make the potholder squares.

That’s enough about Wednesday, Sewing Day. I have to get to work on the binding.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer

Tuesday: Ironing Day

Yesterday, Monday, we did the wash. We sorted the line-dried clothes, put away the things that don’t need to be ironed, re-made the beds with sweet-smelling sheets, and set aside the things we would iron today.

Now that breakfast is over and Dad has gone to the fields, we wash and dry the breakfast dishes, separately wash and scald the many parts of the cream separator, fill a bottle with water for sprinkling the ironing, and put a sprinkler stopper in the bottle.

My job was to take the pieces to be ironed from the bushel basket, lay them on the Formica kitchen table, sprinkle them with water, and roll them up. As I sprinkle the handkerchiefs I place them in a pile and, when all are sprinkled, roll them into a cylinder. Starched shirt collars and cuffs get a liberal sprinkling, as do the hems of pillowcases. All of the pieces are heaped on the kitchen table and covered with a dry tea towel.

Now there’s time to make the beds, bring up the ironing board from its perch on the basement landing, and plug in the electric iron, a wonderful advance for the homemaker.

I, being a mere child, am not allowed to iron complicated things such as white shirts, work clothes, or women’s dresses. That is the province of my mother and grandmother, but when it’s time to iron the flat stuff – table cloths Ugh!), pillowcases, and handkerchiefs, I take over. I turn on the radio and tune in to a Kansas City Blues baseball game and iron away, imagining home-run balls flying over the fence.

Copyright 2014 by Shirley Domer