Aunt Jeanette

Got the news this morning that my Aunt Jeanette died yesterday evening. She would have been eighty-six next month. Bless her.

She was my mom's sister, the one just younger than Mom. Grandma and Grandpa raised a family of seven children, one boy first and then six girls. Aunt Jeanette was right around twenty years old when I was born.

After World War II ended, she married my handsome Uncle Don. They then moved to southern Illinois and lived in a teeny-tiny trailer while he went to school and Aunt Jeanette worked to support them. After graduation they came back home to northern Illinois.

Some of my earliest memories are of being taken places by them. Ice skating in our city park, to a carnival, on hikes, to Uncle Don's mom's house where they were doing some painting. I distinctly remember picking up the paint brush when all adult backs were turned and quickly painting my white leather shoes.

All seven of the aunts and uncles (my parents included) lived and raised their families within a few miles of each other. There were thirteen of us cousins that grew up together. All the families celebrated every holiday and birthday together. Later on when I was in high school, there was a rash of little babies again which added six more to the extended family.

Aunt Jeanette had four children of her own . . . two boys first and then a little later two girls. She did day care for twin boys (toddlers) at one point . . . who would have guessed that it would be in preparation for the arrival of her own twin granddaughters when she was seventy-two! At that point, she jumped in with both feet to help her youngest daughter with the babies for months often staying overnight.

She was the ultimate homemaker creating a warm, comfortable home. Great cook, fantastic baker. I know she gave away millions of pounds (I'm not kidding) of baked goods and was forever packaging up meals to deliver to someone in need or sending goodies to kids away at school . . . or to us living six hundred miles away. Uncle Don often said he should buy stock in 3M because she went through so much tape and wrapping material.

I talked to her sometime last week. Even though the conversation was difficult because of her heavy medication, her sunshiney outlook and quirky sense of humor still came through. She had what sounded like laryngitis and said she would call me when her voice was better.

Aunt Jeanette was the very last of a generation. The last one of my aunts and uncles to go. Her passing truly does signify an end. I think I'll always remember all of them as they were when I was growing up. My daughter says that's how it should be.

I told Aunt Jeanette often that I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. I'm still working on it. She gave me a lot to shoot for.

Update On How Our Honey Bees Be

Yesterday we went out to check on our bee hives. Here Roy is opening up the first hive. All of the pictures included in this post were taken then.

In northeastern Minnesota, the long, cold winters are devastatingly hard on bees. This past winter was just such a typical winter, and our bees suffered. We made sure to leave them plenty of food for over-wintering, but because of extreme conditions, it didn't seem to do much good.

We went into winter with five hives. This spring was cold, wet and gray which made things worse for the bees. After having to stay clustered together in an effort to stay warm all winter and not moving about in the hive to get to their stores, their "hibernation" season was made even longer by the bad spring weather. With no sunshine, no warm days for them to get out for cleansing flights or even realize winter was over(!), more of them died.

When the queen bees started laying brood in late winter, the bees had to stay in a yet tighter ball cluster to keep the brood alive. The main aim was still to keep themselves, the queen and the brood alive which took too much of their energy.

Bottom line, when Roy checked the hives in early April, we found we had lost four of the five hives.

The remaining one hive had a handful of bees and a queen but no live brood. Roy was doubtful that there were even enough bees left to rebuild the hive. Never underestimate the strength and determination of a honey bee though. Gradually through the late spring and summer, that rag-tag little bundle of bees built themselves up into a moderately strong hive.

A good friend that we had gotten started in beekeeping a few years ago fared better over winter than we did. He lives approximately 40 miles away and must have a micro-climate that is kinder to bees than we do because his consistently seem to do better than ours. He gave us two splits from two of his hives in early June. Splits consist of two frames of bees including eggs, some partially sealed brood, some completely sealed brood plus a queen cell. Those two splits situated in their new home (on our homestead) developed through the summer into strong hives.

The above is a shot of our bee enclosure. We have them totally enclosed in a chain link cage including a chain link covering on top. This is because we've got black bears that would love nothing better than to get their big paws on some honey. The whole enclosure is inside an electric fence also. The chain link fence might not keep out a determined, very hungry bear (after he went through the electric fence) but hopefully it would cause enough noise that we could get out there before the hives were totally destroyed.

So we ended the season this fall with three moderately strong hives although they hadn't put by much honey due to having to use all their energy to build themselves up over the summer. Needless to say, there was no honey for us to take off our hives this year.

Without a good supply of honey in the hives, we knew the bees were going to need a little extra help over this coming winter, so this fall we fed sugar water.

Below is the sugar syrup feeding tray which sits on the very top of the hive.

Each of the three hives took about twenty pounds of sugar along with some biodynamic additions to enhance the syrup mixture. We fed until the bees stopped taking the syrup and at this point, Roy feels they're ready for winter. We're now waiting for seriously cold weather to wrap the hives with 1" thick foam insulation to help keep them warm. Then we hope for a bee-friendly winter, early spring, and bountiful summer for them to flourish in. Then maybe, just maybe there will be enough honey for us to take some for our own use next fall.

