“Grace is great for nostalgia but she’s not stuck in the past” from the May 11, 1978 Door County Advocate
Grace is great for nostalgia but she’s not stuck in the past
By GRACE SAMUELSON
It’s May, and the dandelions are in bloom, late, like all the flowers this cold spring. If I were 10 I’d be out digging up dandelions for spring salads. Back then we ate them as sort of a spring tonic, and because we’d had no greens all winter. You could store root vegetables and cabbage but we hardly ever saw head lettuce, let alone find it in the stores.
Now we welcome Nature's greens — dandelions, and watercress — because floods in California have rocketed prices on lettuce, celery, etc. sky high. The sunny faces of the dandelion flowers will make many a bouquet for children to carry with grubby little hands to mother.
Sugar bowls and jelly glasses on the window sills will hold the offerings, and not even an orchid is more appreciated. When the dandelions went to seed we would pick the fluffy little balls, blow hard to make the winged seeds fly off, count the remaining bits of fluff to “tell what time my mother wants me.” If you blew hard enough you could release all the seeds, which meant that you could stay a long time to play.
Tulips are ready to bloom and I recall back in the depression days of 1936 when I had scraped together enough change to be able to get a “special bargain offer” of tulip bulbs. Carefully that fall I planted them just outside the south windows in the old farmhouse.
All through that rugged winter I dreamed of looking out those windows in the spring, and thrilling to see the rainbow colors as the tulips lifted their cups to the sun. Finally spring did come but to my deep disappointment only two blossoms peeped through. I had planted them in a low spot and the ice that covered the ground smothered them. But the forsythia bushes outdid themselves that year.
Planting the garden was a happy, cooperative family time. Early in May we girls had been told to sort out and sprout the potatoes in the cellar and set aside the seed potatoes. We weren’t particularly happy about spending Saturday morning down there instead of enjoying the spring sun but when Papa came home that evening we all turned to, helped cut the potatoes with the eyes and then dropped them into the holes dug along the string stretched out between two sticks.
The peas had been planted earlier while it was still cold: now we planted radish, leaf lettuce, Papa’s favorite, pepper cress, carrot seed, and set onions. Then, in the house for our usual Saturday night supper of baked beans and brown bread; then study your Sunday school lesson, take your turn for a bath, and maybe Mama would help you put your hair up on rags to be curly and beautiful for Sunday.
Sometimes Mama fixed the dandelions with a hot bacon dressing and hard boiled eggs but Papa liked the greens just as well when sprinkled with sugar and then cider vinegar from his pressed glass cruet, which sat on the table before him at most every meal. He loved the big Bermuda onions, sliced in plenty of vinegar, with pepper dotting them thickly.
We were just as happy to turn over the page of the old calendar hanging on the kitchen wall as we had been to turn it to the new year; always looking for something better. If the May days turned real warm we might get permission from Papa to leave off our long winter underwear. Our cotton undershirts, panty-waists, outing bloomers, camisoles, or “shimmy shirts” and ruffled petticoats still protected us from cool spring breezes and we begged to wear our heavy sweaters instead of winter coats to school.
Today’s supermarkets are a far cry from the groceries we knew then. What would Grandma say if she could view the frozen foods sections, the tempting fresh produce counters, the ready mixes and instant foods? When we think of what life was like before there were plastic containers, or foil wrap, or saran wrap. Ice boxes which kept food cool, but not really chilled; keeping the milk, cream and eggs in the cellar, the young one’s job to fetch and carry.
We all had our own weather signs since there was no radio or TV with a meteorologist to predict rain or shine tomorrow. We said “Rain before seven, clear before eleven” and it usually worked out that way, leaving us free for picnics and wild flower picking. We’d look for tiny fern fronds — “babes in the wood” like the story in our second reader.
We had fancy little parasols to match our Sunday dresses and “bumbershoots” which we shared on rainy days. (“Don’t open an umbrella in the house — you’ll have bad luck!”) Rubbers, kept in the hall seat under the big mirror; those cravinette raincoats. Those rainy Mondays when the wash was strung throughout the house (you HAD to do the wash on Mondays!) If everything on the supper table was eaten up we’d predict a nice day tomorrow. If we dropped a piece of bread on the floor and it fell butter side down someone was coming hungry.
If we watched the chickens and birds oiling their feathers we knew it was going to keep raining all day. Farm women stripped goose feathers in the spring to make the thick, soft downy pillows in which every housewife prided. Wool was carded and made into batts to be used for filling for next winter's warm comforters.
