Nostagia

Twenty Years Ago Today

Stuckey’s truck stops make the best pecan candy. It’s so amazing, we’ll forgive them for spelling “y’all” wrong.

This photo was taken March 21, 1991. Twenty years ago today.

I remember because it was my half birthday, and back then, something as momentous as a half birthday seemed pretty darn important.

We were on an excursion to Vicksburg, outside Stuckey’s getting gas and pecan log rolls. I was goofing off and taking pictures of my cousins using scotch tape to deform their faces when my Uncle Tom leaned over and quietly suggested we take a photo of the sign. He said, You’ll want to remember this one day.

I obliged and didn’t think much of it. I knew the Gulf War had just ended and all the adults were talking about the price of gas and how ticked off they were that it hadn’t gone back to being under a dollar a gallon. Funny thing is, somehow, in my mind, I honestly thought Uncle Tom meant I would one day tell my children about the time…When I was a kid and there was a war on and we were willing to pay as much as $1.13 a gallon!

Truth is Uncle Tom worked in the oil industry for decades and probably saw what was coming today. You ought to hear what he has to say about tomorrow….

I think $1.13 looks pretty good right now.

Grandma Lucile’s Beer Can Alligator

by PEACHES 11 Comments

By popular request, I present to you, Grandma Lucile’s beer can alligator with genuine pearl teeth! Ta Da!

I told you it was amazing.

The whole body is made from a 20 old fashioned beer can tab tops laced together with green felt. Simple, yet genius. Suppose you could make it with the regular can tops you see today, but I don’t think it would come out as well. The feet and head are snipped directly from aluminum beer cans.

And THE TEETH! I wish I had a macro lens on my camera so you could see the teensy weensy stitches she used to sew in these tiny pearls. For someone like me who is hard to impress on the craft front, this little gator blew my mind.

Wait ‘til Christmas and maybe Bird will let me take some photos of Grandma Lucile’s holiday village. There are a dozen different yarn’tastic structures, each more intricate than the next! A courthouse. And ice cream shop. The general store. The windmill. Every house has a music box. One of them plays Edelweiss. I think it’s the post office. Who knew postal workers loved Julie Andrews?

Hip-Hip-Hooray for Grannies!

PS: Did y’all see Michele’s latest Make it Good Challenge? Check it out!

The Old Tomato Wreath

by PEACHES 24 Comments

Ten years ago I lived upstairs from The Old Tomato. Her real name was something like Veronica Pommerossi or Verachi Pomodesa or Villanova Panchinelli…whatever it was, it sounded like vecchio pomodoro, which roughly translates from Italian into old tomato. It was an acuarte description too –she was wrinkled and acidic, small and round, squishy and strangely sweet like a roma tomato that had been left out in the sun.

Her tan was impressive. All summer long she could be found in front of the building, sitting in a folding lawn chair and listening to Frank Sinatra on her portable radio. She didn’t speak much English but managed to express disgust and/or worldly advice at nearly every passing person. Teenage boys would walk by wearing baggy jeans and she would yell Why you don’t put pants on your ass? You try to catch you the raccoon? Put pants on your ass and you catch TWO raccoons!

Raccoons?

One time there was a string of robberies in the building next door and she took to sitting on the stoop waving a giant metal spoon at every suspicious person who past the building. I sort of wondered what she would do with the giant spoon, but alas, the opportunity never arose, as the robberies stopped. We took to calling her The Old Tomato: Crime Fighter at Large.

Sadly, the summer passed and so did she. Shortly after Halloween The Old Tomato suffered a massive stroke and died a few days later. Her family came and cleared out a few prized possessions then hired a flock of teenage boys to clear out the rest of her belongings and set them by the dumpster. It was a sad sight: her whole life in boxes laid out in an alley, discarded by raccoon chasing boys in baggy pants.

One of them saw me walking up the stairs and said Hey lady, want some Christmas stuff? I don’t feel right putting Jesus in the garbage, and handed me a box the size of a stove, filled with ornaments and wax evergreens.

It was her Christmas box. How could I say no?

Now, it’s not like I needed a bunch of funky Seventies Christmas stuff, even back then. In fact, I didn’t even keep a Christmas tree in those days. It just broke my heart to think of throwing it away. The box sat in a closet with the water heater for years.

One day the water heater broke and the repair man came in and moved the box, tipping it over and the contents fell out. Instead of apologizing, you know what he did? He made fun of me. He said I was hoarding someone else’s memories. He said I should get rid of the box.