But You Look Clean and Don't Smell . . .

When we first moved here to the great state of Minnesota, it was to 80 acres of land out in the boonies which had originally been homesteaded in the early 1900s, but then deserted since the early 1920s. There was no house on the property (it had long ago burned down), and what had once been hay fields and garden area were overgrown with trees that were over 50 years old. The only building left on the property was the hand-hewn square log barn. The roof had caved in, but the four walls were still standing.

In order to have shelter, we had an 8' x 50', 15 year old house trailer moved up here from Illinois. It had very little insulation and was truly like living in a tin can.

There was the original hand-dug well on the property that, we were told, had been boarded over to keep animals from falling into it. We had a terrible time locating the well because it was well hidden by a mass of brambles grown over it. But once we found it, my husband pumped it out, went down into it (it was lined with rock) and cleaned it up the best he could. We built a new platform over the top and put a hand pump on it. The water came into the house by the bucket full and that was our water system for the first few years.

The old well served us well (no pun intended) but it faithfully went dry twice a year . . . in August when the ground water seepage dried up and in March when the ground water froze so that it didn't flow into the well. In August we took jugs down to the shore of Lake Superior and got our water there. In March I melted snow (a slow, laborious project) for all of our water.

Our bathroom facilities were located at the end of a meandering path through the woods. There was a large window in our outhouse with a scenic view. I kept our biffy clean and odor-free which, contrary to what some people think, is not hard to do.

We either took sponge baths or filled the old aluminum wash tub on the kitchen floor. Primitive though our water situation may sound, we had a system that worked well for us.

Our second year on the homestead, a Montessori School opened in town. Because our daughter was an only child, we thought it would be beneficial for her to get some socialization with other children her age. The school encouraged parents to be involved so we had a good number of meetings and committees involved with the curriculum.

One of the mothers I met and was involved with was . . . how shall I say this? More than a little on the up-tight side and basically, I think, unhappy. Her family had come to northern Minnesota because her husband, who worked for the Department of Natural Resources, was transferred here. She hated being 130 miles from a shopping mall, she hated the lack of cultural events, she hated the weather, basically she didn't want to be here.

At one of the school functions, someone asked me where we lived. I told them and they commented that we didn't have electricity that far out, did we? The discussion continued about our lifestyle and when the up-tight mother heard me explain that we didn't have running water or plumbing in the house, she got a look on her face like she had just eaten a bad piece of fish and said, "Oh, my God! But . . . but you always LOOK so clean."

Yep. I was clean. We were all clean. I kept a clean house and we ate off clean dishes. Our level of hygiene was right up there and none of us ever got sick. Each year we refined our own alternative electrical and water systems a little more. We ended up with quite adequate systems and many people coming to our home didn't realize we weren't hooked up to grid power.

Then came the year when public utility power came down our little back road, and we brought it in to the house. We actually became quite "modranized" (as one old, salt of the earth, backwoods gal in the area used to say). Why, we even had (ta-dah!) running water and indoor plumbing.

You Won't See My Neck Until Spring

I'm comfy this early morning in my turtleneck, sweatshirt and stretchy pants. The house is still a mite on the chilly side because we're not enough into the winter season to bank the wood stove for a serious overnight fire.

The sun is just starting to peek through the east tree line into the front yard. Sun?!? Great balls of fire, are we going to actually see some sun today? One can only hope! How welcome that would be.

As you can see, all of our trees have lost their leaves except for the apple trees which seem to hang on to them as long as they possibly can. Bare November. No snow cover right now. We've had a few light coverings that quickly melted. The grass is still mostly green which is nice for the poultry still eager to get out every morning to do their thing.

Here are Mr. and Mrs. Shetland Goose taking a morning drink of fresh water. You can see the shards of ice behind them that formed on the water pan overnight with our 28° temp.

The Virginia Creeper that is so beautiful all summer and fall is now naked and shivering this early morning. Looks uncared for and disheveled, doesn't it? (Kinda like my hair right at the moment.)

We're back to having cooked grains/cereals for breakfast a few mornings a week . . . it just seems right now. This morning it's kamut. I take mine with a little brown sugar, a sliced banana and milk. Roy prefers butter and soy sauce. Each to his own. C'est la Vie. Whatever turns your crank or floats your boat.

Now I'm gonna go add another little piece of wood to the fire and be grateful that it's turtleneck season again. Yup, time to snuggle in and dream about that illusive long, slow winter we'd like to experience.

Creepy Corn

Annie over at Maple Corners has mentioned "creepy" corn in her last couple of posts. Corn as in corn stalks. As in fields of standing corn stalks. As in acres and acres of standing corn stalks.

For those of you who have never lived in corn growing country, corn stalks often grow very tall. Taller than you can see over. If you walk down a corn row and lose sight of the end of the field where you entered, you can very quickly become disorientated and a kind of cornfield claustrophobia takes over.

