King Solomon’s Beef

Posted on November 18, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

This weekend, Uncle Bob and I were talking about the prices of different meats.  I was trying to explain the many benefits of buying local, grass-fed meats versus Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) raised meats.  Uncle Bob could only see the bottom-line price and he said I’d “been had” by my local farmers.  They’d ripped me off.

I felt guilty, thinking that I was spending money unwisely.

Grass-fed local meats are almost always more expensive than CAFO meats produced by giant food factories.  There are certain “economies of scale.”

Government farm subsidies, too, are invisible to the consumer.  Joel Salatin, a controversial farmer, wrote a piece addressing just one reason why small farming operations are at a disadvantage when trying to compete with industrial farmers.

Salatin addresses “foodie guilt” too.

Making good decisions about spending money is complicated.  Sometimes I feel like I’m banging a soundless drum, trying to encourage my readers to make wiser and healthier decisions about the food they eat.  Is my soundless banging falling on deaf ears?

My friend Janet sent me an e-mail recently and it warmed my heart.

Hi Julie-Ann,

I was reading 1 Kings 4 this morning and came across something that made me think of you.  Verses 22-23 “Solomon’s provisions for one day was thirty cors of fine flour and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen and twenty pasture fed cattle, a hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks and fattened fowl.” 

Isn’t it interesting that pasture fed cattle is mentioned? 

I guess there is something to this grass-fed beef.

Word.

Posted in Cooking and Food, Farmers | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

It Tolls for Thee

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

I went to a funeral yesterday and they tolled the church bell as we got in our cars to go to the cemetery.

A death in the family and the full moon reminded me of an older post I wrote on bells, moons, and meditations.

Sadness all around.

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The Past is a Different Country

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

For the last few years, I’ve been writing about the past as I remember it. Generally, I’ve woven “feel good” happy endings and old-fashioned lessons into stories about my family, both living and dead. If someone were to read my blog, they might think my family was a New England version of The Waltons. My brother could be John-Boy, sitting in his bedroom listening to Neil Young on his headphones and scribbling out stories in a three-ring binder. Maybe I’d be Mary Ellen, wanting to bust out of Walton’s Mountain because it was just a “little old speck on the map.” Frank Anicetti at the Kennebec Fruit Company would be the equivalent of Ike Godsey and Ellen and Margaret Marchak would be the Baldwin sisters, sans “The Recipe.”

Ah, how lovely it is to rewrite history according to my selective memory. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of omission.

The other day, my neighbor and friend Gina called me up and said “let’s go pick some red berries for decorating.” She drove around until we found some densely populated bushes, she parked the truck, and we started snipping the twigs. I don’t remember what we were talking about when out of the blue she said “Hey, how are you related to Lena Baumer?”

It’s not like writing about my father’s cousin Lena hadn’t crossed my mind before. Although she only died in 2005, I didn’t really know her. In fact, I don’t think I had ever spoken to her; she lived just two streets away from me (on Baumer Street) from the time I was born until I moved away in 1987.

It was a very long time ago and my miniscule memories have faded.

I asked Gina what she remembered about Lena.

“Well, my mother always told me not to go by her house.”

That made sense.

Lena was born in 1910, in the house on the corner of what was then called Baumer and Rand Streets. One of six children, she was the daughter of my grandfather’s brother, Alex. According to her obituary, she attended The Powder Puff Beauty School in Lewiston and then ran her own salon at the house on Baumer Street. I can still see the sign for Lee’s Beauty Shop in my mind’s eye.

Lena’s brother Joe had run a hair salon in town also. My grandmother used to go to Lee’s until she went to Joe’s. Could it have been a family schism which prevented us from gathering around Lena’s shampoo bowl for discounted wash and sets? Or was it something else?

I know I shouldn’t be airing my family’s dirty laundry here on my blog, but I can’t help but have some curiosity about Lena’s life story. I interviewed my parents a bit about her last night. Their memories are growing dimmer and even though they each remember hearing a shot or three fired one July afternoon in 1970, they can’t seem to remember if there was any police investigation.

All I know is that a man died of a gunshot wound next to the garden in Lena Baumer’s backyard.

