Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and temperate.

And summer’s lease hath too short a date.

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines.

And often is his gold complexion dimmed.

Many thanks to Bill Shakespeare for today’s guest post!

I just finished my stint of working on selling raffle tickets for a “dream home”.   The house is donated and all of the money goes to a children’s cancer charity, but it takes a lot of time from us volunteers.  So I had some time to think about the nature of dreams.

This is the flyer that we gave to people to entice them to part with $100.   Doesn’t it look lovely with the mountains and pines in the background?   The actual home is in a bit of a depression, so I don’t think the mountains are visible.   It’s out on the windy prairie and all of the trees are spindly recently transplanted things.   Oh yeah, there are houses right next to it, about 10 feet away.

Of course as it is a display home, it is tastefully furnished, and neat as a pin.

And if you ever dreamed of sitting in the bathtub, AND being able to see your neighbors, then this house is that dream come true.

But the house is new and shiny, and we were able to sell a lot of tickets (but not all of the ones available), so I think we did some good. The winning ticket was plucked out of the bin by a young cancer survivor and was won by a person from the town south of here, so both of their dreams came true.

I have dreams as well, even if they don’t include this house.

And this is how I dream.   I sometimes buy lottery tickets.  I don’t consider them to be a waste of money, I think of them as buying a dream for only a dollar.   With each ticket I imagine the fun I could have spending all that lovely extra money, then it is back to reality as I have never won and have a dollar less in my wallet.  (Each of these tickets had exactly one of the lucky numbers, and you need to have at least three lucky numbers to win a prize).  But it’s cheap fun for a moment.

Memorial Day means different things to people.  It’s the official (or semi-official) start to summer.  School is usually out and people take their vacations.   Many folks celebrate with a barbeque cookout and lots and lots of beer.   I decided to go to the local cemetery where they were honoring the soldiers of past wars.

First up were the revolutionary war re-enactors.  I had a bit of a chat with them, I do have an Iroquois ancestor who fought with the Americans, so I could join the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution, a snobby sort of fossilized organization) if I ever lose my mind.

There weren’t any Civil War people, but there were WWI guys.

They are not from the same time period, America did not officially enter the war until near the end, and the German is in a uniform from the beginning of the war.  I asked him if he was an ‘evil Hun’, but he denied it.   He said that he enjoys representing anyone other than the Americans, so he also has the uniforms of Brits and French soldiers.  His gear is both originals and reproductions.

WWII is more popular with re-enactors and I think the stuff is somewhat easier to find.  When I was a young girl you could find this sort of stuff in antique shops, even original Civil War caps and such like.  (My uncle loved to go to antique and junk shops to look for the flotsam of the past.)

This guy had bought an ambulance and had restored it.  The speedometer says that it could go up to 60 miles per hour, and he laughed and said that was a fantasy.  As this was a consuming hobby, I asked what his wife had got (instead of her own ambulance) and he said a Jaguar!   Seems like a fair trade to me.

And we remember those who did not make it through the wars.

The memory of food is amazingly powerful and persistent.   You may not have tasted a certain food in decades, but there it sits, ready and able to be recalled.  And the desire exists to recreate the experience again.

When I was a little girl we lived in a working class neighborhood of old red brick housing, and many of the neighbors were  Germans and Poles.   We were poor as dirt and did not get a lot of treats, but payday was the special day and it always meant we would get some lovely thing to eat.  At least until my father drank up the rest of the pay.   There were wonderful bakeries that made delicious bread, crusty and chewy, that is what I visualize when I think of bread.   And then there were the pastries, something we might get after going to Mass.   Modern pastries may look like the old ones, but they taste nothing like the originals.   I saw a recipe in a cookbook from an old baker for Danish pastry and decided that I must have this one more time.

Real Danish involves making a yeast dough with eggs, butter and sugar and then layering in more butter, sort of like in puff pastry.  The cheese layer has ricotta and cream cheese, some sugar, but not too sweet.   So  this picture is from the first batch that I made.   It tasted like that way I remembered, with the goodness of butter and sugar, not artificial flavoring.   So I took this to my knitting group, because as much as I enjoyed eating these, I couldn’t eat an entire batch and still fit into my clothes ;-).   One of the older ladies in the group is from Austria, and this is the food memory she has of Danish as well.   She really raved about the taste and asked for the recipe, so that she can have the memory again too.   I wonder if the young people of today will crave the factory produced facsimile when they are old.