I grew up in Illinois and when I was fifteen and too young to get a "real" job, I de-tasseled corn for a summer. The crew was made up of about 30-40 girls, mostly young teens but some in their late teens also. We met in a city park each morning at 6 AM where a semi-truck picked us up. We rode in the back of the truck on benches that had been bolted to the floor. Sort of like cattle, only cleaner, and at 6 AM, quieter.

Each day we were hauled out into farm country, to a different farm (or different field) where we worked until 3 or 4 in the afternoon de-tasseling corn.

When we got to the designated field, we would spread out at the ends of the rows of corn, and each girl would head into the field walking in between two rows. As you walked down the row, you de-tasseled each stalk (reaching up above your head, grasping the tassel at the top of the stalk, pulling it out and dropping it on the ground) working both the row on your right and the row on your left.

The first couple of hours in the morning were the best (sort of) because the temperature was as cool as it was going to be all day. But the corn was usually heavily covered with dew and you were soon drenched with water from rubbing up against the stalks. As the sun climbed in the sky, it got hotter and hotter, muggier and muggier, and then it didn't matter that your clothes were wet from the dew because you were sweating so much.

Even though the temperature most days reached the 90s, you had to wear a shirt with long sleeves and long pants because as you moved down the rows the blades of corn would inflict cuts on exposed skin. Usually, in a week's time, at least one girl fainted from the heat. Hot, dirty work.

So where does the "creepy" corn come in? Some of the fields were huge . . . and we never knew how big they actually were or how long it would take to reach the end of the rows. (Often it would take hours to work to the end of a field.) Some of the older, more experienced de-tasselers worked as fast as they could so they would come out on the end and have time to lie down and rest and visit before being picked up by the truck and taken either to a spot to eat our brown bag lunches or to a new field. Some were naturally slower in their work habits so although we all started out at the same time, we didn't finish our rows at the same time.

To say de-tasseling corn was a boring job is an understatement. Sometimes a friend and I would try to stay moving down the rows together at the same pace, but often I would come out of my 15-year old reverie and realize I was totally alone in an endless field of corn stalks. How long had it been since I had heard or seen anyone? How much longer was the row? Was I ahead or behind everybody else? Was I so far behind that the truck at the end of the field would leave without me? Would I be lost forever and die in the middle of this creepy corn?

Halloween mazes cut in fields of dry, standing corn couldn't be much creepier than those I worked in that summer back in Illinois. How much did I earn? Sixty-five cents an hour. But if you worked the whole summer de-tasseling season (seven days a week) without missing one single day, your pay went up to a whopping eighty-five cents an hour. Few of us made the bonus.

A Blast of Dynamite

This morning I'm feeling like it will take an explosion, or at least someone wielding a big stick, to get me moving. "Tis a frosty morning (gray and drippy AGAIN) that made our new flannel sheets feel mighty good. And, yes, I did sleep in a little . . . had to do something profitable with that extra hour we gained last night.

November 1st today. How did that happen? I truly feel September and October went by faster this year than July and August. Anybody else notice that? I'm still struggling with the "summer" jobs not yet completed. The time is fast approaching when I need to throw in the proverbial towel and face reality. They are not going to get done this year. Dang. Seems I'm always fighting summer chores in the fall, fall chores in the winter, on and on. I want to go skippingly along rather than step . . . trip . . . step . . . trip.

Eggs? Eggs? Anybody got eggs? The lack of daylight (could have something to do with total lack of SUN light, too) has thrown our chickens into a molt and, as my husband, puts it, we're getting 1/2 an egg a day. Our daughter, Chicken Mama of the Northwoods, isn't in any better shape. The farm where we buy our milk has had a "Sorry, no eggs right now" sign on their cooler for a couple of weeks. Times like this sure do point up how very much I use fresh, organic eggs in my cooking.

I'm looking at the (dusty) Halloween decorations around the house this morning knowing they need to go and make way for the Thanksgiving ones. Turkey Day will be here in about 3-1/2 weeks. Also time for me to make my annual batch of fruitcake from my mom's recipe. It's not your usual fruitcake. (You know, dry, heavy, sweet but tasteless and can be used as a doorstop or boot scraper by the back door.) Mom's is more like a moist, heavy spice cake and has no candied fruit in it but rather a mixture of dried fruits: dates, apples, apricots, raisins (or craisins), and peaches. Made with honey rather than sugar which adds to the moistness. It's baked in loaf pans and is so good. I give our daughter a loaf as soon as I get it baked, and she soaks hers in spirits . . . rum or brandy or some such . . . until Christmas time. Not a bad little treat if you're home for the evening and in your jammies prior to indulging.

I've been sitting here sipping my morning latte while typing, and I think I'm getting sleepier. (Something's not working!) So I fear the only solution to my oncoming stupor is to get up, and do something a little more physical.

Look out ghosts, bats, goblins and ghoulies! You're gonna get packed away for another year. And it wouldn't hurt if I dusted and vacuumed either.