Tale of the Gingerbread House

One of the joys of getting ready for Christmas is the day to create the beloved Gingerbread House. When our children were at that magical age of wanting to do everything Christmas – popcorn and cranberry garland for the tree, Holiday cookies, print our own wrapping paper with potato stamps, they also begged to make their first gingerbread house.    

Karla, the ten year old baker, meticulously measured out the construction pieces of each “cookie” wall. Guy and Jessie whipped up the cement frosting for the walls and roof.

Once the pieces were baked, cut, and cemented into place, the plain house was ready for the candy decorations. The memory of watching little hands pressing candy chips on the roof and around the frame still sends a thrill through me. They decorated the cardboard platform with cookie bushes and green coconut leaves on cookie pine trees each carefully placed to the rhythmic song of child talk.

Once their very own unique ginger house was completed we gave it a proud place on the dining room table flanked by two candles. In the morning we happily ate our crunchy granola admiring the beauty of the previous day’s creation.

A few days went by when one of the children noticed a hole in the back wall of the gingerbread house along with nibbles out of the bushes and outside the newly created doorway - little black . . . well, mouse turds. It’s a week before Christmas and a mouse has moved into our beautiful gingerbread house!

What a fine mess this is! 

We called a family meeting with children lobbying for the new resident of their creation to happily enjoy the place. We adults explained the whole cleanliness thing to which they countered (while munching on other pretty cookies), that they were not intending to eat the structure anyway. We agreed to move the house off of the table and implement an eviction in the case of excessive mouse partying or if mouse relatives moved in. Recognizing this was a seasonal decoration we also agreed to move the house outside along with the Christmas tree and its edible garland when we entered a new year.

Each morning the children checked on the interesting disintegration of their ginger house. We imagined the mouse ecstatic at his good fortune. We never saw the little creature but only knew him through his leavings. Though there are those who would criticize our parental decision to allow the mouse to live with us in our house, the situation remained benign.

Our gifts from this curious animal visit included humor, imagination, cooperative decision making, and eventually our mouse in the house became part of a delightful repertoire of family stories.

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season and a healthy new year.

Helene and family

p.s. Happy Birthday Leon, Jim, John and Tyler, fine December men.

Thanksgiving Ghosts

            At this time of year I often think of our first country-grown, free barnyard rambling turkey. Our neighbor, a quarter mile down the road raised a few hundred turkeys for the locals in the Thanksgiving season. He also raised Hereford beef cattle that grazed and lounged on the hill outside our east-facing kitchen window. And milk cows, large Holsteins, housed in the big old Sears designed white barn across the road from our newly built homestead.

            After a grueling year surviving the near-tragedy of moving in too soon to our unfinished house, we were finally living upstairs. Joel built bedrooms for the children in the walkout downstairs while we slept in the upper level.

The story of the turkey as described in the book, A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life goes like this:

One moonless night we woke to strange sounds outside our window – rustling grass and deep animal sounds. Trying hard to draw up some light from the darkness all we could really see right outside our window were free form white shapes moving slowly one way and another. The sounds intensified - deep low grumblings – as if the mass of whatever it was, was growing. The white spots lurked around all the south side windows. Joel grabbed a small child’s baseball bat and lantern flashlight. In a surprise move he flung open the door only to see several large startled Holstein cows staring back at him.

I called our farmer neighbor who seemed grateful to be notified of his naughty girl cows. At two o’clock in the morning we helped round up the giant explorers and escorted them back across the street to their barn.

We talked into the sunrise about how our urban roots had not prepared us with enough data to determine the mystery of floating free-form white blobs attached to heavy animal snorts.

In late November, about a month after our strange encounter with errant Holsteins, we heard a light knock at the door. Our farmer neighbor sent his shy young 15-year-old son to deliver a 22-pound freshly harvested, cleaned, and bagged turkey for us. “Here’s this,” he almost whispered as he plopped the big bird in Joel’s grasp.

We were equally as grateful for this big thank you compared to our small neighborly gesture of rescuing cows. We have yet to find another Thanksgiving turkey to match the incredible taste of that big Tom. In the years following we discovered that all subsequent Thanksgiving meals remain attached in our minds to the confusion of ghostly grumbling forms in the night.  

No matter how you celebrate the launching of this holiday season, we wish you opportunities to enjoy the mysteries around you, and a place of comfort to tell the stories.

