Potstickers. Nostalgia.

Wonton skins with filling

Every once in a while, Beez asks for a batch of potstickers. The process for making them is kind of involved--grind the meat; mix in chopped vegetables, egg, cornstarch, and a bunch of seasonings (recipe is here); lay out half of the wonton skins, spoon filling onto each, moisten the corners and fold the skins to form the dumplings, brown them in some oil, add stock and steam them; then repeat with the other half of the wonton skins. 

Dumplings formed and ready to brown

While I was working I had plenty of time to recall our family watching one of the early cooking shows together, learning how to make these little Chinese dumplings.

As I set out the wonton skins in the familiar grid pattern on the sideboard, I found myself thinking of all of our kitchens where I've performed these very same actions: In New Hampshire in the old red farmhouse with the lamplit kitchen and the scratchy radio playing in the background, in the very old house on High Street with its wonderful sense of history, in the little country apartment with the view of the woods and the fields, and in the house where the bears and the moose lived all around;  then in New Mexico in the little adobe house in town, in the big brick house out on the High Plains, and now in our adobe home in the orchard.

Little Pete helps out

And in every one of those kitchens, I've always had a helper. In the past, there were children in the kid-sized aprons I had sewn for them, standing on chairs or stools to help. Nowadays, I have a no less eager helper with an enthusiastically wagging tail, cheering me on from the floor.

Road Trip; Old School Style

Family vacations were a big deal when I was a kid. My father often used his two weeks off all at once and we traveled in the family car that whole time. We bought new clothes before hitting the road; we called them our vacation outfits. For some reason they always included a hat, although we rarely wore casual hats in the other parts of our lives.

Here are my Aunt Nellie, little me, my mother, and littler Bucksnort, while on a visit to Jerry and Jimmy's Grandpa, who also appears elsewhere on this blog. He's the guy with the boots and jeans and for-real cowboy hat; the one who is grinning and no doubt cooking up another trick to make his San Francisco visitors remember their trip to his Arizona ranch forever. He isn't wearing his vacation clothes, but the rest of us are. My dad and Uncle Jack were off branding cattle, much to their dismay, so they didn't appear in this photo. You can tell that these are vacation clothes that we are wearing because they are matching outfits, and because we kids are wearing hats with our names stitched on them.

And here we are, much later, back in civilization. That's our neighbor's house and car in the background; and Bucksnort, my dad, and me in the foreground. We are not wearing vacation clothes, although they might have been road trip outfits at some time in the past. You can tell that we are no longer on vacation because we are not wearing hats. In spite of the fact that we have no labels stitched anywhere, revealing our names, my dad seems pretty certain that he has hold of the right girls.

When You Give a Sheep a Shot; 55 Things You'll Never Know About Me

Please just skip this post and move along. If you read this list you'll just embarrass both of us.

Still here? I'm warning you, there will be nudity. You won't like it, and neither will I.

1. I have plumbing issues. I’m still afraid of the bathtub drain, and I secretly believe that one day a snake will swim up out of my toilet.

2. My father came from Worcester, Massachusetts and only completed 8th grade, making education for us kids of prime importance to him. We disappointed him a lot but he still loved us.

3. My mother came from a farm family with thirteen children and she didn’t want to talk about it.

4. My parents moved me from my birth state of Maine to California when I was three months old, thus making me officially rootless. I have lived in four other states and one Canadian province. I keep an atlas handy at all times and am always planning my next move.

5. I was born near the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and grew up in San Francisco, one block from the Pacific Ocean.

6. I learned many of the skills I needed from books.

7. I can make a blanket from the sheep onwards.

8. I used to have milk goats and that one goat, Lily, and I have been known to make a big ruckus out in the barn. She always waited until the pail was full before delicately placing her hoof right into it.

9. I believed that book about raising backyard goats and really thought they would weed around the fruit trees for me.

10. During the same period of my life, I once turned the geese into the strawberry patch because another homesteading book said they would clean the weeds between the rows.

11. I know to never turn your back on a gander and I didn’t have to learn that out of a book.

12. I once sheared a sheep by hand with manual clippers, but only the back half. My hand got tired. She looked like a lion.

13. I can give a sheep a shot, but it makes me nervous. It makes the sheep nervous, too.

14. I once owned a weaving store and taught spinning and weaving.

15. I think chickens are fascinating and I can sit and watch them for hours. Their behavior is a metaphor for something that I am still trying to figure out.

16. I once startled a skunk when reaching into a nest to get the eggs out.

17. I helped deliver a lamb in a dark barn while reading the directions, with a flashlight, from yet another homesteading book.

