Summer Memories

I am greatly sorry for the long gaps between posts. I'm sure both of the readers I have left are staging a boycott as I type. However, since I have time to write and my kids have had time to pile up a barn full of summer activities, you will listen to every word I have to say!

Well, that just cut my readership in half.

I'll just start summer with Sweet Pea's birthday. Why would I start there? Because that's where my pictures start on the computer.

As you can tell by the picture, 'A good time was had by all'. Actually, I think SP was already dressed for bed judging by her clothes and hair. The black Muppet on her shoulder is Ruby helping her blow out her candles. I'm pretty sure Ruby probably just chewed SP's hair while she was huffing and puffing.

Next we headed west to South Dakota to attend my Grandma Peg's funeral. She was my pie baking grandma and our family was fortunate enough to enjoy 96+ wonderful fulfilling years. Funerals involve much sadness but they are also great chances to remember a life and reconnect with family members that you haven't seen in a long time by relating all the unforgettable memories we all shared.

Here are Number One Son and Sweet Pea enjoying time with their far away cousins. At least I think N1S is enjoying being with all of his girl cousins.

When we go to SD to stay with Gramma and Grampa we usually have to find a little time to golf. The kids are now old enough to swing a club and actually see the ball fly above the grass. Here N1S hammers one! Pay no attention to the small yellow dot in front of him.

SP's swing shows a lot of 'potential'. I'm pretty sure she connected on this one for a heckuva shot.

While we enjoyed our golf game we also took time to take in the beautiful surroundings. Just across the out of bounds fence on the second hole we had our own private gallery cheering us on. People from SD know that this is not an uncommon sight. We made sure to take some time to try to lure the calves over to us and feed them some grass but their mothers kept them pretty close.

After a long morning of golfing, we went to Gramma's house to relax. As you can see some of us were quite exhausted.

SP used her time to climb Gramma's big maple tree. It doesn't look too high but her feet are actually about seven feet from the ground which is pretty high for SP.

We are grateful to have family that we can visit and have fun with. Thank you Gramma and Grampa Bell for living close to a golf course next to a farm and for having big trees to climb.

And a big thank you to my Grandma Peg for her wisdom, guidance, support and love. And especially her pies.

We will always remember you.

Well that only brings us to early June. We have more summer to come. Tune in next week.

Things My Grandmother Baked.

This is a continuance in what, hopefully, will be a series. Weeks ago I posted about the memorable sayings of my Grampa Pete. This week I will give equal consideration to my Gramma Peg. Gramma Peg and Grampa Pete were married sixty years before Lady Di and I tied the knot. Grampa Pete died just a few years ago and Gramma Peg is still going strong at 94 years old.

Growing up I lived a few blocks from both sets of grandparents in a small town, so I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with them. And Gramma Peg knew how to lure me to her home for many visits. Gramma Peg knew how to bake. And she baked a lot. She was even good enough to get my sister and I to eat bran muffins, and like them.

Grandma Peg's specialty, though, was baking pies. Every holiday she made a seasonal pie for dessert. Pumpkin pie, of course, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Peach pie when the fresh peaches came to the grocery store by the crate in the summer. She had an apricot tree in the back yard that produced apricots only one summer in its life. That year it must have gotten pollinated just right because apricots were bending branches and filling multiple coolers, so Grandma had to bake pie after pie just to keep the fruit from rotting on the ground.

This time of year, however, puts me in mind of her number one pie, apple pie. She makes her own crust, picks her own apples and creates a perfect pie.

Since she was such a prolific pie baker, she would fill her deep freeze with pies to enjoy at a moments notice. One of my fondest memories of college was coming home for the weekend and returning to school with one of Grandma Peg's pies. My roommates were understandably jealous. I would share on occasion, but the slices I cut for them would be the thinnest possible. One related memory that I will never forget is when I had taken my foil wrapped pie back to school. I spent the entire drive anticipating cutting a slice when I got back to my dorm room. When I got to my room, I unwrapped my dessert, cut a piece, put it on a plate and settled in my chair to enjoy. The first bite made me pause. This was not apple pie. I was green tomato pie. Which, amazingly, tastes similar to apple pie, but is not apple pie. Since Grandma Peg was such a prolific pie baker, she understandably would sometimes lose track 0f which pies she had in her deep freeze.