If you want to read more about our country life discoveries, you’ll find lots of humor and insights in A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy GranolaChanged My Life: 2.99 Amazon Kindle. We hope you check it out.

Affectionately,

Helene

Garden Tomatoes - MMMMmm

                Harvest season is almost over in these parts of the country. We’ve become so used to green house and transportation technology presenting us with fresh vegetables all year that we tend to forget the foods of the season have a time limit . . . except for garden tomatoes. Yes, we can get tomatoes all year long, beautiful perfectly formed red globes. Still the exclamation from August through September rings loudly as we sink our teeth into sloppy, artistically formed, scarred and deeply colored clowns of the harvest  – “mmm there’s nothing like the taste of tomatoes from the garden” we exclaim.

                The thing about garden fresh tomatoes is the metaphor for the garden itself: from early summer to the intense heat of late July, early August, tomato plants grow tall and wide singing sweetly, showing their delicate yellow blossoms soon to turn into little green shiny balls.

As the new green fruits grow larger and fatter, we hopeful gardeners begin dreaming in anticipation of all the harvest. Green beans come on quickly and soon scream at us to get out there and harvest! We eat the sweet first fresh strands and store the rest. Beans are gone as swiftly as they come,  while those puffy tomato plants continue to grow bigger with still green globes. Sniffing the air with their pungent fragrance, we linger on anticipations of summer meals decorated with a plate of tasty, very tasty, sliced tomatoes. Not yet. Wait. Wait. We are taunted by their beauty and the memory of that luscious taste.

Then sometime in mid-August the green becomes painted with pink, light orange, soft red, and suddenly, BAM! Tomatoes! Eat eat until you never thought it would happen but you get sick of them. C’mon eat! Soon they will be gone. And so they are.

                Yes, they are canned and frozen and combined with other great flavors into sauces and salsas. Yes, we can buy some pretties at the grocery store all winter long. But too soon, the mouth-watering fruit that tantalizes all our senses even to the kinetic dribbles down our face and arms are done. With much sighing, we rescue a few of the lingering green ones and stretch them out on an available window sill in October for one more chance to absorb that succulent flavor. Ahh. 

Hope you enjoy other garden stories in A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, Amazon Kindle (also good to read on iPod and computer), cheap - $2.99. 

It's All About BUSINESS

Though Crunchy Granola, the book, reads like a back-to-the land memoir, it is really a book about Business, capital B. What we learned about living with animals, growing our own food, building a house, and raising (or being raised by) delightful children were all just day-to-day do-with-what-is. The bigger story is how we learned the basic principles of Commerce and the tremendous impact on our understanding the world around us.

            The book, A Homestead Decade  - How CrunchyGranola Changed My Life, begins with a gigantic bale of broom straw brought to our snowy homestead by an 18-wheeler and dropped off at the top of the hill presenting us with a serious problem-solving issue: how to get the bale down the hill, then how to store it in our tiny workshop.

            Yes, brooms. We became broom makers out of a dire need to feed and clothe our children and it was the next thing in front of us. With unbridled enthusiasm (ignorance notwithstanding) we threw ourselves into the business opportunity. The principles are simple on paper: production, marketing, and distribution. We didn’t need a textbook or degree to figure out the tremendous list under each of those items.

Production – means design, equipment, raw materials, storage, hands and bodies, and lots of coffee. We learned to produce beautiful fireplace brooms and variations on each. We learned to find and manage the raw materials from the best sources across the Midwest. We learned, sometimes grudgingly, to discipline ourselves to the task.

Marketing – required creative thinking about who the market might be and how to reach the various entities (before computers and the elegant electronic tools available to us today). We learned about seasonal timing. We enjoyed the ego boost of sales from all over the country including our grand sister states Alaska and Hawaii. We also learned that The Market, even our little hand crafted product, can be surprisingly vulnerable to the ebb and flow of consumer trends.

And the real surprise Distribution – how to get the hard earned product to the customer (and collect payment) especially when the nearest UPS distribution station was more than 40 miles away and there’s an OPEC oil embargo interfering with us little tiny business people just trying to survive, and your mother is calling wondering what you are doing playing with goats and brooms and when are you going to get a real job.

            The size of the business really didn’t matter in this grand MBA lesson. Trucks and trains and ocean container freight all have new meaning to us. We discern from “good ads” and crappy advertising unlike ever before. We have come to understand BUSINESS. Bet you never thought Crunchy Granola could do that for you.