18. In my first garden I planted several rows of corn (reading the directions as I went along) with my little bantam chickens for company. While I was busy looking at the book, the banties were scratching up and eating the corn--another lesson learned about companion animals.

19. One of my favorite things to do (I have a quiet life) is to consider the alternate words offered by Spell Check. For instance, it wanted me to change the word “banties” in the previous sentence into “panties.” Imagine.

20. I honestly believe that I am psychic, but only with my sister, and only some of the time.

21. I used to live in a house that had four fireplaces and was built in 1770. All of the people who had lived there over the centuries had left some little part of themselves behind. There was always lots of company.

22. I hated swimming for years because I was sent to lessons at a vast outdoor unheated salt water pool in cold and foggy San Francisco. The thought of swimming made my teeth chatter.

23. I kind of like swimming now, but only where I can see my feet.

24. I went back to school to finish my bachelor’s degree when I was in my fifties. My father would have been proud, but it was too late to tell him.

25. I got my master’s degree when I was 56.

26. I’ve always had a secret soundtrack running in my head, describing my adventures as I was having them. (She leaned a little closer to the bathtub drain. What was that slithering sound? Something was coming…)

27. My first library job was driving a bookmobile.

28. My last library job was teaching information technology to reluctant 8th graders.

29. While skiing long ago in a headlong and out of control fashion down a bunny hill, I made a promise to myself to give up extreme sports.

30. I have a sister-in-law who once jumped out of an airplane. That’s extreme enough for me.

31. I once stepped on a snake while running barefoot down a California sidewalk.

32. I have never been bitten by a snake, but expect to be momentarily.

33. I have three dogs. I don’t even like dogs. I might be mistaken, but I thought I was a cat person.

34. Just in case, I have four cats.

35. In an unrelated development, I have had several husbands as well, nice men all. We are still in touch.

36. Beez and I have been married for 41 years and have forgotten to celebrate most of our anniversaries. We remembered the 25th because we were in Yellowstone with all of our kids and grandkids and they reminded us. The 30th was lovely because we went to France.

37. My children’s names are in alphabetical order, but not because of any planned cuteness. The blended family just turned out that way.

38. I only like to watch non-scary movies. Years ago I decided that life was scary enough.

39. I learned to knit from a book.

40. I have made 110 sweaters for Knit for Kids.

41. I learned how to bake bread from a book. It has taken me years of practice to make a nice light loaf. Ask my first husband, who used to say that one of his arms was longer than the other from carrying the sandwiches I packed for his lunch.

42. I once lived in Canada.

43. When I lived in British Columbia, my California friends believed that I was somewhere in South America. Others, who understood that I had moved somewhere up north, believed that I was living in an igloo.

44. Now that I live in New Mexico, some of my eastern friends believe I am in a foreign country where only Spanish is spoken.

45. I used to lie on a hill all night and take photographic time exposures of meteor showers.

46. A group of people entrusted me to develop their meteor shower photos. I switched the hypo and developer solutions by accident and ended up with clear strips of film.

47. I had a friend who traveled to Europe and asked me to water his plants while he was gone. I used the jug of photo chemicals that was next to the jug of plant watering solution by mistake.

48. I learned to make pies out of a book when I was 11. I waited until my parents were out and baked ten apple pies for the freezer. Surprise!

49. Another time when my parents were out, I ate too many home baked cinnamon buns and threw up. Good thing no one had thought of eating disorders back then.

50. I learned to make replacement cinnamon buns from a book.

51. Having political discussions gives me a stomach ache, not unlike the one I got from the cinnamon buns. I know what I believe and can’t understand that everyone else hasn’t gotten with the program. My program.

52. Long ago, I was sleeping naked when my apartment caught on fire. That was bad, but not as frightening for everyone concerned as it would be if it happened now.

53. My first car was a 1951 Chevrolet that my father sold to me for $200.

54. I always wanted to be a cowgirl, until I actually rode a horse and found out how high up I was. Another extreme sport given up.

55. I love blogging, because my family has already heard all of this stuff.

If you are down here at the end of the list, you might as well know that this meme was inspired by Judy's list of 100 things about herself. I was excited to read there that she doesn't take meds and that there are dollar sundaes at McDonald's. I do take meds (though not the really good ones) and that's probably why my list only goes up to 55.

Preacher, Preacher, Hair on Fire

My mother's family

My mother's family was a large one, as you can see. Although one of them was missing in this photo, there were 13 children in all. There was such an age spread that the older ones had already left and started raising their own huge families when some of the younger ones were still being born back home. My mother is that sweet child in the bottom row on the far right. This photo would have been taken around 1919.

