Happy Birthday Paul

Sit back, relax, and enjoy your ride on the way-back machine.
The Beatles – February 9, 1964 – The Ed Sullivan Show Performance

Along with memories of this music still resonating in my head from 1964 comes the sounds of my Dad sitting in his chair behind us girls who were plunked down on the floor in front of the television.

Grousing noises came from behind us that sounded like “mops on their heads” – “look like girls” – “yeah yeah yeah what the H is that supposed to mean” – “bangity bang boom boom boom.” My Dad was a man of few words, but when The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan that night, he was amazingly verbose.

Ah, memories… How ’bout you? What do you recall of that night?

p.s. If for some reason YouTube takes down this video, there are plenty more just like it. Just go to YouTube.com and search The Beatles or Paul McCartney.

It’s hard for some people to wax nostalgic about any kind of laundry, let alone having to lug heavy baskets of clothes outside to dry on lines.  Line drying clothes is hard work and not often reliable – i.e. rain, sleet, and snow.

I, on the other hand, am a fool for laundry.  Any way, any kind, any place.  Ask my sisters who I disturbed all evening long washing and drying clothes at a family gathering.  hmmmm…. yeah, a bit nuts.

One thing about doing laundry that even my sisters can’t fault me for is the romance of drying clothes outside.  All of us siblings are suckers for a clothesline full of sheets, towels, work pants, aprons, and t-shirts billowing in the breeze.

What brings on this nostalgic waxing today?  Summer is here.  Not officially but certainly within our hearts.  In my mind, that’s when we haul out the clothes pins and set our sheets a sail!

Memories of Mom with clothes pins in her apron pocket, expertly arranging the sheets, towels, and wash clothes so they were all strung together, are a big reason I relish the thought of drying clothes outside on a clothesline.  Then the way she hung the shirts and pants in just the right way to catch the wind was a bit of engineering genius.  You know what a windsock looks like at an airport?  That’s how Mom got those clothes to billow.

The smell of fresh laundry dried in the sun is something you can’t put into words; and no, you can’t bottle it in fabric softener either.  There’s a mysterious draw to that aroma, even for a kid.  Want a kid to go to bed at night without complaint?  Put sheets on the bed that have been on the clothesline all day.

“Simple pleasures for a simple mind” some may say.  I say drying clothes on a clothesline is the closest thing you can get to heaven on earth.

There is some controversy in the wind about folks drying their laundry in neighborhoods with strict homeowner association rules about such things.  My friend Susanne Myers, the Hillbilly Housewife, has explored this problem at some length in her blog “Remember The Clothesline.”

Susanne, like many of us, believes drying our clothes without the use of electricity is a good idea.  It’s too bad these associations can’t bend their rules a bit to help homeowners save money and help us all save our earth’s resources.

Aside from those reasons, it’s the memories that make me want to see more clotheslines with laundry wiping in the breeze.

I know that just once more I’d like to run through a clothesline full of sheets and have Mom holler at me.  Then, later that night, bury my face in those same sheets when she tucks me in at night.

And that’s why I’m waxing nostalgic about clotheslines.

If you grew up preparing food to store for a winter season, you may know the term “putting food by.”  This term is often used to refer to canning food or preparing crops for the root cellar.

However, in my grandmother’s and mother’s day, putting food by also meant freezing food.  Which leads me to the reason I’m putting freezer cooking, old fashioned cooking, and The Hillbilly Housewife together.

I was introduced to a website called TheHillbillyHousewife.com first by my daughter, Nicole Dean, internet marketing guru.  I thought she was trying to show me some new-fangled gadgetry website thingy that I knew I wouldn’t understand.  But the name Hillbilly Housewife?  That name didn’t fit exactly into Nicole’s niche of internet marketing stuff.  But, I clicked on TheHillbillyHousewife.com anyway and was ready to check it out.

The first thing that struck me was the image.  There stands a woman wearing an apron, tending to a pot of coffee on a very old fashioned kitchen stove.  That scene could have easily come right out of any family scene I remember from, oh… decades and decades ago.  My grandmothers, my mother, my aunts… all these women in my memory, any one of them could have been that woman in the picture.

That image warmed my heart and I immediately had an affinity with this website, and the person responsible for it, Susanne Myers.