Perhaps he had a point. Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut. I ‘m not sure, but I got so crazy defensive that I became determined to take every single one of those ornaments out of the box and put them on display. Good bad, ugly, broken down, I was going to take them out and let them shine. I still didn’t have a tree at that time so I settled on clustering them together and tying them onto a wreath. It’s like a whole Christmas tree clustered together in a single circle.

I love it.

There are glass balls and satin bells and needle point poinsettias…gold bows and green icicles….even a one-eyed angel. Why, the only thing missing is a raccoon.

The other two smaller wreaths have specific affiliations too; the one on the left is made from candy I picked up on a wonderful vacation, and the one on the right is made from ornaments on a tree that used to be on display at a previous job. There are more scattered around the house. My goal is to make one wreath a year, affiliated with one person or place or event. They are accumulating quickly.

I’m still deciding what this year’s wreath will be. I’ll have to clean my cupboards out after Christmas and see what comes out to play. It’s a good post-Christmas pre-New years activity.

I’ll keep you posted 😉

Good Old Fashioned Salt Dough

by PEACHES 8 Comments

I feel like a cheater for posting a project like this.

It’s not like I invented salt dough or anything special. I’m not even making anything that hasn’t been done a hundred times over, either. I’d feel more entitled to write a post on how to make a decent peanut butter sandwich.

However, even though salt dough has been popular since the dawn of time, it sure seems like every year I find someone who has never made it. Not when they were a kid, not with their own kids. They are living salt dough free. Let us show them the light!

Salt dough is oodles of fun for munchkins and adults alike. It’s cheap, easy, fun, and with the addition of water-proof varnish, it can last for years. Los of people I know (myself included) have salt dough ornaments and hand prints and figurines from when they were knee-high to a grasshopper.

You can do your research to find variations on the recipe, I will take mine directly from my Grandmother Pumpkin recipe.

Ingredients:

One part Morton’s salt
One part warm water
Two parts white flour

Optional:

Add one spoon full of oil to make it flexible and slow drying [like playdough]
Add one spoonful of lemon juice to make it durable and hard [like Xmas ornaments]

Directions

Mix together to form a ball.
Roll to .5” thickness and biscuit cut.*
Bake 250 for one hour or until hardened, or air dry 48 hours.

* Translation for Non-Southerners or Irish-People-Who-Bake-Too-Much: “biscuit cut” means use a jar or a glass or a empty tin can, or cookie cutter to cut the dough in circles. You can also use a simple butter knife and get creative.

salt dough + plastic knives = munchkin menorah

For colored dough, add food coloring, Kool-Aid, or paint into the water before adding it to the dry ingredients. Or you can paint your creations after they dry. If you want your ornaments to last, spray them with varnish, or, if you REALLY want to be sure they last, you can do like my third grade teacher and dip them in a quart of outdoor strength polyurethane. Those suckers will stand the test of time!

An Open Letter to Neil Diamond

by PEACHES 37 Comments

Dear Mr. Diamond,I am mad at you. Impressed, befuddled, blubbering on the living room floor and trying to explain the significance of a song like Shilo to my cat…because of you, Mr. Diamond.

This is all your fault. I have decided you owe me. And now I have a request.

See, a few weeks ago, while under the influence of prescription cough syrup, I made this necklace out of pearls and fingernails. Fierce right? Then I went and wrote an unreasonably long post about why I made the aforementioned necklace. Why? Because, frankly, the cough syrup went to my head and who else is going to listen to me spill my guts on these things? Blogging is free and cheaper than therapy. You should totally try it sometime.

My post was the story of a raging former beauty queen and her children’s lemming like capacity for common sense. It even included a “pre pubescent Texan stripper” reference that generated a lovely email from a real-life not-so-pubescent former Texan stripper named Jacqueline (hey Jax!), who, I might add, has promised to teach me to dance something called the rocket ship if I come to Fort Worth and show her how to make crepe paper flowers. I am really looking forward to it.

I also got some other emails, including three about you, Mr. Diamond. See, somewhere in the middle of my epic and Tolstoy-esque eloquence, I mentioned that my Mom loved your music. It played non-stop in our house for years. When she got sick, my dad installed speakers and stereo wires all over our house so she could hear your music playing in every room. Even the bathroom. Have you ever listened to the Jungletime in the shower? No? Let me tell you something: it’s Friggin Rad.

Thing is, Mr. Diamond, that line about your music was scarcely more than a mention in a very long story. No one gave a hoot about that fingernail necklace. It’s all about you, you, you.

Then, last week, again I mentioned your song Porcupine Pie and got more emails, all about you. Don’t get me wrong, I love your music almost as much as I love getting emails, but dude, Mr. Diamond, you stole my thunder.

