Past Blogs

A creature definitely is stirring. And that creature most certainly  is a mouse. Fortunately, said mouse is on the outside of the house.

Our kitchen table is strategically placed to give us a panoramic view of the Tooley Cafe as we dine. Birds and squirrels flit  in and out all day. Rabbits and deer are occasional crepuscular visitors while raccoons, skunks and, my favorite, opossums, are on the night shift.

So I was surprised to see a wee streak of rapid, white motion in the Cafe the other night. Were my eyes playing tricks on me, or was I seeing an extremely tiny guest?

The following night the little guest zipped up the bird feeder pole and disappeared into the shadows of the feeder tray. This time I got a glimpse of a white belly and teensy white feet. I also witnessed the creature’s lightning fast leap out of the feeder and exit via the tops of the bushes.

Consulting Mammals of Wisconsin, I paged through rodents only to discover that we have a great number of mice varieties in our state. A positive ID of our visitor is impossible; several species fit the description. But if I had to bet, my money would go on the white-footed mouse.

I’ve noticed an abundance of cutesy holiday mice ornaments and tsotchkes in the stores lately. I wonder if the people who buy them truly love mice? I consider myself the lucky one. I’ve got a real Christmas mouse right in my own backyard.

The idea behind a Christmas cookie exchange is simple. A number of women each agree to bake a gigantic batch of a favorite Christmas cookie. The group then gathers, and each baker trades a dozen cookies with everyone present. Voila! Each lady leaves with dozens of cookies of many varieties and saves hours of time in the kitchen.

Please don’t sign me up. Baking Christmas cookies is a yearly joy for me, and each of the many kinds I bake is filled with family tradition.

My beloved Christmas Cookie Cookbook came from the Wisconsin Electric Company in 1957. Three generations, my grandmother, my mother and I, all attended the free Friday cookie baking demonstrations in the Electric Company’s downtown auditorium. We all left with complimentary cookbooks which contain the best (and thoroughly tested)  cookie recipes in the world.

Each December I get out my tattered, battered book and bake our family’s favorites… California Dream Bars, Toffee Nut Squares, Chocolate Snowflakes, Mexican Wedding Cakes, Gold Cookies, Pinwheels and Gingerbreads. My son gets his own batch of Oatmeal Jam Diamonds.

I also use another ancient cookbook, The Big Chocolate Cookbook, to create Chocolate Orange Cookies, Chocolate Fig Cookies and Chocolate Coconut Squares.

The cookies I don’t bake are equally important. After my Aunt Vi died, our family retired the cookies we made exclusively for her, pastel pink and green coconut kisses. My Aunt Vi had a thing for pink food.

The Tiger’s Paw cookies have been retired as well. My son-in-law baked these extraordinarily labor-intensive cookies. All the tiger claws, slivered almonds, had to be carefully placed in each paw.

Only my mother could make rolled, white sugar cookies. They were mostly butter, and she would turn the furnace down to make the house frigid enabling her to roll the cookies paper thin before the butter melted. My father always watched the oven for her while she rolled and cut.

My mother-in-law’s specialty was anise cookies. Our daughter continues that tradition. Her first attempt at duplicating her Grandma’s recipe turned into hockey pucks, but she has mastered the recipe now.

I happily share plates and boxes of cookies with friends all during the holidays. And when I receive a gift of homemade cookies, I know there is more than cookies on that plate. I’m getting a taste of another family’s history as well.

Sewing machines and I are not compatible. For Christmas many years ago, my husband surprised me with a portable sewing machine. He reasoned that anyone who loves color, design and fabric as much as I would be a natural at sewing.

My spirits sank when I looked at my owner’s manual. All fifty pages of it was a literal translation from the Japanese. Seventeen steps were required to thread the needle and bobbin. Multiple pages were devoted to troubleshooting problems of “tension”. I had a hunch the manual wasn’t referring to the type of tension I was feeling.

Accurate measuring has never been one of my talents, and I quickly discovered that sewing clothes is a mathematical exercise.

