Just behind my desk, a wicker table holds three hat-boxes: One is floral, another has a repeating Tuscan scene and the third is transparent, the contents held taut by pale blue gossamer fabric. All are chock full of memorabilia from days gone by. All three, a type of journal-in-the-making.
Depending on your style, your journal may be traditional with words and lists. Maybe you even paint or use colored pencils to amuse yourself or record an image. If you are tech savvy, you may have a photo journal, an audio or video journal. Maybe you are even into scrap-booking.
A hat-box is a type of scrapbook, really, a place to keep ticket stubs, magazine and newspaper clippings, programs, and fliers. You don’t actually have to write anything, unless you are into marginal notes, underlining and highlighting like me.
A few weeks ago, I opened one of my hat-boxes and found an article on the sexuality of corn that I may use on a blog post next spring. A page of a man’s outfit I thought natty also surfaced along with an article about videotaping I must have liked back in the May 7, 2007 issue of Newsweek.
I like the irony of a Mennonite girl keeping clippings in a hat-box, hats forbidden in my teen years when fancy hats were then popular. But just like my youth, hat-boxes don’t contain the end of my story but seed kernels of what is yet to be.
Do you have a container, odd or simply utilitarian, for memorable “stuff”?
What does it look like? What do you keep inside? Inquiring minds want to know . . . .
According to The Huffington Post, the median home price in the United States (2014) is $ 188,900.00. Even adjusted for inflation over the years, housing prices have increased enormously since the 1940s.
My parents were married in 1940. Until they bought their first home in 1941, they lived for a few months with my father’s parents, Henry and Fanny Longenecker, and then with a relative, “Uncle” Elmer Longenecker in the village of Rheems, Pennsylvania. The newlyweds’ first home of about 1240 square feet cost $ 5000.00.
Just as astonishing as the price of the house was the bill for their home furnishings from Eberly Furniture Store just above Elizabethtown. They outfitted this home for $ 425.00 including a dining room and bedroom suites with a mattress and box springs, a kitchen table, rugs and two utility cabinets.
Please note that table pads for the dining room and a third, smaller rug were apparently thrown in as a bonus. Milton was a happy man the day Ray and Ruth Longenecker walked through the door of his store. And the feeling was mutual. My Mother’s comment on the receipt says it all: “We bought this all at one time, but not these days. Isn’t this something.”
The Art Deco bedroom suite has been replaced with something more contemporary but not nearly as beautiful to my taste. What is left of the original purchase: the kitchen table and chairs and the Duncan Phyfe dining room suite.
Isn’t that something?
The “Moments of Discovery” series is Part One of a continuing series that will unfold as we sort through the contents of the house on Anchor Road. It joins other series on this blog: Purple Passages, Moments of Extreme Emotion, and 10 Tips/Secrets.
How do you furnish a house – traditional, contemporary, eclectic?
Are family dinners important? What about empty nesters? Families of one? Do family dinners protect against the effects of teen drug use and cyberbullying? Writer Melodie Miller Davis in her recent blog post “How do you keep family dinner?” got me thinking about recent research on the topic.
In her post, she refers to Columbia Casa Family Day, a national initiative to remind parents that they have the “power to help keep their kids substance free.” Cornell University researchers also have discovered that shared meals may help prevent eating disorders. An article in Time asserts that teens benefit from interaction with their families and find security in the shared, predictable ritual of family mealtime possibly preventing early drug use and the effects of cyber-bullying. However, there is also research that claims such effects are overstated or not verifiable.
Whatever the case may be, the faster the pace of our lives and the more insane world events become, the more I long for the sweet spaces of serenity that sharing family meals can provide.
The Longeneckers and the Metzlers, two strands of my family line were oblivious of any such research but carried on the ritual of family meal time together. Here is a post from the Metzler gatherings, often picnic style.
Family dinners can be very large as seen here in Grandma and Aunt Ruthie’s house with twenty, mostly Bossler Mennonite Church friends, gathered around their huge dining table.
Whether large or small, indoors or out, dinners require preparation. My sister Jean and her family provide some of the “raw material” from a shared meal at Mother’s house.
Years ago if we didn’t visit Pennsylvania, I shared holiday meal making with my sister Janice, who lives just 2 ½ miles from us.
There’s a joker in every crowd – even in family!
And then the over-flow table with the kids . . .