What kept me going back to visit TheHillbillyHousewife was the simplicity.  The information, stories, recipes, and topics of discussion sound like the women of my memory;  women gathered in the kitchen, trying to figure out how to blanch corn, how to save money, how to plant peas, how to season cast iron, how to get grease out, how to make curtains, and all those things that make a household run smoothly.

Now, I know what inspired me to go back to visit TheHillbillyHousewife over and over again.  After all, I know my history.  But, what I wondered was:

1) What history does Susanne have with the women in her family that inspires her to write such an old fashioned website?  And,

2) Apart from making meal time easier with a freezer full of food, does the concept of  “putting food by” as a hedge against winter, inflation, or hardship inspire any of Susanne’s writing?

Rather than wonder, why don’t I just pose these two questions to Susanne.  So, without further ado, I present Susanne Myers, The Hillbilly Housewife.

Patti: “Welcome to my blog, Susanne.”

Susanne: “Hi Patti, first of all thank you for having me here on RemarkableWrinklies.com. I love your blog and the fresh perspective you offer. And also thank you for recommending my freezer cooking ebook. I’m glad you are enjoying it as much as I am.”

Patti: “You are welcome, and thank you for coming!  If you would, could you tell us in your own words how you would describe your inspiration for The Hillbilly Housewife.  I suspect you were surrounded by some remarkable women in your life; women who created the sort of home that we would describe now as old fashioned.”

Susanne: “You are so perceptive Patti … yes, my inspiration for the Hillbilly Housewife website comes from some amazing women in my own family and that of my husband. I have learned so much from my own grandmothers and my husband’s “Grandma Griffin”. I greatly admire all three of them. They are (and were – one of my grandmothers passed away almost a year ago) hard working women who always “made do” with what they had on hand. Each of them had 4 or more children and a large house and garden (and in one case an entire farm) to take care of. Money was often tight, and most food was cooked from scratch and most of the vegetables and fruit they grew and preserved themselves.

After I got married and had my daughter, I noticed that there were a lot of skills I was forgetting and I had quite a few friends who never learned how to make bread or cook a pot of stew from scratch. Old fashioned homemaking and home-cooking is becoming a bit of a lost art. The website is my little contribution to make sure these skills don’t become forgotten. Yes, the site is a bit old fashioned and most of the topics certainly are, but at the same time, they are useful to us today just as much as they were to our grandmothers when they were young women.

Yes, we have other options these days that include premade meals and convenience foods we can pick up at the store and of course plenty of restaurants. At the same time, we pay for that convenience and it isn’t always the healthiest food. I know I feel better knowing I can make a batch of cornbread and chili from scratch, even if I don’t do it every week and it’s just as easy (and actually more environmentally friendly and more effective) to scrub my kitchen sink with baking soda instead of a harsh chemical cleaner. My point is that yes, the site is a bit old fashioned, but the information is just as applicable today as it was 50 years ago.”

Patti: “You are exactly right – old fashioned never goes out of style, as strange as that seems.  How about the concept of “putting food by” as a hedge against winter, inflation, or hardship; does that idea inspire any of your writing?”

Susanne: “Yes, it sure does. We have gone through some tough financial times where I wasn’t sure where to get the money to go to the grocery store that week. Having a freezer full of food gives me a feeling of security that no matter what my daughter will not go hungry. It’s also nice to know these meals are there in case I get sick. I had a bad case of the flu earlier this winter and my husband isn’t a big cook. It was nice to know that he could just pull a casserole out of the freezer and heat it up. It gave me the peace of mind to just relax and allow my body to heal instead of trying to push myself too soon into getting up, heading to the store and cooking dinner.

Along the same lines, it is nice to have a few meals in the freezer that I can share with a family member, friend or neighbor if and when it is needed there.”

Thanks to Susanne Myers for taking time from her extremely busy schedule to answer a few questions from this humble blogger.  I hope you enjoy visiting The Hillbilly Housewife as much as I do!

p.s.  Now that you’ve gotten a chance to “meet” Susanne, take a look at the Freezer Cookbook that inspired me to ask Susanne about her inspiration.  Click on the picture below and see if you think this might not be something you can use for yourself – or for a gift!

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.

I want to honor the brave men and women serving our country, then and now, by remembering this day in history.

I hope you will take a minute today to say thanks in some small way.