As always, thanks for stopping by. If you get an e-copy of the book from AmazonKindle (cheap $2.99) let us know what you think.

Loving the fall colors,

Helene  

Saturday Sale Subject of Documentary - Sale Barn

On a slow summer night for television a few days ago, I just happened on a documentary on WKAR tv called Sale Barn, by Brooke Dagnan and Producer Angel Vasquez. What?! Is that our Saturday Sale? And sure enough a soft little awareness film about a place that gave us so much way back in our homestead history from learning about and acquiring our first goats to picking up Free-Take-One Amos the absolutely best dog that ever lived (I know, that’s a little romantic, but I swear he is becoming legendary in our memories). Sale Barn gives a lightweight visual of the Saturday Sale now known as the KenFrecker Auctioneers Inc , but in our memory the weekly event was far more than a casual auction. From the book, A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life we described the Saturday Sale a little differently:

“The Saturday Sale in this rural area is quite different from another popular Midwest cosmopolitan sale at Shipshewana. Tune up your senses, here we go: Sweaty human body smells through old damp wool. Goats with urine/sperm spray radiating from their coats. Coffee steaming from plastic foam cups. The misty vapor of barn manure, muck, rotted straw and grain drifting from thick rubber boots. And old oil and grease smells intermingling with contrary drifts of excessive after shave colognes.

“That is just the smells. Sounds from all the activity include a symphony of comments from bleating goats, angry roosters, braying asses, ducks, chickens, geese, horses. Humans are blowing and wiping amid a cacophonic chatter of tones, accents, words working their way through rough graveled throats. And children. Children who are free for a time running, laughing, whispering anticipated mischief to each other. Imagine a long journey through human gatherings – the Saturday Sale is the medieval market live.”

One important item the film, Sale Barn, captured is Martin “Barney” Barnhart, auctioneer. We forgot the gift of Barney’s captivating auction song. There are many effective auction rolls rattling numbers and enticing bidders in a crowd, but we have yet to hear one that quite compares to the cadence of Barney’s call, it is truly a song bringing the notes up then finalizing the punch down – “45 doll-ars, you got it.”

Barney Barnhart auctioneer is well-known in Southern Michigan, in his mid-nineties at this writing. KenFrecker has a nice page on the history of the gentle man with the big voice – an exceptional singing auctioneer. As for the documentary, Sale Barn, thank you for reminding us, you may have captured more than you know.

Thanks always for stopping by. Be sure to go walk among those beautiful wind towers in the previous blog. 

Affectionately,

Helene

WOW - We Own Wind!

           We go through our busy lives paying bills, doing laundry, catching a number of family situations – all generally without notice. Then one day we see something that draws us to take a turn in the road and so experience a very notable moment. So it happened with us a few days ago. Driving north on Michigan’s Highway 127, the one that leads to our historic masterpiece the MackinacBridge, when just an hour out of Lansing we saw tall towering gleaming white Wind Towers. Not just one or two, but many wind towers.  We turned east following the site like curious Don Quixotes, bearing instead our intention to embrace the concept rather than fight it.

            In our Crunchy Granola days experimenting with various non-polluting renewable resources we only dreamed of power significant enough to serve a grand population. Our little abode used passive solar techniques, but mostly we depended on wood from our little forest out back, and coal delivered to our local utility company. We watched more adventurous colleagues actually produce wind/solar power enough to sell energy back to “the grid”.

Over the years we have explored the advancing technology in both wind turbine designs and solar collection. We lamented that we might not live long enough to actually see acceptance of the advancing renewable technology against the resistance of high profit dinosaur bones, that the sucking of oil from sands and the flattening of mountains will use all of our human brain and muscle power until there is nothing left, before we try to catch up to the gifts that shine on us (sometimes blisteringly) every day.

            Here, in the summer of 2012 the giants stood before us – over 130 of them – quietly overseeing lush corn and soybean fields amid pristine farmsteads of Gratiot County, Michigan. They stand over 400 feet capturing gentle winds across this ancient lake bed flatland of mid-Michigan on some 30,000 acres. The wind towers generate enough electricity for more than 50,000 homes in the area.

These lovely machines are providing hundreds of jobs from production (General Electric) to raising at the sites (Livonia-based Aristeo Construction), to maintenance. They provide tens of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars over a few years, to the communities for roads, schools, and all the things that make for great places to live right here in my beautiful Michigan. This is just one of several planned energy farms in the state. Consumers Energy and DTE are swiftly moving toward the establishment of the wind farms in the “thumb” and the Lake Land Wind Farm in Ludington capturing Lake Michigan winds on the high ground.