They lived on a farm up by the border between Maine and New Brunswick. You can tell they are farmers by the "farmer's tans" on the men--tanned and reddened faces with white foreheads that would have been protected from the sun by their hats when they were out working on the potato crop. Many years later, my mother would beg me not to move back up to Canada, because all she remembered about that place was the hard, hard work grubbing up potatoes out in the fields.

See that fellow who looks like his head is smoking? That's my Uncle Clifford, who later became a preacher. He was a man who liked to pray whenever it occurred to him, and he liked lots of company. He came to visit our family when we had left the dust of the Canadian potato fields far behind and had moved to a suburban lifestyle in northern California.

My mother had also left the "holy roller" church of her childhood far behind, and my sister and I were raised like little heathens. My parents occasionally did send us off to church on our own with dimes for the collection plate. I remember having a real religious revelation one Sunday on our way to the neighborhood Episcopal church. I explained to my baby sister that we should walk in the woods and Appreciate Nature instead of attending church with the all those "tea party ladies." She agreed with me, as she always did back then, and we made sure to look around appreciatively at some trees and flowers as we flagged down Glen the Ice Cream Man to spend our collection money on creamsicles, all frosty orange and white.

My parents were pleased that we were seemingly "getting religion" every week with no effort on their part. We were also pleased with the arrangement, as was Glen the Ice Cream Man.

All was well, until Uncle Clifford showed up, probably taking a swing through the western states on some missionary trip or other. As I said before, Uncle Clifford liked public prayer, administered often and lengthily, with all participants down on their knees. I spent my Uncle Clifford prayer time peeking over my folded hands and sneaking looks out the California-style picture windows, mortified that my friends might be passing by and might see me in this peculiar position.

As I peeked, I noticed that the adults all kept their eyes tightly closed while in prayer and that gave me my getaway opportunity. I inched along on my knees, painfully and slowly, across the hardwood floor until reaching the carpeted hallway and, speeding up on all fours, made it to my room where I crawled under my bed.

I fully intended to stay there until Uncle Clifford went off to save some other hapless suburbanites, but my mother eventually discovered my hideout. She refused to believe that I was "talking to Jesus" under there, as I claimed. Sadly, that made her suspicious of my other religious activities, and I don't remember seeing much of Glen the Ice Cream Man on Sundays after that.

Little Bucksnort and me, before we got religion

Second Tier Girl; Painful Memories of Early Meanness

Is that a beautiful skyscraper?

They used to tell me that high school was the best time of life and, even at that tender age, I thought incredulously that I hoped it wasn't so. We high school kids were so judgemental, and so critical of each other and of ourselves. So very unkind.

You'll think I'm mean, and you'll be right, but I remember that awful feeling at a dance when I'd be looking hopelessly at the cute boys and wishing one of them would come my way and then, from somewhere way out of my field of vision, there would come one of those guys that I'd never noticed before except maybe in math class for being so smart. One of the pimply ones who didn't know how to saunter; didn't know where to put his arms when walking; in short, someone who was just as self-conscious as I was. Someone who was probably thinking, with his smart vocabulary, "That poor girl, I'd better rescue her while she still has a shred of self esteem left."

And there I'd be, with another project on my hands. Someone I needed to be nice to, someone I couldn't let down, while all the time he probably considered that he was the one taking on the project. Neither of us would ever know the truth--there was precious little communication between genders in those early days.

It was the same when it came to clubs, the kind you had to be invited to join. There was the club for popular girls, and there was the other one for all the rest of us. Definitely second tier. I grew to know my place, but that didn't make me any kinder.

All past meanness is eventually rewarded. That's how I ended up here in my accidental prairie home. Not the New Mexico of the little adobe houses and the soft sound of Spanish being spoken and the sight of sharp mountains against an early morning sky. Nope, I got the New Mexico of the flat land, dairy flies, and bad health care. Not the New Mexico of the Indian pueblos and the fragrant piñon fires and the hanging red chile ristras. Nope, I got the New Mexico that smells of chemical fertilizer on good days, manure piles from the dairies on not so good days, and abject fear from the stockyards on the worst days. And not the New Mexico where people of all kinds are accepted, but the New Mexico where there are 17 kinds of Baptists, angry with each other and with someone else, who are all convinced that people who are different (maybe gay, maybe Democrat) can be changed as long as they accept the Lord.

It's a good place for a second tier girl, remembering past unkindnesses.

Skyscraper? Nope.

Meanwhile, Back on Jimmy and Jerry's Grandpa's Ranch

Today another story from The Zees will be published on The Elder Storytelling Place. You might remember reading it here some time back. It's the memory of a little San Francisco "cowgirl's" trip to a for-real ranch in Arizona, and it is called Tenderfeet.

