How long did it take to learn that?

I remember when I wrote the only poem I've ever written that's worth a damn. It's called Canada Geese, and it's about the arrival and departure of the geese every spring and fall. All my life, since I was a wee lass, I would rush outside to see the geese flying overhead, and I would cry.

I don't know why I cried, but I always did, ever since I was a little girl. Then, one autumn day when I was married to my first husband D, after I cried looking at the geese I ran into the house and wrote the poem. It has been taken out and polished many times over the years, but actually I've made very few changes.

Some people who enjoyed the poem asked me "How long did it take you to write?"

Well, that depends on when you started counting. It either took me around  20 minutes, or 20 years, depending on when you started!

Well, two days ago I had a similar experience.

See this?

This is a bit of knitting. A rib stitch, to be more precise.

I started knitting on Tuesday. After a lifetime of not being able to knit.

Oh, I've tried. My Grandma used to let me play at knitting. She'd cast on for me, and I'd do the in-over-through-out" motions till I got bored. But I could never manage casting on myself, no matter how many times she showed me how to do it. I'd get one or two stitches on, then forget how to do it and get it wrong, inside out or backwards or whatever - just couldn't manage it.

I still couldn't manage it when I was married for the first time and two friends tried to teach me. I seem to have a problem with knots. In fact, if I stop to think about it, I can't tie my shoelaces. I either go quickly through the motions or it doesn't happen.

I always picture my friend P, trying desperately to hold in her laughter, as she watched me try to cast on. This after six lessons. She suggested I stop trying, and I thought that made sense, since I wasn't getting anywhere.

About two weeks ago, I started dreaming about knitting! I could see the needles, I could see the wool, I watched, in my dream, as I tied the first slipknot, then in slow motion I could see the needle going through the loop, could see the wool making another loop, watched in awe as I slipped the new stitch onto the first needle.

I had this dream about eight times in the past two weeks. On Tuesday, I scoured the house for some string and grabbed two barbecue skewers and tried it.

And it worked.

Not consistently. I kept undoing my ten stitches so I could practise casting them on again. I was so excited I called my cousin, who knits and crochets.

I was stunned. So I went out and bought one set of knitting needles and one ball of wool. And I started practising.

I'm still having trouble keeping the number of stitches the same from row to row, but I'm finally, after all these years, getting it!

You have to understand - this is simply unbelievable to me. Imagine if you'd never driven a car, then one day someone puts you behind the wheel, and you start driving right away with no problem. Or if someone gave you a violin, you picked it up, and started playing right away,

It's fantastic! I never thought I'd ever knit.

So how long did it take me to learn? Well...five minutes, or fifty years, whichever you prefer!

Navigation Issues

So I decided today was the day I would go hunting for summer-weight leggings. I've seen a lovely long blouse I want to buy for my summer wardrobe, but I need leggings to go with it. I've been poking around all the "large-lady" stores (there's a joke in there about big-box stores, if I could find it...) but all they have for summer are capris. I want full length.

There was nothing for it - I had to go to Walmart, something I rarely do, and usually dread. Because the Walmart is at the 10/30 mall.

For those of you who don't know, the 10/30 mall is at the intersection of highway 10 and highway 30. And it's not a mall you can walk around in, it's a small city. Every big-name store in Canada has a building here.

But there are no road signs. Plenty of streets with stop signs and traffic lights, but no street signs. Occasionally you find a street that has a name, but by the time you see the sign you're past the street.

I managed to find my way to the general area. I even saw the Walmart itself, and aimed the car at it - but, sadly, the road refused to let me turn that way and I found myself in short order on what appeared to be a highway. Luckily for me, there was an exit only 2 kilometers away, I turned right, and tried again.

This time I pulled into a parking spot and turned on google maps on my phone. It gave me directions, which I followed, which made no sense to me, but I've grown to have faith in the gps. It seemed to me I drove around the same block twice, but I did in fact end up at Walmart!

I had a very pleasant time there, actually. See, I avoid shopping like the plague. So when I do let myself out, it's kind of a treat...

(I can hear my Daughter's voice echoing in my head - "Mom - you have no life!")

I got an umbrella, some leggings, and discovered that Walmart sells fat quarters (fabric for quilting). A very enjoyable time.

As I buckled in for the ride home, this time I took no chances and turned on the gps right away.

And proceeded to get well and truly lost.

I don't think it was updating fast enough. I tried valiantly to find the street it kept insisting I turn right on. (No right turn here.) I found a street, and kept glancing at the little triangle on the map. Didn't seem to matter whether I followed the voice instructions or not, that little triangle was not going to line up with the route.

"In 600 meters, keep right at the fork."
"In 300 meters, keep right at the fork."
"In 100 meters, keep right at the fork."
"Keep left at the fork."

Did you see that? In advertising, they call this "bait and switch." I went left.

And found myself barrelling down some highway, to the sound of...

"In 9 kilometers, take the exit for blah blah blah blah."

(The "blah blah" bit is because the gps mispronounces names so badly I don't recognize them."

At which point I phoned Hubby.

"I'm on my way to Vermont," I said.

"What highway are you on?" he asked.

"Damned if I know! Listen, stay home for a bit, okay? I may need you to come find me!"

"Did you get your leggings?" he inquired.

"Oh yes," I told him, "and more. I got an umbrella, a bath mat, and some fat quarters!"