After awhile, our children began entertaining us, first in Chicago where all four worked, earned graduate degrees and started a family.
Then when they moved to Florida, two years apart, their meal making continued with Fourth of July at Joel’s house . . .
. . . and Thanksgiving at Crista’s house in her bright sun room.
Any excuse for a party! Besides birthdays, Fourth of July can be a cause for celebration too.
One of us, who loved everything about entertaining from meal preparation to talking and eating around the table, will be missing this holiday season and every meal in between, our Mother Ruth Longenecker, hostess extraordinaire.
Mother slicing pig stomach with baked corn casserole and a stick of butter close by
How have family dinners marked your family history?
Coming next: # 1 in a series “Moments of Discovery”
Did Granny or Mom make clothes out of feed-sacks? Did you wear outfits with rickrack or smocking? Blog friend/author S. K. Nicholls reminisces in this recent post.
My grandmother never bought her clothes. She made most everything she wore. Sometimes her sister in Montgomery, Alabama, would send her store bought dresses. That was a time when the sewing machine (and the piano) was the most prized piece of furniture in the house.
She baked her own bread, biscuits, cornbread, hoecakes, white bread, and pancakes. The flour and meal came in big fifty pound fabric bags. The feed sacks and flour sacks came in pretty floral prints and stripes, bright calicoes and solids.
She would wash and dry the fabric and lay it out on the dining table, pin a pattern in place, trace it and cut it out. We would have to stand for what seemed like hours while she pinned the hems. She made all of our clothes that way. We literally wore flour sacks to school.
Diners at the Bâtard, an upscale restaurant in Tribeca, NYC can enjoy a dessert dish called milk bread, “A Christmastime treat from Germany,” says the September 1, 2014 issue of the New Yorker. The article goes on to describe this milk bread as having crème-brûlée crackles with innards like French toast or the texture of iced donuts.
My German-Swiss Grandma Longenecker’s milk bread was much simpler. In fact there were only two ingredients: Milk and toast, probably with a little butter. Picture a bowl of warm milk and pieces of toast snippled up making a kind of stew. And she called it milk toast, not milk bread, serving it as a balm for belly aches or whatever else ailed us.
Another milky treat Mother served in the winter-time before school: Hershey’s hot cocoa with buttered toast for dipping. Yes, we dipped the toast in cocoa, inhaled the chocolate fragrance as the warming lump slipped slowly down our throats. Reinforcement for the cold walk to the bus-top. Uh-um, good!
Do you have any milk with bread images in your memory bank? Any other cool weather warm-up recipes to share?
Coming next: 10 Things Our Family Did/Didn’t Do on Sunday
Produced by Babyhood Industries of Shrewsbury, MA, the Wonda Chair was “a do-it-all, all-in-one, convertible wonder. As the seller mentions, the multi-piece furniture/stroller kit mixes and matches to create the following: Hi-chair, youth chair, chair and table, dressing table, desk set, rocking chair, stroller, baby carriage, basinette, and cradle.”
As expectant parents, we fell prey to this marvel and sunk hundreds of dollars into this magnificent wonder, the Wonda Chair. We used it mostly as a high chair and stroller for our children. Later, Crista and Joel pushed each other around on the sidewalk with the stroller base. Here they are improvising their own version of a horse and buggy with a dog and Wonda Chair carriage wheels.
Recently, we have been going through Mother’s things in her attic and came upon this 19th century marvel—a high chair that converts into a baby carriage—hand-made and still serviceable.
Mother was the first daughter in the family after four brothers, so she is the fifth in her family to use the chair. It is vintage, however, and probably handed down to the family from the previous generation, frugal Mennonites who valued quality and heritage.
Mother in the Metzler high chair, 1918
Two wonderful chairs – the Wonda Chair and the heirloom . . .
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Your turn: Take your pick – The Wonda Chair or the Vintage chair?
Or tell your tale of special pieces handed down in your family.
I have had many moments of extreme emotion. Some you may know about like flunking my driver’s test, an explosion in the curio cabinet, and a broken piano leg — and some you may not.
According to my journal, this particular moment lasted almost an hour and happened in Positano, Italy, a terraced town poised on a peninsula along the Amalfi coast by a vertiginous slope to the sea.