Life in a small New Hampshire town, remembered with fondness

Back when we lived in New Hampshire, I worked at the school, and we lived close to the center of town. Here are some of our favorite things about living there...

Hanging my laundry out on the line on a Saturday and having the kids at school on Monday giggle about seeing our family's underwear.

Having kids ask me year after year to set aside the book I was going to read aloud in the library and tell them, instead, the ghost stories about our house that they had heard about from their older siblings.

Having all the kids from the park across the street come over to our house for a potty break because they had heard we had a new "jet" toilet.

Finding another line of kids at the door one day waiting for a tour of all the haunted spots in our house (our son was apparently charging admission).

Hearing stories about our old house having been a stop on the Underground Railroad from the volunteer firemen that time our furnace caught on fire.

Having the 8th grade English teacher write a play about our house and the Underground Railroad.

Going to the Town Clerk's office for some car-related business only to find that the office was in her 250-year old house and that those of us waiting in line, sitting in lovely old chairs, were to be entertained by her two-year old playing the piano. This was a LOT different from the motor vehicle offices I had dealt with before.

Watching that same two-year old grow up to adulthood and start raising her own family.

Hearing the carpenters run away when they were fixing one of the sills and some snakes came slithering out of the wall of the bathroom/laundry room. They said there were 14 snakes.

Being asked two weeks later about the 14-foot snake that "people were saying" we found inside our clothes dryer. We loved the way stories grew as they were passed on and joked that if the "carpenter/14 snakes" story continued to circulate it might eventually morph into 14 belly-dancers-with-snakes discovered in the attic.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Elva's fancy 50s kitchen.
It even had a wood-fired grill with a copper hood.














My mother, Elva, was born in 1914 on a farm in eastern Canada. In her lifetime she saw amazing things--families changed over from driving horses to driving automobiles, the national highway system was developed, telephones were installed in homes and then the cell phone was invented, and household labor savers like vacuum cleaners, automatic clothes washers, dishwashers, and the microwave became common. We got our first television set (black and white, of course) in the early 1950s, opening up a whole new world of entertainment with its three channels. Computers were invented and changed over time from room-sized to pocket-sized. The Internet was really getting going in her later years, but I could never interest her in it.

One thing always remained the same with my mother. She loved to cook--whether on the wood cookstove of her youth or the fancy GE countertop burners in her first new house in the 1950s--and she loved to try out new recipes. Here is one of her favorites, probably cut out of a magazine in the 1960s.

These pancakes are very tender.

Cottage Cheese Pancakes
1 cup cottage cheese
1 cup milk
4 eggs
¾ cup flour
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
2 tbl. melted butter or vegetable oil

Separate eggs, beat whites, set them aside. Beat yolks with cottage cheese. Sift dry ingredients, add to cottage cheese mixture. Fold in egg whites. Makes about 20 pancakes.

Targets

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Moving Wall has come to Clovis, prompting our local newspaper editor to send out this question to his mailing list: Do you have any Vietnam memories you'd like to share? At first I thought that I was still not ready to talk about those years or share those memories. I have never been able to watch movies about that war, and it's such a hard time to talk about. However, after some sleepless hours, this is the answer I sent. The editor of the Clovis News Journal, David Stevens, posted it on his blog on 3/17/08.

This is a hard, hard question, both for those who went to war and for those who stayed behind. I was up in the night thinking of what to say. This is not the story of the boy I knew who, having been trained to kill, came back from the war and murdered some people in a bar in Colorado. This is not the story of another young man I knew who left his family and his country forever because he did not want to kill anyone. And it is not about the boy who didn't come back at all, and who is named on the Memorial Wall. This is about yet another boy I knew during those war years.

Targets

One of my friends went away to the Vietnam War right after high school. I went away to college. We had known each other since junior high and had even "gone steady" back then. We dated each other occasionally during high school, but it was never serious. We wrote letters back and forth all the time he was gone away to war. His letters started becoming romantic, and he began to write about "our" love and future marriage. I was puzzled because this intensity was sudden and seemed to come from nowhere but, inexperienced as I was, I understood that he needed to make some kind of plan for a future that he could imagine while he was experiencing the unimaginable. Our correspondence continued as long as he was in the Army. His letters were passionate and all about the life we would have together when he got back. Mine were matter of fact and about the daily details of life at home.