I saw the ambulance go by with a sheet-covered dead man in the back of it.

I found an old newspaper article online, saying the police ruled the death a suicide; I don’t know. Was there a suicide note? And why would a man, who had served in the military in World War II, use a .22 caliber gun to end his life? You can barely hurt a squirrel with a .22.

It might make an interesting research project and maybe a short story; I could call it “The Things I Learned at The Powder Puff Beauty School.”

The past…it’s a different country.

Posted in Friday Pillow Talk | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Not Quite a Painting

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Andrew Wyeth probably never walked on the power lines.

Still, a pleasant walk.

Posted in Minimalist | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Winter Gardening

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Just this morning on Facebook, one of my friends wrote a post about how he had collected a bunch of plastic children’s toys, cleaned them up to donate to a charity, and the charity had suddenly folded.  Now he’s stuck with a garage of clean, gently loved children’s toys with no place to go.  The initial purpose of the project was to keep the plastic out of landfills.

The accumulation of plastic in landfills is a topic of concern.  My heart grows heavy and my brain is quickly weary just thinking about it.  In good American “Gone With The Wind” fashion, I’ll have to think about it tomorrow and avoid buying anything plastic today.  Is that even possible?  Is there nothing that won’t be wrapped in plastic?

Sometimes, my mother puts vegetable scraps in a plastic bag.  Then the bag goes into the barrel in the back yard where it waits for my father to take it to the transfer station, aka the dump.  There’s a lot of recycling that goes on at the transfer station, but the highly degradable vegetable scraps are not necessarily going to decompose inside Helen’s plastic bag.  I’ve lectured my mother about this and even once suggested they install or build a small compost pile in the backyard.

That idea was quickly squelched, a la NIMBY.

Now that I have quick and easy access to the natural world, I’ve built my own compost pile.

I save my vegetable scraps and coffee grounds in a sealed plastic container and bring them with me when I go to The Farm to walk on Sundays.  It’s easy enough.  There’s a horse farm down the road, too, and I’ve found piles of horse BLEEP on the road.  I pick it up with a gardening tool and a bucket.

I hope this isn’t too much information (TMI) for my delicate readers.

It’s almost winter, dark and cold.  A woman has to do something to generate warmth and hope for spring.  Reggie says “Keep looking outward, and keep moving, walking, and doing.”

That’s my winter gardening plan.  Keep looking outward, and keep moving.  Walking, doing.  I’m glad the horses on The Farm road are also moving, walking, and doing.  It’s going to help keep things warm inside that compost pile this winter.

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Hooyah

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Today is “Veterans Day” here in the United States.  November 11 was initially called “Armistice Day” to mark the end of World War I, while England and other Commonwealth countries call it “Remembrance Day.”

Reggie Black is a veteran; I asked him if he wanted to write a “guest blog” today and he declined.

The announcer on the classical music station was uncomfortable as he tried to arrive at the appropriate vocal tone and posture for talking about the day.  He noted that many people have the day off and there will be parades and observances.  He has been trained to sound happy and upbeat (it pleases the advertisers) and I didn’t hear a somber tone in his voice.

He says we should “remember the brave men and women who have kept this country strong.”

What does that mean? Is being “strong” the same as being “free?”

Recently, I read an article about new streetlights the city of Las Vegas is installing.  Not only will they illuminate sidewalks, but they can also broadcast messages and music.  Maybe they’re like those annoying video screens on gas pumps.  Although the Las Vegas public works is trying to downplay it, the streetlights can also record sound and video.  Soon, Las Vegas will have surveillance streetlights.

Late one afternoon last week, I was driving home along some country roads.  Cows were grazing in the fields and the darkness quickly descended.  Suddenly, I noticed how dark it was along this particular road and it was because there were no streetlights.  It was peaceful and calm.  I felt safe in the darkness.  I’m happy to know there are no surveillance streetlights in my own little corner of the world.  Not yet, anyway.

I don’t have any words of wisdom about Veterans Day.  What I have are questions, a never-ending litany of questions about freedom, peace, and privacy.  They are hard questions and they require critical thinking and contemplation, not the distraction of flag-waving or the blinding beam of surveillance streetlights that purport to keep us safe.

