Summer Energy

 

I don’t keep it a secret, I need peace and quiet to write and develop story ideas. Driving in the car is best. My head starts to hum and the memories just come flooding back to me. This does not work with the kids in the car though…. if they are there I am distracted by their "energy" (this would be a polite word for them arguing).

 

Lately I have had no quiet time, no silent reading time or long car trips alone and I am in trouble. Today I want to write a column (I need to write a column) but I am blank. I can’t get my head around food, my childhood or the Fisherman’s Picnic, which was my intended column topic. After sitting at my keyboard for more than two hours Googling the history of the Fisherman’s Picnic, Grand Marais, I have given up and decided to write about whatever pops into my head, which of course sadly would be nothing as I have a severe case of "writer’s block" or as I like to refer to it, "Sandy’s brain on empty."

Sure I can think of lots of recipes I would like to share with you. Delicious, easy to prepare summer foods that would give you the Norman Rockwell setting you’ve always dreamed of but I have been robbed of any clever antidotes to accompany this fare. All I have ringing in my ears is "He did this," "She said that," "It’s my turn," "Give me my phone back," or my least favorite of all "Hey, let’s wrestle!" Because I know that eventually all wrestling leads to tears or broken furniture. Of course broken furniture leads me to tears, so let’s face it, no one wins in wrestling.

For inspiration I pulled out my Grandma Isabelle’s notebook of recipes. The book is written entirely in her hand and she put a name in the corner of each page telling who gave her the recipe. I love this book and refer to it whenever I want to remember Grandma in the kitchen. The book is stained with bits of batter and grease but you know she used it often as she was running a house with eight busy kids. (Thismakes my three children seem like a walk in the park.)

I can tell which recipes were her favorites because she would make a little star in the corner and write "good" next to it. Today I found her recipe for crab apple pickles. This makes me smile. She had lots of apple trees growing in the yard of her house in Schroeder. I would help grandma by gathering up the crab apples without any wormholes. Thenwe would wash them in the big sink in her kitchen. My other job was to stand at the counter and push a large needle though each apple to keep it from bursting while it cooked. I remember asking her once why we didn’t just use the apples with the wormholes already in them. She made a face. It seemed like a great idea to me at the time— let the worms do all the work.

One summer day my brother and I tried to count all the apple trees in Grandma’s yard but we argued over who was right and my mom told us to drop it. I think her head was buzzing from all our "energ y."

A toast to peaceful summer days in my near future, Sandy

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.

Sam Keen