I am mad at you.

Fast forward to tonight. It’s nearly midnight and and I’m watching your recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live chumming it up and talking about your new album of cover songs. Must admit, I prefer your original work, but who am I pass up a new version of Desperado? Thought I would take a quick glace at your stuff on Itunes…new, old, and otherwise.

Big mistake.

Fast forward ten minutes later, to me, right now, on the living room floor, listening to your version of Midnight Train to Georgia, blowing my nose in my shirt, blubbering to the cat about a simpler place and time.

Now the cat is mad at you too.

Mr. Diamond, sir, knock it off. I have work to do. I could be doing something important like glue-gunning sequins to a hippopotamus Christmas tree topper, but instead, now I’m cruising ITunes for songs I haven’t listened to in years and drudging up all kinds of angry, festering emotional dust bunnies. Twenty seconds scanning this list, thinking of all the times and places in my life where you have played a part….

Whoa.

When I scan this list and look at your catalog of work and the course of my life, it becomes plain as day: you, Mr. Diamond, are everywhere.

You were there in the back corner of my elementary school auditorium when I saw people making out for the first time. And by people, I mean 13-year-olds. The whole school was singing Song Sung Blue in a round, lead by Mr. Bukema the music teacher. And by music teacher, I mean the world’s hottest obo player. Holy crap I love that song.

You were there playing Kentucky Woman in the lobby of the restaurant where I saw my ex-fiancé out with his new girlfriend NOT EVEN THREE WEEKS after we broke up. I hated her. She was a size zero and made a casual reference to Kierkegaard in the first five minutes. You would hate her too. I didn’t eat anything at the restaurant that night, or for the next week, for that matter….blah blah blah….now I’m over it, but, Mr. Diamond, if you ever decide to write a song called Up Yours Kentucky Woman, that would be really awesome.

You were there in an army bar in Bishkek, Kyrgystan on New Years Eve 2004. I know, I had never heard of Kyrgyzstan either. It was impressive. Most of the bar patrons smelled like camels and grain alcohol and no one batted an eyelash when the bar keeper hired an exotic dancer to drop by for a live show. So there she was, wearing a bikini made of scrap leather and fur, shaking her tail feather, making freakishly strong eye contact, carrying a boom box with her song of choice: We’re Coming to America.

You were there the one time I ever saw my father cry. It was a random morning when I heard him go out to the car and play Hello Again louder than that car stereo had even been played before. From the corner of my window I could see he had his elbows up on the steering wheel with his head in his hands. When the song ended, he grabbed the cassette tape and turned it back to AM radio like nothing ever happened. He never saw me through the window. I never asked him about it. I really wish I could go back and ask him.

You were there with me on my first real baby sitting job as I sang Sweet Caroline to the 16-month-old little girl whose diaper I was changing at the time. Sweet Caroline is just the sort of upbeat, bouncy song that is good for distracting babies when they are having their private parts cleaned by a strange new babysitter. The crescendo peaked with the line about …reaching out, touching me, touching you… and a sudden explosion of butterscotch sludge. An explosion. I’m not even kidding. It got in my hair, Mr. Diamond. I heard you wrote that song about Caroline Kennedy, but did you know that song has that effect on babies?

You were there when Miss Kimmy, Washington County’s most enchanting 23-year-old tattooed tap dancing teacher, chose the music to the annual recital. Have you ever seen a pack of chubby eight-year-olds shuffle-ball-change to Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show? Yeah, me neither. And neither did Zynetta Hughes’ Mom. She didn’t know your music and thought you were making fun of Christians. Don’t be offended, she was one of those snake dancing church goers. That’s a lie. Mrs. Hughes didn’t dance with snakes, it’s just an expression. Actually, come to think of it, there was a real snake dancing church two counties over but Mrs. Hughes was not a member. Mrs. Hughes was very normal, just uptight. Although, she named her kid Zynetta, so, not that normal.

You were there when I had too much to drink at a wedding reception and danced my butt off to Thank the Lord for the Night Time…one thing lead to another and I told a good friend I hated her dress. She felt so self conscious about her appearance that she left the party before the bride and groom cut the cake to another favorite of yours, Red, Red Wine. I sat there listening to you sing about your blue, blue heart and thought Oh my God, when did I get to be such an insensitive piece of sh*t?

Well, it’s hard to pin point that exact moment in time, but I’m guessing you were there too.

I could fill a book with memories of your songs and their attachments to people and places that you have never heard of…but I digress. There is work to be done and a hippopotamus tree topper to sequin. I cannot stumble down memory lane with you and your Two-Bit Manchild music any further this evening, Mr. Diamond.

