I’ll have an old-fashioned winter, that is!
Yesterday, my brother presented some historical data about winters gone by and the possibility that this winter might be an “old timey” winter.
Click on the picture to read an older blog post I wrote about an enjoyable old-fashioned winter activity.
Bring it, I say.
In last week’s mail, I received my quarterly statement and invoice from my life insurance company. The invoice was twice the amount I paid in August. What was going on?
When it comes to life insurance actuarial tables, calculating one’s age is slightly different from one’s actual age on any given day. If that were the case, I would be forty-nine. To calculate “insurance age” I use the year for which the premium was due and subtract my birth year.
The premium is due for January, 2014. According to my life insurance company, I am now fifty years old.
Many life insurance companies use what is known as “age banded rates” and the amount of premium increases gradually every five to ten years. Turning fifty is an actuarial Rubicon of sorts and my premiums now reflect it. Based on whatever pooling statistics the company used, I’m more likely to die at 50 years old than at 49.
If I die, they pay. If I live, I pay.
The next thing I know, I’ll be getting my AARP application.
I’m being melodramatic today. Every day, I’m reminded that I’ve already lived more years in the past than I’ll live in the future. Whether the insurance company will be there to cover that probability is unknown.
“After all, insurance is just another class of protection that may or may not be worth the paper it is written on when push comes to shove, and as we have seen in the case of Detroit, supposed protections can be ephemeral.” Nicole Foss, The Automatic Earth.
Reggie Black called me on the later side of last night and we had a long chat. Reggie’s not a “hi, how was your day” kind of conversationalist. We talked about Maine’s largest ethnic group, the Franco Americans, and my recent experiences attending “La Rencontre” at the Franco Center in Lewiston, with two hundred or so aging members of this group. We talked about the glue that had bound this ethnic group together for so many years, primarily their French language and Roman Catholicism.
We talked about an article published by the University of Maine’s Marketing and Communications department on the outcomes of a Maine state legislative task force convened in 2012 to define “who is Franco American.” I read the article closely; I read it twice. I was promised some “unprecedented perspective on Maine’s largest ethnic group” and found none. I was underwhelmed. The legislative task force called for the creation of a state Franco-American Leadership Council.
I told Reggie I thought the article and the task force was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Then Reggie asked “do you know what you’re going to write about for your blog tomorrow?”
I looked at my watch and said “probably nothing about Franco Americans, legislative task forces, and Roman Catholicism.”
We wished each other “bonne nuit” and “au revoir.”
I sat up for most of the night on the settee I had recently gotten from my late aunt, tossing around ideas for blog posts. I considered a “fluff piece” about a “Holiday House Tour” I went to last month or the Danvers Historical Society’s Holiday Designer Show House which ends this weekend. My creative and procrastinating side would love to spend several hours in the Jeep in the pursuit of beauty, but the logical part of me knows this is not the weekend to fall behind the clock.
I moved some furniture around and considered writing a blog post about the settee, but my early morning keyboard tappings fell flat.
It’s another sparkling cold day here in Maine. There are only 11 days until Noel. Que l’on chante qu’on s’apprete.
Fa La La La La.
After a few overcast and snowy days here in Maine, the sun came out yesterday. My phone rang and an excited little voice told me to “go outside! Everything is sparkling like diamonds!”
Regretfully, I couldn’t go outside until the day’s light waned and I missed nature’s sparkling festival of diamonds. This was the best I could capture as the sun dropped into the pines.
Today is another bright sunny day.
My head was spinning.
I put the Jeep in reverse and backed out of the driveway, seeing the bag of sweaters in the back seat just out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t need any more sweaters.
A few years ago, one of my aunts died; I hadn’t seen her for a long time. That’s how things go in the modern world. You’re born, you “grow up,” you move away, and you forget your kin. Modern psychologists and government experts will tell you that it doesn’t matter; that you can make your own family.
You can even call your cat your son or daughter.
My uncle has lived these last few years in the second house he and my aunt built together. I never visited them in this house but I faithfully sent them a Christmas card every year and as I look at the real estate listing on-line, I can see it was a very beautiful house. Each image is fit for a House Beautiful or Country Living magazine layout.
My uncle recently sold his beautiful house and has been disposing some of his many possessions, including my aunt’s extensive wardrobe. Somehow, all these things ended up at my mother’s house and Helen asked me if I would come over to sort them out.
When I saw the pile of clothing, I was overwhelmed. Beautiful wool blazers, lined wool slacks, pencil skirts, silk blouses, and sweaters of every fiber. Some things still had the price tags on them. The little girl in me, who worries that she’ll never have enough or be enough, wanted to take everything, but the grown woman stepped in and took only a few practical and timeless items that I could work into my wardrobe. I’m wearing one of the skirts right now.
I think I have enough clothes to last the rest of my life.
After I got home with my sweaters and skirts and blazers, I tossed and turned all night. I thought about my aunt and how I wished I could have spent some time with her in her last few years. The time for asking questions has passed; I may never know whether she worried about having enough or being enough.
Enough stuff is enough.
Last week, I had planned to write a “Little Old Lady” story and poke fun at myself in the way I like to do, but I got sidetracked by a speeding motorist. Today, I’m returning to where I left off before some jerkazoid passed me on my road, going 20 miles over the speed limit.
Some of my blog readers know I drink raw milk. Applying high heat to milk (pasteurization) not only kills germs but also kills the healthy components of milk which strengthen the immune system. Things like enzymes and probiotics. The milk sold in grocery stores, pasteurized and homogenized, is a mere shadow of the rich and delicious liquid available from local renegade cows in my area. I call the former drink “white water.” It’s not milk.