Along came World War I and the higher-ups decided that daylight saving would be a good idea for the farmers and for those raising “Victory” gardens. So we had an extra hour to hoe, and pull weeds, to collect potato bugs in tin cans with a little kerosene in the bottom. We counted the bugs; for every hundred we got five cents, money stashed away to be spent at the big Fourth of July celebration in Vendome Park. We were fascinated with weather vanes (I still am). Papa was always concerned with the direction from which the wind blew — no doubt because of his years on sailing vessels. We used to recite: “When the wind against the sun dost run, trust it not, for back it will come.” The wind had a lot to do with the way the fish would bite, with the way you hung clothes on the line, whether to wear a sweater or coat to school, and for flying kites.
The rainbow also held fascination for us. We speculated on the pot of gold at the end. (Now they tell us there is no end: the rainbow forms a circle.) The hanging lamp in our dining room had a painted shade, with prisms hooked all along the metal edge. We used to borrow one or two prisms to hand in the window, so we could watch the rainbow colors spread to every corner of the room.
There were rainbow colors in the woods, too. The lavendar of hepaticas and violets; blue violets and bluebells; green of the jack-in-the-pulpit, buttercups. yellow violets and cowslips; the orange touch me not and Indian paint brush; pink spring beauties, rosy wild roses, and red honeysuckle.
Very early in the spring, when there were still patches of snow in the woods, we would often hunt for the delicately fragrant and lovely trailing arbutus. Even then it was almost extinct due to folks yanking up the long strawberry like runners and destroying the roots. Here and there were patches, well guarded and secret, and those in the know would sell bouquets for 10 cents a bunch. We always tried to find some to send to Aunt Grace, well packed in damp moss and wax paper. She loved it so as it reminded her of picking it down in Egg Harbor when she taught school there. Grandma’s sister Great Aunt Sarah Livingston once wrote a poem about the arbutus and Grandma would read it to us.
The birds, strung out like a game of tic tac toe the telephone wires, flaunted many rainbow colors. We watched eagerly for the bluebirds, orioles and the redbirds to come. Spring gardens provided their own rainbows: lilacs, and tulips and we hoped the cherry and apple trees would be in bloom by Decoration day, when we marched down to the cemetery with our offerings of wild flowers to lay on the soldiers’ graves.
I was 10 when President Wilson designated the second Sunday in May as official Mother’s Day. At first it just meant wearing a pink carnation if your mother was living, and giving her a white one if her mother was dead. Then the idea of gifts began — books, candy, flowers. After a while it snowballed into commercialism. Newspaper ads, then radio and television commercials touted suggestions “for Mother on her day.”
Anna Jarvis, who crusaded for a day of tribute to mother, was, by the time she died in 1948, a bitter person, condemning the way in which her idea had become a farce. Still, it’s nice to be honored and we all look back on favorite gifts or words from our children and grandchildren.
The sampler, so lovingly stitched, the little blown glass fish you treasure; plaster craft hands; the little bottle of cologne or the potted pansy with its happy face. And Mother’s Day cards, from Hallmark to handmade, so welcome.
Words and expressions have changed throughout the years. You seldom hear anyone say “bucket” now — and you don’t hear too much about pails. When syrup came in pails school children used the container as a lunch bucket. There were honey pails, lard pails, jugs of molasses or vinegar, water pails, scrub pails (you can’t lean on today’s plastic scrub pail to help yourself up now, but then there aren’t many floors that have to be scrubbed, with kitchen carpeting and outdoor- indoor floor covering.)
Scrub brushes and kneeling pads are hard to find. Mops have sponges and squeezing gadgets. No need to shave Fels Naptha into the scrub water — Spray Fantastic, or like solution; presto!
Some expressions originated in the kitchen: “salt of the earth”, “a peppery disposition”, “a spicy story”, “full of ginger”, “little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.”
Some expressions certainly didn’t originate there. If we’d used the world “lousy” or “snotty” or “brat” we’d have got our mouths washed out with laundry soap.
I remember a little fellow picking cherries in the orchard who was overheard to string out what we considered then obscene language. I asked him “What would your Mother say if she heard you using those words?” And he told me: “First she’d wash my mouth out with soap, then she’d use a washcloth, and then she’d give me a piece of cake.”
I think back to my young years and I realize I’m already old. But there are advantages. Freedom to be myself: to do things on my own schedule; to walk down the street and speak or smile at folks without my friendliness being misconstrued. To talk about the “good old days” yet feel that today is good, too. To go to bed as late or early as I feel. Best of all to get up early and watch God make a new day. Happy “new days” to all!
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Grace Samuelson
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/grace-samuelson
Articles about spring
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/spring