However, before I go, I would like to make a small request. Since it is now abundantly clear you will be writing the soundtrack to my life, past, present, and future, I for one would like to hear more harmonicas. You hardly ever incorporate them in your music and they are my favorite instrument. Don’t get me wrong, you know how to write a song just dandy without my two cents, but, if I’m going to be hearing you at nearly every pivotal moment in my life, I feel that I am entitled to some input.

More harmonicas please.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Peaches

###

Click here to read about the time a company paid me to photoshop Neil Diamond and my cat.

Big Alice’s Apple Kuchen

by PEACHES 20 Comments

Big Alice’s Apple Kuchen: Another Dead Aunt Story

I was standing funeral home’s parking lot playing hacky-sack with some family members when Franny asked “whatever happened to that deaf lady? You know, Old Rubber Face” to which Herbert replied “don’t you remember, we buried her years ago” to which hitomeone else replied “oh yeah, with the apple cake!” to which everyone replied in unison “OH YEAH. THE APPLE CAKE!”

Big Alice had already been gone nearly a decade, more than half our lives, and we were still talking about her apple cake. It was that good.

For a woman who could not hear and rarely spoke, Big Alice could communicate across an ocean with her facial expressions. In fact, it was not until Herbert’s mention in the parking lot that day that I realized she was deaf. In my mind, we had spoken dozens of times. Heck, we were pals! She played in my blanket fort. I fetched her unfiltered cigarettes from the patio. She saw me hide brussel sprouts into my napkin and didn’t tattle. I didn’t say anything when I saw her taking a swig off a wine bottle in the kitchen just before she took it out to the table. Herbert’s news that she was deaf came as shock. In vain I searched my memory for the sound of her voice.

Isn’t it strange how the very young and the very old have no problem communicating without words?

Big Alice was born somewhere in western Austria. I’m not entirely sure where, but I know she spent most of WWII in a work camp in Eastern France. The fractured stories conveyed across various members of my paternal grandmother’s family are not pretty, nor are they my stories to tell in this forum. Sufficient to say, Big Alice survived on little more than her sense of humor. She lost her hearing at the age of 23, when a respiratory infection went untreated and spread to her ears and nose. Although she could speak just fine, you rarely heard a word cross her lips. After the war ended and she came to America to live with my Great Aunt Long Shirley and Uncle Karl, she was discouraged from speaking German in effort to assimilate. She learned to read and write in English just fine, but without the ability to hear her own voice, never became comfortable speaking in English with others. Unfortunately, the others did not feel comfortable speaking German in post-war America. Things are different now and we all go crazy celebrating our Germanic heritage, but back then, Big Alice had to rely on her hands and facial expressions as a mode of communication, hence the nick name, “Old Rubber Face.”

Her other nickname, Big Alice, was misleading. The woman weighed as much as a wet hamster. The name came only after she had a daughter, dubbed Little Alice, whose daughter then became known as Tiny Alice. As fate would have it, Tiny Alice recently had a baby girl named Emma, which is a lovely name, but I was really looking forward to one day adding an entry to my address book under the name Infinitesimal Alice.

There’s always next time.

A trio of Alices was not unusual. Most of the members of my father’s extended family share the same 6 or 7 first names, all named after a handful of people who died long ago and far away. One Thanksgiving at Baby Shirley’s house (note: Baby Shirley was pushing 50 at the time), someone called out from the kitchen, “Hey Joe, you have a phone call” and five men and two women stood up.

And that’s not even counting the kiddy table. And by kiddy table, I mean a locked basement covered in tarps, duct tape, and a dozen buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The visual of 20+ children without adult supervision, screaming and squealing and playing Pilgrims and Indians while sucking on drumsticks might strike you as something out of Lord of the Flies, but to me, it just seemed like a normal family activity.

Tangent: When I tell you my Dad has a big family, I don’t mean he had a lot of brothers and sisters. It grates on my nerves when I hear people define “family” as a circle of immediate blood relatives. Family, at its best, is so much bigger and more wonderful than just a tiny group of people with a common gene pool. Some families are related by birth, some by circumstance, and some by love. When I was a kid, my grandfather would meet me at the bus stop and walk me home and ask me about my day. One day I came home and reported that there was boy on the playground teasing my friend Michelle and saying she didn’t have a family because she was adopted. My Grandfather asked me what I did about it and I told him, rather proudly, that I ran and got the teacher who immediately stopped the teasing. He looked at me disappointed and made a tisk-tisk noise with his tongue. I asked him what I should have done instead and he said “Beat the tar out of him.”