Quaint Positano rises up, up, up to houses crouched in cozy rows and leans down, down, down to the snug little village below. We leave the charming hotel, Villa Rosa, to spy out the sights and shopping. Positano itself is dripping with bellissimo scenes: lemons the size of grapefruit, grapes a million, shiny red peppers, elegant shoppes, delikatessens. Cliff wants to check out the sights first and I prefer the shopping, so we decide to meet at a certain time and place “under the bougainvillea” before we go our separate ways for awhile.
Now a host of pergolas of bougainvillea adorn the village, each pergola with blooms that cascade like crimson waterfalls. Of course, I think he must mean the one on the way down the steep street leading into the village.
Upper bougainvillea – where I thought we’d meet
In one of the shops, plates of lemon yellow and Mediterranean blue catch my eye with painting on the back “dipinto a mano per alimenti Positano” – hand-painted dish. They come bubble-wrapped so I can snuggle them against breakage between layers of clothing in my suitcase, I think. I can’t decide between the blue and the yellow, so I get two of each, complementary.
Soon it’s noon, the time we agree to meet before lunch. So I meander back up to the brilliant bougainvillea to people-watch and wait for my prince. I wait and wait and wait. No Cliff in sight! That’s just like him – losing track of time when he’s snapping photos. The minutes pass and I’m starting to get mad. The temperature on my “mad” gauge rises even higher as the sun beats down furiously on my head. Why didn’t I wear a straw hat and then I think “Where is that man?”
Mad turns slowly to sad as I realize he must have fallen over from heat exhaustion and now is lying at the foot of the Duomo, his camera case splayed out beside his prostrate body. Oh, my goodness, do they have ambulances in such a small town? I haven’t heard sirens here unlike Rome where horns hee-haw all hours like electronic donkeys. Finally, I convince myself Cliff’s not dead and probably still wandering around. My emotions cycle between mad and sad a few more times until I see a tall, blond man approaching me looking very mad himself, certainly not glad to see me again.
C. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you by the bougainvillea for almost an hour now!
M. “Well, I could ask the same thing. I have been waiting ages under this pergola for you. I thought you might have keeled over from the heat. Where in the world were you?”
C. “Don’t you remember? The last thing we talked about was the bougainvillea by the Duomo, so I thought that was the place we were supposed to meet!”
Where Cliff thought we’d meet – by the Duomo
We rehearse the scenario far too long and try to resolve the mix-up by arguing our own points of view, an exercise in futility. What we do agree on finally is a cool place for lunch which for us is a tomato-drenched pasta (larvae-shaped noodles) entré and an omelet. I exchange a pile of eggplant “aubergine” for an “ensalada mista,” garden salad.
Bellissimo!
I’ll bet you have a story similar to this one but with a different setting or a comment about this one.
A tortoise had become friendly with two geese who promised to take it to their home in the mountains. The plan: The geese would hold a stick in their beaks while the tortoise would grasp it in the middle with his mouth, but he must be careful not to talk. During the journey, villagers below made fun of the tortoise. When it answered back, it fell to its destruction.
You guessed the moral: Talking at the wrong time can lead to fatal consequences!
Quick Quiz
1. Are you the first to air your knowledge when your favorite topic comes up?
2. Do you interject your opinion before anyone else has a chance to speak?
3. Do you tune out what others are saying because you are busy thinking of a comment?
I’m just guessing here, but you were probably the 3rd grader whose hand was the first to shoot up when your teacher asked a question. And I must say I am guilty as charged. Just see the Cliff and Marian misunderstanding below.
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Hearing and listening are not the same thing. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention, says Seth Horowitz in a New York Times piece.
The Harvard Business Review blog reveals that one in four corporate leaders have a listening deficit. No surprise there! In the business world, failure to listen can muddle the lines of communication, “sink careers, and if it’s the CEO with the deficit, derail the company.” In our personal lives, muddle and mayhem can result.
Good advice for better listening? First of all, slow down. While listening seems like such a passive thing to do, it is essential for understanding. Secondly, consider the source. “Try to understand each person’s frame of reference—where they are coming from.” Disagreements can often be averted with skilled listening.
Studies show that thoughts move about four times as fast as speech. No wonder it’s so hard to slow down and actually listen.
Here is the beginning of a list of tips for good listening:
1. Give full attention to whoever is speaking.
2. Don’t interrupt. Let the other person finish before you begin speaking.
3. Listen with your face as well as your ears. It’s appropriate to smile, frown, laugh, be silent at times when you are in conversation.
