Oh Those September Nights!

Here it comes again. Fall with all its harvest colors, foggy morns, and blue bowl skies. It always pulls me in diverse directions. The loss of the long summer days, blazing and hazy yellow, makes me sad. I am not really a winter person. I suppose I have too much of my Italian father's Mediterranean blood and not enough of my Pennsylvania Dutch and Irish Mother's. On the other hand, who can resist pumpkin pie, Thanksgiving dinner and a romp in the leaf pile? Unfortunately I don't do much romping any more since age and health do not permit my more frivolous urges. What a loss that is!
Believe it or not, I have walked across Florance, climbed huge toppled trees in Yosemite, and climbed the twisting tower of an ancient Irish church without a strain. What ingrates we people are. All that joyful running about and never a thankful thought, never realizing what it will be like when the ability to run up the stairs or even walk down the street is gone. There comes a time when you are thankful for every day and for every person you love and for every season you live through. Amen.

Listen for the Grace

Just a little while ago I was sitting at the table with tomato juice running down my arms and off my elbows. This making of sauce takes peeling the skins after dropping the fruit in boiling water and getting out as many seeds as possible while you are at it. I may as well bath in it by the time I am through. Still the simmering smell of the sauce surrounds the kitchen and wonders out onto the porch area. That aroma takes me back forty years.
I remember the rich, delicious smell coming from the house on the hill, I was just twenty one. A very inexperienced social worker making house visits in Hocking County. I was way out in the cave area; somewhere above Laurelville. The family that I was visiting were clients that I had not met before. They had a big garden in the back and there was a grinding wheel and two mules. No tractor at this farm house. I don’t know what I expected, but I followed my nose to the back screen door and knocked. A little round woman with an apron and her hair up in a bun came to the door. After introductions, she let me into the kitchen. These first introductions were often awkward. I had found that most people do not like social workers because they are sometimes officious. When they are not, they don’t like them because they remind them that they are beholden. They expect you to go poking around and snooping. I had already been in some places where I did not want to go snooping!
I took a deep, appreciative breath and asked what that wonderful smell was. The lady was warm and tired. Her plumb cheeks were apple red and there were sweat beads along her hair line. She smiled and motioned me into a small dark room off the kitchen. There were bottles of jewels; red tomatoes, ruby juice, green pickles, and yellow corn relish. She had been canning tomato ketchup, When I asked about her husband, she told me he was back in the holler hunting sang for tobacco money. She looked down and said, “He chews.” I talked with that lady about forty minutes. I learned an important lesson that day. I learned about “The Deserving Poor.”
If there was someone in the kitchen that day who was the deserving poor, it was me; poor in experience and ignorant of life. My extended family were all nice people, good people, but they did not appreciate those who had not reached for their bootstraps. Men on welfare were lazy and worthless. Maybe. But what I found out was that these particular people and many like them in the county worked hard. They did hard physical labor. They cut timber, they hunted Gin Sang, and they plowed with their mules, and put grain in their own sacks and food on their tables. What they didn’t do was punch a time clock. You see most people in this edge of Appalachia came from Breathitt or Greenup County Kentucky. They were hill farmers until their land wore out from too much tobacco or the mines bought out too many neighbors. They just couldn’t stand being penned up in a factory and the things they did produced food, kept their houses warm with wood and coal pickings, but it did not produce enough cash in a timely manner. That was why I was there. I decided that day to learn to listen and to not paint everyone with the same brush. I don’t know who that obnoxious phrase “The Deserving Poor” described in Hocking County and I still don’t know. What I do know is there are as many stories as there are people, and the stories are all interesting, and we are all the children of God. I suppose in the sight of God we are all ignorant, poor and undeserving, but may we learn to listen for the grace.

Michele and the Night Visitor

Some days you just know the devil is winning. The simplest command from Jesus was to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Now how hard is that? Well, apparently it is complicated and too difficult for me!

Last night a shivering, wet woman came to my door. She said she lived on the next street over; just across from me. She asked if I had a car. Upon a positive answer, she sat with me on my screened porch and told the following story. Her husband may need back surgery and she needed to get him to their doctor in Lancaster at 1:00 PM on Friday. If the appointment was not kept they could loose his workman's compensation. She wanted me to take him.

Easy enough. I have no other commitments. But this is not the same little town I grew up in. When I was a girl there would have been no question about this. It would have been a foregone conclusion that you would help out if you could. Now something insidious has wafted through the night streets. Suspicion and fear has become a part of our daily lives.

Instead of immediately saying yes, I asked her if she had contacted social services, had she asked her friends or family, and finally what about her church? She replied that social services said they had no program to help her, her family had just moved here from Dayton and didn't know many people and the people in her church had refused to help. Still I held back, feeling guilty about it, but red rockets of suspection were flaming in my mind. So I compromised. I took her name and phone number and I promised her that I would make some calls and that I would call her back tonight. Luckily, I knew people in the social service community who belong to my church and felt free to call them in the evening. After telling the story, I was given a time, a phone number and a person to talk with in the morning at an agency. I did convey all of this information to the husband who answered the phone. I don't know the outcome to all this, but I do know two things.

First, I don't feel at all as if I followed that commandment. Should I have taken that risk and just met their need? Well, big news here! Trying to be a Christian is not easy, nor safe. In thinking about it this morning, I think I might have failed in an appointed mission. I could have gotten someone else to go with me. How dangerous could it really be?

Second, what is wrong in a town where a person has to wonder up and down the street in the rain to find some help. Shouldn't it be obvious where to go under these circumstances and shouldn't all citizens know the answer?

I have no answer to either question. Some days I wish it was 1950 again.

Tomato Days of August

Blogging is a new experience and I think I am doing it for my family and friends and because I like to write. I really wonder if I actually have anything worthwhile to say! Over the next month we will see.

The last days of this week will be spent trying to decide what to do with a counter full of ripe, red tomatoes, bright yellow acid-free tomatoes and motley ruby heirloom globes. They are the jewel of the late summer and I always hate to see them come to an end. At least there will be nights of Insalata Pomodori. In our family we call this caprece and we wait all year for the homegrown tomatoes to have it. Heaven!

A plate of sliced tomatoes

Thin slices of fresh mozzarella

Fresh basil leaves, lightly crushed

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Red wine vinegar or balsamic

Deep green virgin olive oil.

As with most Italians, even half life Italians like me, when the tomato sauce level goes down in their blood they get really cranky!

As for the rest of the bounty, there is sauce for pasta; fresh and frozen, quartered tomatoes frozen for stew and shreaded ones for soup.

Last year we finished with green tomato relish, but I was not wild about it. We will have to find something different for the green ones this year. That is a problem for late September. I am open to suggestions.

I think it must be time for me to make caprece and have it with crackers, olives, and peppers.

Yum!