That’s family.

My dad’s family defines its members by an elaborate and extensive phone tree where three people call three people and so on and so on. It was initially started back in the 50’s as a typical cold war precaution, but it is still alive and kicking today, used mostly to pass along news of births, engagements, and unfortunate passings. Email could do the job, but what is the fun of that? This way, when someone dies, the phone tree starts off and three people call three people and so on and so on, and before you know it, everyone knows and everyone is cooking. This means that within two hours of someone’s death, their living room will contain no less than 12 casseroles, 10 cakes and pies, 8 trays of cookies, 5 pickling salads, 3 bottles of wine 2 cheese trays and 1 tomato aspic. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, there will be a roast turkey on the doorstep come morning, courtesy of Baby Shirley’s eldest daughter, Hairy Frances.

Everyone has a special dish. It never changes. For example, Baby Shirley’s middle daughter, Baby Roberta, has been making pinwheel cookies for forty years and no one makes them quite like her. If you see pinwheel cookies, you just know they came from Baby Roberta because no one would dare step on her territory. Don’t even bother asking for the recipe. She makes them the best and it’s not even worth trying anything else. If I lived in the area and someone died, I would be in charge of bringing over a veggie tray. It doesn’t matter that I don’t eat raw vegetables, there is no room in the baked goods department where I rightly belong. I’ll need to wait until someone in charge of cakes and pies dies before I get a crack at delivering something good and tasty. This territorial land war over dessert cobblers is how the legend of Big Alice’s Apple Kuchen was born.

Prior to her death, Big Alice would always bring a delicious and wildly popular apple kuchen (fyi: kuchen is German for cake). Regardless of how much food was around, it was always the first dish to go. She only made it when someone was born or when someone died. Big Alice was high up on the phone tree and the kuchen didn’t take long to make, so she was usually one of the first to arrive. This meant if you wanted some kuchen, you needed to get your butt over to the house faster than everyone else. It brought out strange and competitive behavior. One time I saw Uncle Sloppy Joe sneak some in his pocket and nibble on pieces as they carried Old Rusty Uncle Karl’s casket out the door. That might seem rude to you, but it’s probably what Old Rusty would have done if the situation was reversed. The kuchen was just that good.

The afternoon Big Alice died of a sudden aneurysm, everyone said “what a shame” “what a pity” “at least she didn’t see it coming” and agreed it was a good thing to be taken without great suffering or pain. They went on their way and said “see you shortly” before hanging up the phone. By 6 p.m. Little Alice opened the door to see Aunt Shirley carrying a glass Pyrex dish covered in foil. It was kuchen. The gesture was sweet and passive aggressive. By making apple kuchen for Big Alice’s funeral, she would secure it as her signature dish for decades to come. She wanted to win the popularity contest. Can you blame her? I couldn’t. And neither could Aunt Roberta when she showed up carrying an aluminum tray of her own rendition of what else, apple kuchen. Then the Rauches showed up with more kuchen. And the Millers. And then Big Franny. And then Hairy Frances (she was tired of making turkey)….and so on until 7pm there were THIRTEEN APPLE KUCHENS spread out on the dining table. Each were delicious and slightly different, but none were quite the same as Big Alice’s Apple Kuchen. Everyone agreed to hold back on claiming the sacred kuchen spot. No one made it for many years. Until now. I have taken it back!

Before she died, Big Alice gave her recipe to Little Alice, who gave it to me here. And now I’m giving it you! It’s no great secret and I’m positive she left out something special, but it comes pretty close. It’s easy to make and easy to customize to suit your family’s taste. the end result is somewhere between coffee cake and apple pie. It keeps well and goes great with ice cream.

CAKE
1 Box of yellow cake mix
1 Cup of light sour cream
1/2 Stick of melted butter
1 Egg + 1 egg white
1/2 Teaspoon salt
Pinch of cinnamon

Mix well and spread over the bottom of a 13″x9″ pan. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

APPLE MIXTURE
While that’s in the oven, mix together with your fingers:
3 cups of peeled apples thinly sliced (or something around 3 cups, that’s around 4 apples decent sized apples)
1/2 Stick melted butter
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
Pinch of lemon zest

+2 Tbsp of Brown Sugar for sprinkling

BAKE
After the apple mixture is tossed and the cake is in the oven 15 minutes, remove it but leave the oven on. Arrange the apples in rows across the top of the warm cake and sprinkle with 2 Tbs of brown sugar. Return it oven and cook 30-35 minutes, until toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm with fresh cream or ice cream!

Happy Kuchen Y’all!

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Nostagia