After his discharge he came home tense and exhausted in a way that was beyond my experience. We went for a long drive with another couple. We were in the back seat; it was warm and he nodded off. I watched him sleep and was thinking how good it was for him to get some rest, when a passing car backfired and he woke and went into a crouch, groping frantically for an imaginary weapon. I pressed against the opposite door, horrified by his fierce reaction and suddenly understanding more about his war in that moment than I had ever understood before. I was brokenhearted for the lost boy I had known.

His job during the war was being a gunner on a helicopter. When I asked him how he could do it, he said that you had to teach yourself to see the fleeing people as targets. Just targets.

A Dangerous Childhood

The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden. Collins, 2007. 270 pages.

When I was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, our neighborhood in San Francisco was noisy with the shouts and cries of the children who lived there. We rode our bikes, we roller-skated, we played dodgeball, and we played jump rope. We raced on foot, on bikes, on scooters, and on skates. We took our skates apart and used the wheels on various invented riding vehicles. In quieter moments, we sat on stoops and played jacks and pickup sticks. We collected rocks and cracked them open on the sidewalk, always searching for that elusive geode. We played every sort of game of “pretend” that we could dream up, most memorably something called Covered Wagon, where we used a sturdy wooden gate as a wagon seat for the lucky wagon-driver-of-the-day, while the rest of us hunched down behind him in the “wagon” bed as we traveled west. We took turns playing good guys and bad guys, riding pretend horses and shooting at each other with our cap guns. We ran, we skipped, we hopped, we jumped, and we turned cartwheels. We fell off our bikes, my sister’s foot got caught in the spokes of my bike when I gave her a highly illegal ride on the back fender, my friend Skippy broke his arm roller-skating, and Trudy’s little brother broke several things when he discovered that he couldn’t fly off a second story porch. It was an exuberant, vigorous, and yes, somewhat dangerous life, at least by today’s standards. In those days it was just what kids did all day until called in for supper.

The Igguldens remember that kind of childhood, one where every day was spent outside playing. It’s the kind of childhood that doesn’t exist any more, for whatever reason. They have written a book that might inspire some of today’s kids to have some adventures, covering every subject that kids—boys especially—get excited about. Keep this book on your bedside table and grab it up when you wonder how to make a tripwire, or a paper airplane, or a bow and arrow; or if you’re wondering about the stars, or the clouds, or the tides, or famous battles; or if you want to read extraordinarily inspiring stories about courage and bravery. It’s all here, from tying knots to Shakespeare, from skipping stones or cooking a rabbit to the Ten Commandments.

The Igguldens are unapologetic about providing instructions for potentially dangerous activities which they note “…should be carried out under adult supervision,” although they obviously realize that children have secret lives that adults know nothing about; and they aren’t afraid to inspire and instruct: “Stories of courage and determination are sometimes underrated for their ability to inspire.”

This is the second book I have read on my personal challenge list. I didn’t actually read it from cover to cover, as it is a kind of reference book, to be picked up and perused before going off on another adventure. I think that it is the perfect book for my grandson, an inspiration for bringing back a healthy kind of childhood, full of exploration and excitement.

Dear Bradley

Dear Bradley,


I’d like to tell you something about the retirement gift you left on my desk last year on my very last day of being a school librarian. I was just about to walk out the door when I saw it lying there. I knew that by then you were back in class, and I knew if I said good-bye to one more person I would start to cry. I also knew that, once started, I would have a hard time stopping. I was leaving so much behind—my career, my school, my library, my friends, and my wonderful students. So, I tucked your present into my pocket and continued on my way. When we got to our new home in a new state where I didn’t know anyone, I put your gift on my bedside table, with its little note still attached.

I don’t even know what to call the little gadget you gave me. I guess it’s a desk toy, shaped like a little hourglass. It reminds me of a tiny lava lamp, and when it is turned over the bubbles shift into a new design. Every time I see it, I turn it over and think about you. It brings back all my old school memories. When I turn the little “fidget gadget” over--

-I remember when you first came to school, a brand new first grader and a good reader already.
-I picture your cute little-boy "skater" haircut.
-I think about how kind you were to your classmates in 2nd grade, even when they weren’t being lovable.
-I remember your first disagreement with your best friend, and how hurt you were.
-I think about the tragedy that struck your family. It was way too much sadness for a little boy. Even the adults at school were worried about what to say when you came back, but you put us all at ease with your matter-of-fact approach and frank words.
-I picture your kind smile.

You are almost a whole year older now, a big third grader. Even though I mailed you a thank you note for the gift long ago, you have probably forgotten all about it. Perhaps the gifts we give that we hardly notice can turn out to be the most important ones.

Bradley, I just wanted you to know how much you gave in a moment you might not even remember. Funny, it’s just a little gift for which I have no name, but it means all the world to me.

Love,
Mrs. Z