My questions will go unanswered today.   I hope they’re heard, understood, and acknowledged (HUA).

Posted in Just Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Throw Off Those Warm Blankets!

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Isn’t it lovely how a pile of heavy blankets can have a narcotic effect on the body? On a brisk November morning, they make getting out of bed a challenge.

Sundays are good days for other things, too, like writing letters to old friends.

Time to throw off those warm blankets!

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Last Night I Dreamed I Went To…

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Mitford?

Yes, Mitford, and it’s consumed my free time for the last fourteen nights.

Jan Karon’s Mitford series of books was popular reading in the 1990’s.  While everyone else was surfing this trend wave, I was reading about the Mitford sisters, a clan of English debutantes.  Books about these six sparkling and controversial sisters trended ten years ago and I was on top of the trend at the time, although I didn’t know it.

Book clubs are not reading about any Mitfords right now.  According to my very well-read friend and long-time book club member, Shelley, clubs are reading Monica Wood’s, When We Were the Kennedys.  Shelley says “It’s sort of the flavor of the day in book clubs right now.”

I’m so trend-adverse that I don’t even belong to a book club.

One of my friends gave me At Home in Mitford, the first in a series of books loosely set in the town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina.  The book was a housewarming gift.  My friend was happy that I had found my way home and I think she wanted to inspire me to further literary greatness by providing me with an example of another writer’s portrayal of small town life.  The paperback sat on my coffee table for some time and I looked at it with daily contrary consternation.

Emily Dickinson said “there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away” and so one evening after a long day of hammering away at other things, I threw my mental bags in the car and headed to Mitford.

Reggie Black, on the other hand, doesn’t have any contrariness about what he reads or the literary frigates on which he sails.  He’s practically a book bulimic.  He’ll gorge on any old tome and then just throw it out when he’s done and make a passing comment like “eh, not my cup of coffee.”  When I confessed what I was reading, he picked up a used copy and started digging around in it.  Sometimes, he doesn’t even read books from front to back.  He might read the ending first and then go back and read the beginning.

Reggie and I have had our own little private book club and we’ve been talking about Mitford lately.  One of his first observations about Mitford was that there was no industry; where did anyone work? I countered that Mitford was a tourist town and there were some references to “summer people.”

I noted that the main character, aging Episcopalian priest Father Tim, gave up driving for Lent eight years ago and walked everywhere he needed to go, including “Main Street Grill” and the local grocery store, “so well-known for its fresh poultry and produce from local sources that most people simply called it The Local.  The Local had provided chickens, rabbits, sausage, hams, butter, cakes, pies, free-range eggs, jams, and jellies from a farming community in the valley, along with vegetables and berries in season.  In summer, produce bins on the sidewalk under the green awnings were filled each day with Silver Queen corn in the shuck.  And in July, pails of fat blackberries were displayed in the cooler case.”

Mitford is the kind of town we all want to live in, theoretically.  Reading about small-town nostalgia never seems to go out of style.  But in a world of diminishing resources, walking to a local grocery store stocked with local food would be a good idea.  It makes sense.

Reggie and I talked about how small towns used to have stores like The Local and whether it would be possible to open such a store right here in Lisbon Falls.  The Kitty Corner Store, which had been open as “Barnie’s” for the last year or so, is closed again and is for sale.  It’s been the topic of memorable Facebook conversations.  If the Kitty Korner re-opened as a store like Mitford’s “The Local” would it be able to stay in business?

Like Mitford, everyone wants to go to the Kitty Korner Store in theory.  Why is it, then, that there are so many cars lined up at the McDonald’s drive-through on a Tuesday night here in my own little town?  Is it because the Kitty Corner is closed?

I’m going to schlep off in my slippers now and make another cup of coffee.  Reggie and I will continue discussing all of the great problems of life, and maybe we’ll even discuss a Bible verse Father Tim never quoted to the Mitford assembled in Lord’s Chapel.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Mitford, Rumford, Lisbon Falls…there is nothing new under the sun.

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Almost Soup Weather

Posted on November 7, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

Soon it will be soup weather.

Simmer down!  I said “almost.”