After many botched projects, I took refuge in the fact that sack dresses were in fashion. I could take two identical rectangles of fabric, sew two straight seams and put a drawstring on the top and a hem on the bottom and call it a dress.

My young daughter and I sported matching sack dresses for many of her birthdays.

By the time my son was ten, sack dresses had gone out of style, and I had reached  a peak of frustration with my machine. I vividly recall sitting down to repair a torn seam in his jeans and having the thread dissolve into a tangled ball of knots and loops. My mechanically inclined son fixed the mess and volunteered to sew the seam. I let him. The time had come for me to donate my machine to a friend who loved to sew.

Since then, I have inherited two more sewing machines. You might have seen them sitting at the end of our driveway with signs saying “Free to a Good Home”.

A sewing basket filled with colorful spools of thread and a pincushion bristling with needles sits on my closet shelf. I enjoy doing hand sewing for simple alterations, repairs and button reattachments. And I excel at emergency surgeries on Raggedy Anns and teddy bears in crisis. I have never lost a patient.

All I ask of the sewing goddess is never to bless me with a sewing machine again in my lifetime.

And to all of you who have mastered these treacherous machines, I am in awe.

Last week was a mess. At times we didn’t know which mess to tackle first.

I don’t understand how two people who value calm, ordered and beautiful surroundings ended up running a shelter for homeless cats, but we do.

On Monday, Neko started the wreckage ball rolling by marking his territory. As we were running for buckets and sprays, his brother, the infamous Gato, hopped up on the abandoned breakfast table and knocked over a full travel mug of coffee. Coffee and cream were running down the walls and rapidly soaking into the kitchen carpeting.

Since our one scrub bucket was already in use, I grabbed a new roll of paper towels to start blotting. Buying stock in a paper towel company might be a wise move for us.

After my husband had the first mess under control, he appeared in the kitchen with the handiest cleaning device ever invented, the shop·vac. This is a wondrous machine as it likes to lap up liquids. Anything a cat can throw out, it can suck up. A prim and proper Hoover would short circuit under that type of stress.

The week proceeded with missed litter boxes, multiple fur balls and a dismembered mouse. Batman dumped a bouquet, and mom cat had three nose bleeds. By Friday we considered sending all the cats for a getaway weekend at a pet hotel.

A small woodcarving of Saint Francis by a folk artist in Cordova, New Mexico, adorns a window sill in our house. The good saint frequently is invoked for patience.

In these pre-Thanksgiving weeks, elementary school children all over America have been busy writing assignments on “I am thankful for”. At this stage in America’s history, when “no” seems to be the most fashionable word, I think it would behoove all of us adult Americans to write a similar essay.

Given that assignment, I would focus on my parents and my thankfulness for the world view that they gave me.

The apple incident is as clear in my mind today as when it happened over sixty years ago. I choose a large apple, took a few bites, felt full and tossed the remains in the kitchen garbage. A while later my father spotted the apple, retrieved it and found me. He was not angry but profoundly sad. “You can’t do this,” he said. “Many children in the world go to bed hungry. You are lucky to have enough food, and you may not waste it.”

He also told me what I should have done. “Take a small apple (schoolboy size as they were called then) and if you finish all of it, you are welcome to have another.” I got the message, and it has remained with me all my life.

My father’s view on peanut butter sandwiches has stuck with me as well. He was against stockpiling food, overbuying and overcooking, “just in case someone drops in”. We had a week’s supply of food which was carefully planned and cooked by my mother. She was extremely skilled at cooking the right amounts, but occasionally  fell short.

“You can always have a peanut butter sandwich if you are still hungry after dinner,” my father would say. He saw this approach as far better than throwing out extra food cooked “just in case”.

Because of my parents, I am grateful for food. Grocery shopping, cooking and eating regularly are reminders of my privileged position in the world. I remain one of the lucky ones.

We will host two Thanksgiving feasts on Thursday. Our family dinner will be followed by the beast feast in the Tooley Cafe. Every leftover spoonful, burnt crust, bone and scrap will vanish before dawn.