Spring?

According to the calendar, spring has arrived! However, we are in winter storm pattern. While the moisture that the mountains are receiving is very much welcomed, it seems that we are only getting more wind with a few snow flakes. Again, the interstate byways have been closed periodically, stranding travelers. This past weekend, we were in Casper so that the Mr. could play in a team tournament for a state competition. Although his team didn't quite make it to finals, we were able to visit with old friends from Carbon Co. As always, we ate too much so we are again on the "computer" with our diet program and the treadmill is getting a workout this week. We will see how long this endeavor to lose weight lasts. I am working again on another quilt square for my quilt club today and finished this project for the heck of it. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I had seen this quote and I just had to do something with it. As the pictures demonstrate, I had an old drawer from a school library table which I primed with gesso, painted, added a "chocolate" colored glass border and lettered. I cut, and painted wood in a "pukey" green and glued to the edges. It was then sealed and will adorn my front porch. If you come selling anything, please bring chocolate to appease me.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

The Mr. isn't fond of corned beef and cabbage and so we bought chocolate mint ice cream. It's green right? Anyway, we are just about as Irish as anyone can be so Happy Pat's to all!! Spring is just around the corner! More quilt squares as I continue with this pattern. Progress to follow.

As spring quickly approaches, we are forced to leave the inside construction and move our efforts to the yard. We have a monumental task ahead of us as we have half a block of lilacs in a hedge that has never been cleaned or pruned and we have about 6 to 8 large rose bushes that we need to move. Also on the removal list are several large juniper bushes that have grown to monumental proportions and we began today by starting with the lilacs and rototilling my first flower bed out back. I discovered a soaker hose along the lilacs that has been there so long that the grass grew over it. I have found tulips trying to grow through matted grass, and tulips that are actually managing to emerge from the previously frozen earth. We do have a few trees on the property that have survived without any water and need to re-plant where many did not survive. I have started my compost pile and we need to rent a chipper as the trimmings from the lilacs are piling up. Because the previous owners were obviously not concerned with the outside at all, the birds are unaccustomed to activity. After trying to identify a noise this morning, I spotted a woodpecker atop our metal chimney cover beating the ever lovin' daylights out of it with his beak. Doves sit on the light pole and watch my activities with curiosity and the finches who have just discovered my feeder (which hung out all winter), are extremely wary of me.

My sister and I went with a couple of older cousins on a drive in the countryside near our childhood home on Sunday. So much of the water is gone, sold to cities and newer subdivisions, which in decades past, watered crops such as sugar beets, corn, beans, etc. Fewer and fewer farms are left and our drive in the rural areas proved how dry and parched the previously fertile soil is. Sad. A cherry orchard used to stand on my uncle's farm and as a child I remember our family, aunts, uncles, cousins, all gathering to pick cherries. There is not one tree there now--not even a blade of grass. Small acreages replace the farms and many of them we noticed were abandoned and in foreclosure. From my earliest memories, I remember helping my father plant our garden every year. I have soil in my blood and I am anxious to get my hands in the dirt as soon as mother nature allows.

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life--
this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do."--
--Charles Dudley Warner

Depression?

I am the daughter of a woman and a man who struggled through the "great depression" with their families. I am the granddaughter of a coal miner who left an immigrant wife with 5 children, two of whom were still in grade school, when he was murdered during the "great depression". I am the granddaughter of a pioneer woman who, at the age of 6, lost her mother and was left to cook for and care for older brothers and her father. Her 9 children were grown except for my father who was a teenager during the "great depression" and spent several months in the hospital in Denver with what was then diagnosed as a "cancer" in his leg. He lost a lot of muscle as a result of the surgery and my grandmother and grandfather traveled by horse and buggy to visit him in the hospital, a trip which took an entire day one way. He told me stories of riding the grasslands of northeastern Colorado to shoot jackrabbits for his sister's family so they would have food on the table as there was no work for any of the men. What is so great about this "great depression"? All I know is that they survived and it made them stronger and instilled in us that what we need and what we think we need are two very different things. As I reflect on my childhood, I think we pretty much continued to live as if we were living in a depression. We didn't waste anything. We did without. We wore hand-me-downs. We ate well, but we ate a lot of rabbits too! We recycled, not knowing that we were actually recycling. Mother made a lot of our clothes, and we darned socks. We learned to appreciate everything and learned to save.

I saw a bit on the telly this weekend about Clara, the grandmother in her 90's. Her grandson is filming her and she is cooking depression recipes. Check her out here. She is terrific!! Peppers and eggs, canned peas and pasta and much more. Egg drop soup? Eggs dropped in boiling water she told the reporter!

Women continued to quilt during the depression and we are still quilting today. Make do with whatever you have. Save fabrics from clothes, rather than discard. The quilters I observe are continuing to use fabrics from their existing stashes, however, there is something enticing to a quilter when brightly colored bolts of cotton line the windows and shelves of a quilt shop. Eleanor Burns has a book for quilters..Egg Money Quilts. These patterns are examples of depression quilts. Money saved from the sale of eggs so a farmer's wife could buy flour or sugar in a cotton print sack. These pics are a version of a Sun Bonnet Sue and some of the fabrics are from old dresses, and some are new. I hope to get it quilted this week.

If we are embarking on another depression, and pray that we are not, there are lots of ways to survive. Those cute little bunnies in my back yard had better beware!! I can cook rabbit several ways.