Posted in Minimalist | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Johnny Cash Approach

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Julie-Ann Baumer

I wonder what made 2004 “The Year of the Last Will and Testament” for me. I met with a lawyer and made a will. It seemed prudent; I owned a home. A will can be easily created using a form from the internet or a piece of paper. Have it witnessed by two or three witnesses and a notary public and the document is complete and legal. Without children and assets, I may not need a will anymore, since the life insurance I carry is a “pay-on-death” situation. My beneficiaries are clearly documented.

A copy is at the lawyer’s office and another copy is in a “safe place.” My parents have a copy, too. Be it remembered that Julie-Ann Baumer has a will!

It’s a standard document, except for the second item, which says “I give, devise and bequeath all of my personal papers, letters and writings to my friend Samantha Van Hopper, of XYZ, Maine, if she survives me.”

I’ve got some bad news for Samantha. I haven’t been making much progress organizing and cataloguing my personal papers. I still have my diaries from third grade, the journals from high school and college, and the papers I wrote for my Victorian literature class. Even though I finally threw out my Journalism 410 project and a blurry picture of a guy I met at a club called “The Tree” in Portland, there are still a lot of papers to organize in the event that Samantha Van Hopper survives me.

How do I decide what is important and worth keeping? Is any of it worthy of a box at the Lisbon Historical Society? It’s not as if I’m a famous author. Still, every day, I nibble away at the boxes of paper, one piece at a time. There’s always something funny, heartwarming, or sad.

Just yesterday, I found a “Prayer to St. Jude” I was given when I worked part-time at Jordan Marsh in the Maine Mall during the late Eighties. It was the gift of a well-dressed neurotic, shopaholic who worked at the store to support her habit. I wonder what was so hopeless in my life at that time that I considered reaching out to St. Jude.

I also found an outline for a newsletter I was planning in the early Nineties. This was during my “party-throwing” period and it seemed like I had a huge circle of friends which would only expand through the publication of a gossipy newsletter. The purpose of the newsletter was “the advancement of the world as it could be.” Apparently, I thought it was important to capture the zeitgeist of a certain Portland, Maine suburban subculture in writing. Somewhere in the masthead, it would say “A newsletter by me, for you, about us. What we’re doing, things that are important to us, and whatever else would make the afternoon mail a bit brighter.”

Oh, the ego!

I further expanded my vision with the bold statement “My mission on earth, I’ve decided, is to encourage more letter writing, more cocktail parties, and the use of the cloth napkin.”

The first issue would include a pompous announcement of my “at home” evenings. Here’s what I wrote:

“As you may know, I have disposed of my answering machine. Although it may be resurrected prior to the holidays (to accept RSVP’s for my Christmas party), I’ve decided to make Thursday evenings, from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. my ‘at home’ evenings. You can depend on reaching me during this time. Of course, you may call our house at any time and any day, but we are in and out so much that it may be frustrating. Just remember that Thursday nights are a guarantee that I’ll be there!”

Good grief. Samantha Van Hopper will be relieved to know that those arrogant little scraps of paper have found their way into the trash.

It’s not all embarrassing egotistical moments, though. I found a card from my old friend T Bone when she moved away to Colorado in 1992. She was visiting Maine a few weeks ago and it was good to see her. Much has changed in both of our lives since that heart-felt note. Back then, we were in our twenties and she was embarking on her life’s journey, physical and metaphorical. She said “it takes time and the trip is a long, often dark one.”

I’m going to keep her card in my “1992” folder.

Not everyone likes to spend time in the past like I do. One of my friends confronted me about my habit, pointing out how much more wonderful life is today, in the here and now. She asked me to consider how medical progress and modern pharmaceuticals are keeping us young forever and scientists are finding cures for diseases and maladies from cancer to constipation.

There hasn’t yet been a cure found for my friend T Bone yet, but I’ll keep praying on it. I’m going to bypass St. Jude and go right to the top. And just like Johnny Cash, I’m going to continue assembling something out of all these scraps of paper from the past. It might take a while, but one piece at a time, I’m putting together my own psychobilly Cadillac.

Thanks, friends, for coming along on the ride.

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