I didn't complain though. As long as more pies kept coming, I kept eating them. Besides, green tomato pie is pretty good and I encourage anyone who has the opportunity to try one.

I have many wonderful childhood memories and many have come from my grandparents. Number One Son and Sweet Pea were also lucky enough to enjoy a few of Grandma Peg's pies. And who knows, with the holidays coming up in a couple months, maybe they too will get to try green tomato pie.

Thanks, Grandma Peg, for all the pies and so much more.

Remember When

A picture is worth a thousand words. It is often worth a thousand memories too. We also attach memories to objects other than pictures. A special childhood toy, a ticket stub or cherished gift from the past are common things to mark those special events or eras in our lives.

Recently, Lady Di came across a homemade sweater that Number One Son wore when he was between one and two years old. This blue sweater was knitted by a friend of my Grandma Peg. It has a hood and it zips up the back.

This sweater is special for two reasons. The first reason is that it was homemade and from N1S's great grandmother. The second reason is, he looked so cute in this picture that we called it our Teletubby picture. The hood has a puff ball on the top and would always stick straight up in the air. It just seemed appropriate.

Great-Grandma was smart enough to ask her friend to make it a little big for him so he got to wear it for a year or more.

It's hard to believe how small our kids were back then. They grow so fast. At least we can still rely on pictures and special objects to refresh our memories of the way they were. Never underestimate the power of a picture. I'm lucky that Lady Di is a scrapbooker. But you don't have to scrapbook to take and save great pictures of your kids. So, go ahead, take a picture of them right now. Who cares if they are sleeping, scowling or pooping. You never know if a memory will be lost or saved.

Plus, it is really hard to recreate the memory eight years later. Number One Son was a good sport for this picture. He thought I was being silly, but he indulged his father's wishes. It's alright though, I told him that I would delete the picture and no one would see. Now I have a wonderful memory (bargaining chip) for his teenage years.

Winter Golf

This weekend I got to visit my hometown. We loaded up the kids and headed west to SD to see my folks and my Grandma Peg.

After the kids were put to bed, we got the cards out and played a game of golf. My Grandma Peg is 93 years young. She walks a little slower and her hearing isn't as sharp, but she still is active. She still drives, lives in her own apartment, and doesn't miss a Twins baseball game on television in the summer.

I dealt the first hand and asked Grandma Peg if she knew how to play.

"I can't remember if I've played this before.", she answered in her shaky gramma voice. My dad assured her that she had played it last week with them. We had played a few rounds when Dad read off the scores. In the card game, golf, the object is to have the lowest score. Well, Grandma Peg's score was under twenty and my score had just passed one hundred.

She leaned over to me and said, "We sure make a good team don't we?" She said this because whenever I discarded, it was always a card she could use to lower her score. Oh well, it was probably just beginner's luck. It seemed she was always trying to put her cards in the wrong column until we would help her. Maybe it was all just an act she was using to sucker us.

After a few more rounds, she started making suggestions to me on which card to discard to her. I started keeping my cards so she wouldn't get them. The problem was that she would 'go out' and I would be stuck with high value cards.

I did have one good round where I went out with only five points. Grandma Peg laid out her cards and asked how much she had. I answered, "You have three points".

She asked, "And you had five points, right?"

"Yeah", I grumbled.

"Well, that's nice.", she sweetly sang.

She then quite firmly and clearly asked for an update on the scores. What happened to shaky gramma voice? Grandma was just approaching 100 points as I had passed 300.

She leaned over again and whispered, "Is this your first time playing?"

As my frustration grew I started placing the draw and discard pile further from her, making her reach for all of those good cards I was feeding her.

"Well, what do you know, another zero hand.", she announced.

I was starting to realize that I was in over my head. I knew that she played bridge with her friends twice weekly. She usually gets her name in the local paper for winning too. This frail, wispy grandma turns into a shark at the card table. I love Grandma Peg and all, but when she gives me the business like Eddie Haskel, I have to wonder what she does to all of those other old ladies at the card table.

The game mercifully ended and Dad got ready to take Grandma home. As she shuffled to the door she called back to me, "Better practice up for next time."