A Cliff and Marian Misunderstanding
Sometimes listeners with a lot of practice get muddled up. Here is a “He said / She said” from our own experience:
Marian: Let’s eat out today.
Cliff: Wonderful idea. (Time passes – Cliff leaves and comes home about dinner time noticing I’m in the middle of meal preparation.)
Cliff: I thought we were eating out this evening. Why, I had some ideas about where we would go.
Marian: For goodness sake, I was thinking that it would be nice to eat outside on the patio because it’s so cool.
Cliff: But I thought you meant we were eating out, like in a restaurant!
God help me!
Listening in the Longenecker Family 1950s
Living in the Longenecker family in the 1950s, we children were taught to listen, pay attention. In a parent-centered household, we listened to directions about chores, instructions about what to do and what not to do. To balance things out though, we also listened to Daddy singing as he played the guitar or the piano, or to Mother singing off-key in the kitchen. “I’ll be somewhere, listening, I’ll be somewhere listening, I’ll be somewhere listening for my na-aa-mm-e . . .
Please add your own tip, an observation, or an anecdote about listening or the lack thereof.
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
– Langston Hughes in Dreams
Dreams always come in a size too big so we can grow into them. – Josie Bisset
. . . if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
– Henry David Thoreau in Walden Pond
Grandparents
“But grandparents, imbued with a different sense of time, create a narrative arc across generations. If parents are the forward momentum of a child’s llife, we become the curators of traditions.” – Ellen Goodman/Washington Post Writers Group quoted in the Florida Times Union.
“Our echoes roll from soul to soul and grow forever and forever.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls from The Princess
Psalm 78: 2-4
2 I will open my mouth with a parable;
I will utter hidden things, things from of old—
3 things we have heard and known,
things our ancestors have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their descendants;
we will tell the next generation
the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,
his power, and the wonders he has done.
New International Version
Being Special, Unique
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. – C. S. Lewis
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die – whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness. – Gilda Radner
Conventional is not for me. I like things that are uniquely Flo. I like being different. – Florence Griffith Joyner, Olympic track and field star
Deep Summer
Heat Wave: “Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” – Sam Keen
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. – Henry James
My dad Ray Longenecker at the Grandpa Martin farm, circa 1920
People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
– Anton Chekhov
Your turn!
Did any of these quotes feel like an “Aha” moment for you? Will you add one?
Coming next: “I’m All Ears” with a Cliff & Marian tiff
Are you hankering for chocolate-covered bacon, do you want to buy a rooster for your flock? A hat for the next Downton Abbey gala? Welcome to Root’s Country Market and Auction, a fixture from my childhood my sisters, husband, and I re-visit near Manheim, Pennsylvania.
Root’s, with over 200 stand-holders, is the oldest single family-run country market in Lancaster County. Beginning as a poultry auction in 1925, Root’s “has evolved over the years to become a piece of Lancaster County heritage.” Come walk with me along the aisles of stands, some housed in long sheds, others outdoors under awnings.
Did I say you can get all gussied up for next Downton Abbey series? At our first stop, we try on funny Brit hats rivaling those of Princesses Beatrix and Eugenie we remember gasping over at the William and Kate’s royal wedding.
From fancy we meet plain at many of the produce stands either selling or buying vine-ripe tomatoes.
Yes, there are household items and books galore, but many stands cater to shoppers wanting fresh meats, produce, deli and bakery items–and flowers. This farmer boasts fresh blooms from his Manheim farm.
I promised you chocolate-covered bacon. Here is a look at a taste-tester. Yes, I had a bite too!
Then on to pickles, funnel cakes, and shoofly pies with wet bottoms satisfying the sweet and sour tastes:
Root’s is a market, and yes, we buy from not just photograph the vendors, but the market is also an auction house. Walking from one of the parking lots, we spy a warning sign urging bidders to uphold the integrity of the auction:
Wanna bid on a coop of roosters?
Our tour ends with Rosa, who graciously invites me to sample and buy one of her multi-colored angel-food cakes, pies, or whoopie pies at Miriams’s Pies. All home-made, of course. That’s the only way in Pennsylvania Dutch land. When I asked her permission to photograph and promote her wares, she admits with shy pride, “One of our customers put us on Facebook!”
I wonder . . . is there a piece of your past you want to re-visit? We are dying to know the “what – where – who” of your story. As always, you are invited to be part of our conversation.
Plain and Fancy 