LIFE WITH MOMMA

Some people have several of these. Some people collect them. Some people own none.

I have only ever owned one. Or does it own me? The little rolling pin is newly acquired, Krystal gave it to me at Christmas, and Jaime Lee promptly declared "It'll make your crusts nice and flaky...." Good one, JL.

But the larger rolling pin is the Boss. And she has a story. But then, doesn't everything? It is a solid piece of wood and it has been in use my whole life, and I suspect my father's lifetime too. I can't imagine my kitchen without it.

Momma had it forever, and if we had a nickel for every biscuit, cookie, pie crust, well you know the rest.

The story goes a little like this. In the early years of her marriage, Momma and Henry lived with his parents, And the rolling pin was already there and in regular duty, I suppose almost every day. But one day there was a fire in the little house and the only thing that my great-grandmother thought to grab was the rolling pin, so it survived the fire.

Was this likely? Yes, you couldn't run a kitchen back then without one. And it's a dandy.

Was this true? Maybe, how would I know, I wasn't there. And I love a good story.

Is it stout enough to knock some sense into you? Well, I am confident it would brain you. This one sure would. What a weapon!

All rolling pins do the same job, and they're timeless. There's no improving on the design, it just rolls out stuff. It's the same today as the very first one ever, which was probably a fat twig off of a tree in the Garden of Eden, where Eve first tried rolling out a crust for her apple pies.

Oh my God, I'm probably gonna pay for that one......but I digress.

It's Momma's story, and I'm sticking by it. This old rolling pin is the work horse in my kitchen (without stating the obvious.......me) and I would imagine someday it will roll out batches of wonderful goodies in the kitchen of one of my kids.

These Brown Sugar Cookies are so yummy with a nice glass of cold milk, Jamie loves them, and he always reaches for any that have a "belly button" that would be a raisin. I am sure that is a nod to his grandmother, who made wonderful cookies. I'm sure she used raisins galore. She was about 100 pounds of attitude, and easy to love.

I like cherries in the center, or nothing at all, but that's just me.

Before you ask for the recipe, here it is in it's unadulterated form, grease spots and all. I really don't know where the recipe is from, I could tell you it came over from the Black Forest with Jewish refugees who endured tremendous hardship crossing the mountains during the First World War. But how likely is that? You might be surprised.

In a future Blog, I just may use that. Wait and see.

This recipe has been around as long as I can remember, written and re-written out many times. It's another homage to Momma and her ability to make something out of nothing, you would have every single one of these ingredients in your kitchen at any given time. I've never heard of the soda/hot water mixture before, I suspect somewhere along the line Momma had no baking powder, and used this as a substitute, I don't know. I just know the dough makes a lovely, old fashioned Brown Sugar Cookie.

These cookies freeze well, if they last that long, and I find they roll, cut and bake much better after a rest in the fridge. In fact, I like to make up the dough after supper and bake them in the morning. Let that dough rest and firm up. Don't be in a hurry.

Make them as you would any rolled out cookie, do not substitute anything for the shortening. Cream the first 5 ingredients, mix in the cooled water/soda mixture, blend in the flour. I like to roll them thick, I get about 18 cookies to the batch.

Also you can see from the first picture, I use the sauce tin from a large Kraft Pizza kit as my cookie cutter, it's at least 40 years old.

So crack out your rolling pin, get your apron on, I'm going to start my Blog!!

Life with Momma was never boring, that's for sure.

As children, my brothers and I were pretty much free to roam the neighborhood and make our own fun, since there were no kids close by, cousins mostly. And the neighborhood consisted of playing in and around the Black Rafter, the big wide ditch, and the ocean!! We loved our bikes too, I remember clearly Butch and me taking our bikes to the top of the hill across the road where Terry Harris' house is now, jump on, and peddle as fast as we could, just ripping down that hill. Then somewhere along the way we'd check for traffic (there was a lot less then, but it only takes one truck......) and dart right across the road, down the Dance Hall driveway, and down the field to home. We weren't remotely interested in slowing down. No helmets. No brains either, whose idea was it that that would be fun? But it was, and we were lucky not to tip those bikes right on the highway in front of a truck, but I guess someone was looking out for us.

We spent so much time down on the rocks, as we'd say. We loved it, and somehow Momma seemed to trust we'd be okay. There was a wide clay path, a road almost, from behind the house leading right down onto the shore, if you can imagine it; Everett operated heavy equipment and he used a bulldozer to dig the path. It was awesome, and the very beginning of the dig is a shallow depression at the edge of the bank behind my house, still visible, but the rest has been swallowed by erosion. And you'd never get away with that now, but in those days, it was a road cut right through the cliff, right down onto the shore.

Farther over on the property a fence post marked the edge and we never paid much attention to it. Except one day Butch was kicking around it and voila! Wasn't there a length of rope attached! Well, what do you suppose we did then?

Well, we rapelled up and down the bank all summer, oh my god what fun! It's no wonder we were hungry all the time, the way we played! And I suppose Momma never really asked what we were up to, we just always came home at suppertime, played out and filthy! And funny, I don't remember getting too many baths.......

One of our jobs too, in those days was to go up to Jackie Doucette's in the evenings to get a bottle of milk. Jackie and his wife Winnifred (she was from Jamaica) supplied Momma with fresh milk pretty well everyday. Sometimes it wasn't ready and we would wait inside with Winnifred and the kids, who we often played with, and she was such a lovely person. I can still hear that beautiful way she spoke and sang, such a lilt, so pretty. She also taught me to say "Shucks" instead of "shit" all the time.