From www.IwoJima.com:

“The first flag raising atop Mount Suribachi, February 23, 1945.

Hank Hansen (without helmet), Boots Thomas (seated), John Bradley (behind Thomas) Phil Ward (hand visible grasping pole), Jim Michaels (with carbine) and Chuck Lindberg (behind Michaels).”

“Photo by Lou Lowery. 10AM, Feb. 23, 1945″

From www.IwoJima.com:

“Four of the Flag Raisers (Bradley, Hayes, Sousley & Strank) appear with their jubilant buddies.  Strank, Sousley and many of these boys would soon be dead.”

Obviously a sobering thought and fact of war.

This is the original photograph by Joe Rosenthal. It was later cropped to become the photo we all know.

The photos and information are courtesy of  www.IwoJima.com.

Please take a moment to explore their website.

Read more about this point in history in James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers for adults, or the abridged version, Flags of Our Fathers: A Young People’s Edition.

p.s. My dear hubby, Neale Winker, served in the Coast Guard at Iwo Jima’s LORAN station 1961 – 1962.  He said that was some isolated duty.

Yes, it depends on your age.

The Baby Boomer generation is reportedly anyone born between the years 1946 to 1964.  If that’s true, then Holy Mackerel, our Dads and Moms were busy celebrating after WWII for a long, long time.  Can you really credit (or blame depending on your perspective) the population explosion on celebrating the end of WWII if folks were still “celebrating” into the 60′s?

But, I digress.  We of a certain generation tend to temper our speech patterns, etc., depending on if we’re talking to a person who remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot or not.    I can’t relate my feelings of sitting in front of the television “that day” to someone born in 1964.  So, the whole “born 1946 to 1964″ is arbitrary and produces a vastly different nostalgic process of thoughts and feelings.

Which brings me to this wonderful website called I Remember JFK.  I’ve been reading this top notch “remember when” website for some time now and I really enjoy the plethora of nostalgic tidbits Ron offers there.

You’ll find very detailed posts on everything from Bugles to Herb Albert (wait, aren’t those two topics related somehow?).  Ron gives your memory banks gentle nudges with some perhaps long forgotten muscle cars, vanished toys, and all sorts of memorabilia from times gone by.

But, which decade do you remember when you “remember when?”  I would guess that if you were born in 1946 your “I remember when…” sentence would end drastically different from a fellow Boomer’s “I remember when…” sentence if said fellow Boomer was born in 1964.

My hubby and I are 12 years apart in age.  Let’s just say our CD player has an interesting mix of music.  So, the 19 year spread between Baby Boomer #1 and Baby Boomer #2 must produce a whole stretch of nostalgia that speaks to one but not the other.

I guess because I talk to so many Boomers anxious to discuss “the good old days” that I’ve noticed this chasm in our meaning of  nostalgia.

Do you get nostalgic over 6.5 ounce bottles of Coke?  How about Poodle Skirts?  Pennies in your loafers?  Peddle Pushers?  Dippity Do?  Teaberry Gum?  Black Jack Gum?  Televisions as furniture?  Giant ashtrays?  Ed Sullivan?  The Beatles on Ed Sullivan?  Mini skirts?  Paisley prints?  Madras prints?  Knee socks and shorts?  Davey Crocket hats?  Pebbles?  Barbie’s Dream House?  Real cherry candy ornaments?  Herman’s Hermits?  The Monkeys?  Hip hugger bell bottoms?  Sock hops?

You see the problem?  Just in that one paragraph I’ve bounced around decades of nostalgia.  How is a Boomer to choose?

The answer is – we don’t.  Our memory banks are gathering nostalgia throughout our entire lives.  What I fondly recall from my childhood is not exclusive of the memories I cherish from my teen years, or beyond.

Give I Remember JFK a read and see how Ron gathers all those decades together, ruminates on just how we might have lost something during a few, and see if you can decide which decade was your favorite.

I, for one, can’t decide if one decade has it all over another.

I just watched a clip from “Saturday Night Fever” and still have to love it.  But, I also long for the days when we had three television stations and played outside all day and all night. I get all warm and fuzzy when I think about my embroidered hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans, but still cherish my little poodle skirt. My CD player has everything from The Fleetwoods to Jimi Hendrix to “Hotel California” by the Eagles.