At long last, it is finally Spring.   (Okay technically it has been Spring, but we have been unable to prove it by the weather, as it continued to act like Winter.)  And as me and Miss P strolled along the path down by the stream, I noticed that the spring flowers were coming out.   (Miss P noticed the abundant baby bunnies hopping about.  I guess that the rabbits weren’t just sitting around eating blackberries and cream during winter.)

And it’s a good thing that there are flowers about, as the hummingbirds showed up on the 15th, greeted by cold and rain on the flat and snow in the mountains.

This bush had zero leaves, just these weird clusters of pale yellow blooms.

I have no idea what this is, but it was blooming.

This little plant’s blossom is barely visible, and doesn’t really look much like a flower.    Miss P was quite bored by the stopping and taking of pictures that did not involve her, so we were quickly on our merry way.

In the early days of the internet (AOL), your computer would let you know of the arrival of this modern miracle of instant communication with a cheery greeting.   Now of course, it is routine to get an avalanche of e-mails, most of which are unimportant, with the occasional gem of communication.   But besides the e-mails that I have kept, I also have written things that come from the past.

It’s fairly obvious from the postcard on the left that these are vintage greetings.

Some of them were sent, and others were saved for one reason or another.

I lined them up randomly to take this picture, but it turns out that they are actually in order.   They are all written by my great-grandmother, Josephine Curry, to my grandmother.   The earliest postcard was written in 1908, when my grandmother was away at Tunasassa Indian School.   After she was at school, my grandmother worked as a domestic for some white people for a few years.   There are no postcards from the time of my gran’s first marriage, that’s a mystery without an answer.   The last postcard is from about 1926,  before my mom was born, when my aunt was going to Indian School.  These faded postcards and an even more faded photo are the only bits left from my great-grandmother, who was born in 1860.   My mom had these bits so I assume that she kept them as a link to the past.  Mom was from my gran’s second family, so most of the old people were already gone by the time she was born and she never knew them.

That is the good mail, then there are the modern letters that I get, and I would not classify them as good or pleasant or welcome, but it is mail.

My youngest brother likes to send me whiny letters complaining about all his bills and ills.   He writes letters because he never answers his phone, this is the only way to communicate with him.   I believe that his purpose is to guilt me into paying his bills, and this is not going to happen.   So I reply; change what you’re doing and I will help you.   That never happens, and I continue to get the same letter on a different date.  Oh well, maybe the fleeting messages of the internet are the way to go.

One of the many foolish questions that is commonly asked in a job interview is: What is your weakness?  (The correct answer is always “kryptonite”).   But I would have to answer that my weakness is books.   I love physical books, ink on paper, the feel of a hardcover book in my hands, e-books just don’t have this, they seem and are ephemeral, they can just be deleted.   Because I love them, books just follow me home, so that even as I get rid of some of them, there are always more coming in.    I really was not trying to acquire this current crop of books, but here they are.

The library had it’s semi-annual book sale recently.   On the last day of the sale, it was $5 for as many books as you could fit in a grocery bag.  All of these are mysteries, except for the one by my friend Barbara.   Mystery is my favorite genre,

And I picked up these books, some of which I had read before, because they also fit in the sack.    So what will I do with these books? Once I have read the mysteries I will probably donate them to the little free library at the Mennonite Church.   Some will probably go on the empty spaces on my bookshelves, until the next purge.

These books came from a quilter who is downsizing.   She invited me and a couple of friends to come over and take as many as we wanted.   It was interesting to see how many of her books I already owned.  It’s true that great minds think alike. 😉

She is an artist and quilt teacher that I had first met many years ago.   And a lot of these books are autographed to her, but she is ruthlessly de-cluttering prepatory  to moving.

So this led to the melancholy musing of what will happen to my books someday.   Perhaps, I will take them with me, but in the meantime I shall enjoy reading them and I promise to make at least one thing inspired from the quilting books.