According to Kevin Parzyck, vice-president of development in the Midwest for  Invenergy which oversees the construction projects, “Once things get rolling, you can put a couple up of (the towers) a day.” [Barrie Barber, The Saginaw News]

            This all came about with more urgency by Michigan’s Clean, Renewable and Efficient Energy Act of 2008 that requires 10% of energy output to be clean renewable by 2015. The projects are embraced by the energy companies for more than meeting that goal, accounting for over a billion dollars invested in the wind/solar projects.            

Standing among the beautiful farmland wind towers listening to the soft cranking of the rotating motors amid crickets and birds, it occurred to me that we are standing in the Future, no plutonium waste, no burning holes in the ozone, no gaseous spills in the water table. A sense of elation came over me – I am so grateful I lived to experience this moment.

By the way, if you research wind energy in Michigan you will also find a good deal of home energy products produced right here. Whew (that’s a little puff of wind celebrating a good world comin’).

Helene author of

A Homestead Decade, How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, Amazon Kindle Book, a memoir, funny, serious and cheap $2.99.

 

AN INDEPENDENCE DAY TO REMEMBER!

Here comes another one, smack in the middle of the week!

We have had some memorable Independence Day celebrations, but only one stands out with fear akin to images of apocalyptic chaos. It was during our “homestead days” when we had moved to the country, lived by our garden and animals, and contemplated a world of peace and love. At that time we had not experienced a rural American Fourth of July.

All chores done, a wonderful summer meal settling in our bellies we decided to take the children – eight year old daughter, six year old son, and the baby in the infant carrier on our backs – to the county fair grounds for some country fun. Remember this is 4^th of July, not the charming harvest days in the fall. This was a completely different crowd.

The temperature soared past 90 degrees. Carney hawkers in smudged shirts with faces glistening from slow moving  streaks of sweat taunted for a piece of the money pie. To pass the time until evening when the fireworks would finish the day folks congregated in the grand stands to take part in bear fights.  Yes, bear fights as in Black Bear.

Men from the audience were chided to come down to the ring, pay a dollar and wrestle the brown bear who had been pacing the edges of the ropes in the ring. Ragged, aging men from a local motorcycle gang challenged each other with shoulder punches and loud laughter to show their toughness against the bear. One burly gang fellow was especially prodded by his colleagues to get in there and take that hairy (bleeper) down. When the human challenger took off his shirt he looked amazingly like his furry opponent.

The bear stood on his hind legs which made him tower over the human and lumbered toward the man. Mr. Motorcycle guy looked visibly afraid, while people in the audience began shouting for blood. The bear hovered above the man. The man began punching the bear. Punch. Punch. Until he managed to slug the bear’s jaw. The angry referee/owner pulled the bear back by his leash and ordered the man out of the ring. The audience went wild. We sensed serious danger and gathered up our children who wisely questioned our lack of wisdom bringing them to this event in the first place. As we left the grand stand, the motorcycle gang was surrounding the wrestling ring demanding their hero’s dollar back. Surprisingly the bear owner refused the refund! We got the heck out of there and decided to linger on the grounds until the fireworks started, which was not such a great idea either.

The crowds outside the arena pushed together tightly to get a close view of the explosions. As the rockets began to fire up to the sky, it became apparent that something was terribly wrong. Rockets were exploding too close to the ground spewing burning cinders on the crowd. We grabbed our children and pushed our way to our old parked pickup truck.  Getting out of the town turned into another event as we turned down one street to find police had blocked the way with flashing lights stirring up the atmosphere. We scooted down another street and finally got onto our country road, which was not idyllic as the song goes, but rather full of raucous alcohol crazies weaving across the lines, screaming and laughing and throwing big green bottles in the ditches.

 At about a half mile from our farm, smoke began floating from under the dash board, then the lights went out. No moon. We have to walk. The sense of danger swooped over us, when our little boy turned to his dad and said, “I brought my flashlight.” I almost cried.

We made it home safely to a joyful Amos who repeated over and over, “where were you guys?!”

There are lots of stories in A Homestead Decade - How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, Amazon Kindle e-book (works on most digital devices) just $2.99. I hope you enjoy the book and the blog and send a little note about what you think. Enjoy a safe holiday this year. Thanks for stopping by.

Helene