That’s how it is with us Boomers.  We’ve lived long enough to have memories that span decades.

First Barbie went through menopause, then the microwave oven turned 60, and now, Bubble Wrap.

What did we do before Bubble Wrap?  And why am I using capitalization as if it were a proper person?  Because, I guess, it deserves some place of honor.

According to the manufacturer, Sealed Air, this “pop icon” rose to acclaim not only because it was a fantastic cushioning material but because of our compulsive popping, stomping, and twisting Bubble Wrap into our hearts.  Check out The Bubble Wrap Book to see just how nuts we can get about how to use our beloved Bubble Wrap.

You know how addictive popping those air bubbles is, which is why it should be no surprise to find out that there are websites dedicated to just Bubble Wrap.  Virtual-BubbleWrap.com dedicates itself exclusively to all things Bubble Wrap, including sending virtual Bubble Wrap to all your friends via email so they can pop their frustrations away.  Fun and environmentally friendly, too.

The folks at Virtual-BubbleWrap.com even have a few issues of Bubble Wrap etiquette that I would like to share with you:

• Don’t pop someone else’s bubble wrap without permission.
• Don’t pop bubble wrap in quiet public places, like libraries, unless you want it confiscated. (My note: Librarians are famous for keeping copious supplies of confiscated Bubble Wrap.)
• Don’t pop bubble wrap in a store if you haven’t paid for it. They get cranky when their rolls of bubble wrap are all limp.
• It is always good form to offer to share your bubble wrap.
• Giving your bubble wrap to children is good for Karma points.

If you wanted to take the time, you could find everything from furniture to wedding dresses made from Bubble Wrap.  You’ll find Bubble Wrap plays a main character in movies and television programs on occasion.  I’ll bet you rarely get through a week without at least one encounter with Bubble Wrap.

So, how did we live without Bubble Wrap?  In even the basic sense, consider the last time you unwrapped some very old boxes still in storage at your parents’ or grandparents’ house.  Everything was wrapped in newspapers.  I sat for hours and poured over old newspapers when unpacking a box of dishes stored for decades.  I wonder what our future generations will think when they run across the Bubble Wrap surrounding our old china and crystal?  There won’t be anything to read to connect the person who packed the dishes to the happenings in the world.  There will, however, be some fantastic stress relief!  I hope they will understand what a gift Bubble Wrap is.

Pop a few today and celebrate!

During two decades of fascination with space exploration and all things lunar, the public was sold the dream of cooking just like the astronauts, and won’t that be keen?!  Hey, we drank Tang by the gallons because the astronauts did… you youngsters just don’t get it.

Once this space age method of cooking started to catch on, there was no stopping it.  By the mid 1970′s microwave ovens, first sold as the Radarange, were outselling traditional gas ovens.  Is this a good thing?  I don’t know.  Is the microwave oven handy?  I guess so.  Can you cook a meal in a microwave oven that looks like the pictures on the cookbooks?  The jury is still out.  Don’t get me wrong; I have a microwave and I’ve been known to use it.  Still…

I understand that there is a lot of evidence by scientists and nutritionists that microwaving our food may not leave all the food intact, nutritionally speaking.  Take, for example, broccoli.

A study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture investigated the effects of various methods of cooking broccoli. Of all the methods of preparation, microwaving caused the greatest loss in nutrients.  Quoting from the study “Clear disadvantages were detected when broccoli was microwaved, namely high losses of flavonoids (97%), sinapic acid derivatives (74%) and caffeoyl-quinic acid derivatives (87%).”  These elements are most recognizable as the things that are considered antioxidants, anti-allergic, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral.  But microwaving our vegetables has become standard procedure.

And who can forget blissfully warming our baby’s bottles in the good old microwave back in the ’70′s and ’80′s?  Today?  Good Lord!  No one would dare!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  This is again so true.  I’m sure Mr. Spencer did a good thing when he figured out how to bombard our food with microwaves.  There are probably many “spin off” inventions that really do benefit humankind – perhaps in the field of medicine.

As for me, when I have a plate of food to heat up, a cup of coffee to reheat, or some vegetables to cook, I’ll choose the old fashioned way once again.  There’s nothing wrong with using real heat to make food hot.

Call me crazy, but I want to eat food that hasn’t been bombarded, thank you very much.