Number 1 : I wasn't aware at the age of 8 or 9 that I said it all that much in front of adults

Number 2 : Apparently, I did. Busted.

Number 3 : It doesn't look like it worked.

Oh well shit, she tried.

At this age and stage, I was terrified of Jackie's cows, he seemed to have them pastured everywhere, but in the 60's they were almost no houses or cottages around us, just the original homesteads. Therefore there was lots of fields for livestock, and to my eyes, they were enormous! And mean. They were pretty docile of course, but the same couldn't be said about the other livestack.

GEESE.

Need I say more? They're are the crossest things in the barnyard and his were legendary. There were two of them that I can remember and if they were aware you were there, they would chase you right back on the road. Tough on the Jehovah Witnesses. I had to walk as quietly as possible across the field, behind the barn, careful all the time that the cows might be about, up one side of the root cellar and down the other, another part of the farmyard worse than death, then take a good look to the left and to the right, then race the last few yards to the house, going hell for leather. Whew! There was a latched gate to get through also, but if you got that far you were in the clear, and if you needed to shave a few seconds off your time, or if the geese got between you and the gate, you could jump it. Tom Cruise in Maverick had nothing on me!!

The option was clear......no broken ankle could possibly be worse that a goose pecking the arse right off you. Poor little kids that we were. Jackie always said "Just give them a boot." Well, we rarely had boots on, we were like Loretta Lynn in the Coal Miner's Daughter, and besides, the friggin geese were taller than me. It wasn't even a fair fight.

Friggin intimidating. But not for Momma, she rarely left the house, and we all started taking on those tasks to make it easier on her. And in retrospect, we all matured young, not always a bad thing. However, I lost my nerve on one occasion, the geese were in hot pursuit, the driveway was on an incline and slippery, geese have the advantage....wings.....I lost my grip on the milk bottle, threw it at the bastards, and ran back home crying. Momma was not amused, to say the least. She lost the milk AND the glass bottle, so another situation to fix. Needless to say, no biscuits that night.

Here's a cloudy old picture of Momma, in her ususal spot, at the end of the kitchen table working on a smoke.

While on our escapades on the shore, Momma liked nothing better than a pot of clams and we loved digging them. She taught us where to pull a few mussels too, to add to a chowder and they were a pitiful far cry from Prince Edward Island's famous cultured mussels of today, but the industry as we know it hadn't begun yet They still made a tasty broth. We knew where there was a small bed of oysters, but I think we avoided those, and she liked nothing better than a couple of great big bar clams, quahogs we always called them. If you can believe it, she sliced them open and ate them raw. And always after a storm, she would send Darrell down to the shore to find her some dulse, he learned from her how to recognize it and again, she ate the thick purple seaweed raw. She must have been lacking something in her diet and years later we learned that she had thyroid issues and seafood was good for her. Instictively she knew it. So we became great foragers, and during this early time, although Momma rarely came on the shore with us, no time was wasted. She showed us how to find and dig out a fresh water spring. These are always covered up at high tide, but at low tide they're there, if you know the signs.The water is icy cold and sweet, hard to imagine, as they feed the salty ocean, but I taught my kids and grandkids where to find them too, even filling a bottle for them so they could learn and appreciate what could be a valuable skill. If there is ever an apocalypse. Or a zombie uprising. You never know, you can't be too careful these days.

One other occasion stands out in my memory from a lot of years ago. Momma decided to take us on a walk on the flats to the crick. Now, everybody from around here knows the flats on Rollo Bay are fairly extensive. We can, and have, walked from our house across the flats to the seal colony, right to Fortune harbour if we want. I did it again just this late summer with Krystal and Jeff, it's quite a hike. But it's all very familiar to me and I love it.

But this day with Momma was a corker. It was very hot and what I got out of it was a cracking good case of sunstroke. I was burnt to a crisp and delirious and no one ever heard of taking water with you in those days or using sunscreen. We were on the wrong side of home to find a spring too. I remember crawling up the stairs on my hands and knees to bed when we got home, I was too dizzy to walk anymore.

Anyhoooo........I survived.

Early in the walk Momma took it in her head to cross the crick. Big mistake. Ask Sara Deveau.

That crick has a little known reputation for being home to quicksand. Call it what you want, if you land in it, it's very difficult to get out. The more you panic and flounder about, the greater the chance of staying there. You just feel heavy and you get sucked down. It can be terrifying. The tide turns quick there and the Atlantic comes roaring back in to that crick, likely drowning you in the process if you don't find a way to wiggle out. There is more than one story around of horses being lost in that crick.

Momma stepped in, it's not deep at low tide, and I can remember these bubbles pouring up all around her. She was carrying a shovel to dig clams and it sure could have ended differently, but that shovel probably saved her. She was able to use it to push herself out. And she roared at us, so we stayed out. The walk was over. We dragged our soggy sunburned arses across the flats back home. We were all exhausted, as anyone who has spent time at the beach can attest. Does anything spike an appetite like it? I think not.

It wouldn't be til years later that we really talked about it, and really who'd believe us? People would just scoff, but trust me, it's there. Cross at the channel if you want, and even that changes all the time, but stay out of the crick.

More later......