Real raw milk, healthy and full of life, also ages gracefully. If a container of pasteurized milk exceeds its shelf life, it “goes bad” and smells rancid. It’s good for nothing more than circling the drain. Raw milk, on the other hand, will “sour” and there are lots of uses for sour milk.
I checked my raw milk the other day and noticed it had soured. I whipped out my circa 1950 Encyclopedic Cookbook and under the section called “Your Leftovers” I found many recipes using “sour milk and cream.” The variety ranged from “Cottage Cheese” to “Molasses Cookies” to “Strawberry Jam Cupcakes.” The recipe that caught my eye, though, was “Old Lady Cake.” I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking of the recipe’s blog potential, regardless of the cake’s taste. I was interested in the provenance of the “Old Lady Cake” and put the term in a search engine. Though limited in its popularity, the references I found mentioned it as an heirloom Dutch recipe, also known as “Oude Dame Koek.” The Oude Dames make it at Christmas.
Curiosity satisfied, I assembled the following ingredients:
¼ cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg, well beaten
2 cups sifted cake flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoons each of nutmeg, allspice, ground cloves and cinnamon
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup sour milk
Cream butter and sugar together. Add egg and beat thoroughly. Sift flour, baking powder, soda, spices, and salt together 3 times. Add dry ingredients and milk alternately to creamed ingredients to creamed mixture. Bake in a greased tube or Bundt pan in a 350 degree oven for 45 – 60 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.
In spite of the cake’s unflattering name, it had a good flavor. As predicted by some of the internet information I collected, it was a flat cake, not rising very high in the pan. But a spice cake is a good “foundation” cake and I started thinking of way I could elaborate on the old dame.
I had some heavy cream (also unpasteurized) in my refrigerator; I whipped it up with some confectioner’s sugar and two tablespoons of Moxie Jelly. It gave the cake some punch and texture.
As I was enjoying a slice of Old Lady Cake with a cup of coffee, I thought about other enhancements. What about making a Moxie reduction and drizzling it over the cake before adding a spoonful of whipped cream? Or maybe a layered trifle combining the cake, some vanilla pudding, a Moxie reduction, and whipped cream? What about adding fruit compote? The possibilities seemed endless and it occurred to me that this was exactly how a cook might create a dish for a recipe contest such as The Moxie Recipe Contest.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Little Old Lady.
Little Old Lady Who?
Little Old Lady who cooked a cake with sour milk and entered it in the 2014 Moxie Recipe Contest.
Like the cake, my knock knock joke fell a little flat. I never said I was a comedy writer, did I?
All I want for Christmas is…
…nothing.
It’s a long and deep meditation to think about wanting nothing, especially nothing that was produced by wage slaves in a distant country and packed into the hold of a cargo ship thousands of miles away.
No gifts, please.
Here on the blog, I’ve shared many stories about the paternal personalities on the Baumer side of my family. These Germans were all around me all the time, steady, stoic, and dependable. It’s quite possible that my enjoyment of walking around the neighborhood comes from my Nana Baumer, who also had such a habit. She would make a circuit from house to house, stopping to visit each of her children.
Since moving back home and trying to establish new routines, I’ve continued with my own habit of “neighborhood walks.” It’s a little different here in my country setting, but one of my promenades takes me down the Bowdoinham Road.
One day, my mother and I drove past this sign and she said “I wonder who lives there?” You see, my mother’s maiden name is “Belaire” and she was curious. Perhaps this was a distant relative, separated by a long-ago spelling error or a few degrees of “e.”
Through the type of circumstances that only happen in small towns, my mother met the residents of Belair Lane. They were not related to her at all; they named their little lane after a classic car they had restored.
C’est Dommage!
Although there are fewer French Canadian people in the area, there is still a Franco-American presence in this part of Maine. Next week, my mother and I are going to attend the Christmas “La Rencontre” at the Franco Center in Lewiston. “La Rencontre” means “the gathering” and once a month, a dedicated group of Francophones meet at the former St. Mary’s Church in the “Little Canada” section of Lewiston, share a meal, and then enjoy entertainment in the church-turned performance hall.
Parlez-vous Francais, s’il vous plait!
My mother had never been and we didn’t know what to expect when we went in November. As we drove up Canal Street, approaching the Cedar Street intersection, my mother tried to help me remember a few French expressions and I tried out a few I had whipped up in my spare time. If someone asked me what I did for work, I had planned to say “Je suis une femme d’affaires.” This is what I had found when I asked Bing for the French expression for “business woman.” When I said it to Helen, she started laughing and then I started laughing. I don’t know what was so funny about it; maybe it was because it didn’t sound so respectable in Franglais.
While we were laughing at the stop light, I looked at the car in front of us, occupied by two white-haired ladies with a rosary hanging from the rear-view mirror. I asked my mother if she thought “les dames” were going to “La Rencontre?”
She laughed.
“Bien sûr!”
I slowly weaved The Jeep through the packed parking lot and as we got out of the car, my mother said if anyone asked where I worked, I should tell them “chez nous.”
I practiced it by saying “Je suis une femme d’affaires chez nous,”
We laughed and laughed.
It will take more than monthly visits to “La Rencontre” to improve and perfect my French, but I’m having fun trying. Noël is a good time to dig up the maternal stories from the family filing cabinet, too.
A la prochaine!
At one time in my life, a friend suggested I take a class to stave off loneliness. I signed up for a rug-hooking class and although it was easy, there were many things I had to “buy” before I could hook a rug. All the wool I had stored in boxes couldn’t be used, according to the instructor.
It seemed to me that the purpose of the class was to empty my wallet and the shelves of the rug hooking studio; what I really wanted to do was hook a rug. I dropped out and I haven’t signed up for many classes since then.
I’m taking a class today. I won’t be stringing beads or squeezing frosting out of tubes, but I may learn something.
I’ll let you know.
Julie-Ann Baumer 