There was a moment's hesitation, then Hubby said, 

"Which you'll now have to declare at the border..."

Scones for Dinner!

Once upon a time, about 120 years or so ago, my Great-Grandmother wrote down her recipe for scones.

My GG was a true Scotswoman, born in Dunvegan, Ontario, where it is said aloud that "They're more Scots than the Scots."

She had a husband and two boys to feed. Somehow this is the only family recipe that came down to us. 

My guess is that Grandpa absolutely loved his mother's scones, and that he got her to write it down for him, or perhaps one of his mother's friends would have given it to him - I'm not sure how old he was when she passed away. And Grandpa was a real "man," never set foot in a kitchen, so the actual mechanics of how we got the recipe in the first place are a mystery. But I'm still convinced he was the venue of transmission somehow, since there were no daughters.

Like any armchair-anthropologist, I wonder what her life was like, and have sat contemplating her recipe, looking for clues.

1 quart flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
A piece of butter the size of an egg, rubbed into flour
3 eggs well beaten
1 cup milk

The first thing I notice is the sheer quantity - double that of any modern recipe I've seen for scones. Ah - two growing boys and a man to feed - I'm guessing these disappeared pretty quickly so she doubled an older recipe.

I notice the absence of salt, and at first I wondered if salt was hard to come by. But if she had a cup of sugar to throw into this, she was able to get ingredients. So then I think, the fat was salty. And why so little of it? Modern recipes use 1/3 cup fat to 2 cups flour.

And, everybody wants to know, what on earth is "Rubbed in flour?"

My wonderful 91-year old friend I explained it to me the first time I tried to make them. She said to take a bit of fat and flour together in your hand and rub it together as if you were feeling a fine piece of material.

I remember how it felt after the first time I'd done that. I stood there, looking at this bowl full of flour, with no visible fat, and all the flour looking slightly granular. I had never been able to get such airy texture into a mix before. "Rubbed into flour" was the answer to scones, to pastry, and to shortbread!

I see she used eggs partly as leaveners, because I put 4 teaspoons of baking powder into only 2 cups of flour. And that's my last clue - she, or the men she was cooking for, preferred their scones to have a light, cake-like texture.

In a modern or traditional scone recipe, there is no sugar, and only 1/4 - 1/3 cup of liquid for 2 cups of flour. So she went waaayyyyy over the top with 3 eggs and a cup of milk! That explains the sugar. It's cake. It looks like scones, but it's cake.

Real scones, traditional scones, are hard lumps. Figures - it comes from Scotland, after all! They were starving! Everything they could make was hard, all ingredients out of their price range.

So when they landed in Canada in the 19th century, and they were able to buy tenderizing ingredients like milk and sugar and eggs, they "fixed" their traditional recipes to make light, sweet scones that are a treasure to eat.

My reminiscing about GG's scones has been brought about because we thought the recipe was lost.

See, in the 1980's, my Stepmother M was given the original recipe card by my Grandma. Grandma had made several copies of the recipe, and M just loved it because of the connection with my dad's family. She was delighted when Grandma gave her the original. I was given a copy too, though I had my head in the clouds and had never so much as opened a can of beans.

Fast forward a few years, and there I was married to S, an Irishman, who wanted me to make scones, sighing long and loud over his mother's lost recipe. So I dug mine out, asked my friend I what "rubbed into flour" meant, and the family recipe was reborn up here.

Hubby S, being a computer guy, insisted I get the recipe onto a computer, so I built a recipe database in Filemaker, and my GG's recipe for scones was the very first one committed to the safety of the digital world.

But I didn't back up my computer, and I had a crash: not a software crash, a whole set of shelves was pulled over and my computer fell from a height of six feet onto the floor, while running. The heads jammed deep into the drive. S did his best and actually recovered a lot of the data.

But the recipe database was gone.

But that was okay, because I still had the handwritten copy my Grandmother had made.

Or did I? Sure enough, I didn't. Even then, I wasn't heartbroken, because I remembered it! So I kept making them, at least once a month.

And then I left Hubby. :-( 

Not only did I not have a family to bake for, I couldn't afford the ingredients any more. Faced with the day-to-day difficulties of keeping my head above water, I managed to forget the recipe.

Several years ago, when Daughter and I went down to Louisiana to visit my Stepmom and Daddy, my Stepsister D and I ransacked the house (as quietly as we could!) and went through all of my Stepmom's recipes and books, looking for the scones recipe. To no avail.

But last night Stepsister called me. She had been going through one of Mother's handbags and come across a small notebook. Yes, the recipe was there.

In her handbag! Bless her heart, she'd been carrying it around, basically on her person, for at least 30 years!

I'm very impressed! And absolutely thrilled that Stepsister found it, and once again left shaking my head in wonder at the generations before mine who simply will not throw anything out!

I mean, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't walk around with my mother's purse on my arm! So I wouldn't have saved it in the first place. I might have looked briefly at a notebook...I hope I would have! But when I get into my mind that things have to GO, well, get outta my way or you're gonna get hurt, buddy!

And other times, I am unable to throw away a single piece of fabric, an single piece of paper, because I am paralyzed with fear that I will lose something irreplaceable by doing so.

Well, all my faults aside, I am so thankful this recipe has been found by someone who is careful and thorough, who has managed to return to me a part of my heritage that was briefly lost.

There will be scones for dinner tonight!