Currently Cry Me a River By Julie London see related

I'm a crier. I've always been a crier. I wish I weren't, but I am. I cry when I'm sad, or when someone else is sad. I cry when I'm happy, or when someone else is happy. I get choked up (and cry) when people or churches work together, or when people are reunited, or when someone has something wonderful happen to them. I cry when I watch someone's dream come true. (THAT is a big one for me.) When Susan Boyle sang for the first time on Britain's Got Talent and knocked it out of the park, I sobbed. When Liv Tyler's character hears her friends' song on the radio for the first time and goes screaming and running down the street in That Thing You Do I get choked up (and cry). I cry when others are not crying, and when they are. I hate the movie The Lion King, except for the first five minutes. When the baboon lifts up the king lion's newborn son and all the animals rejoice and bow down in adoration, I am undone, and I cry. I've seen it a hundred times, and I still cry.

I have hated this trait about myself for my entire life.

I spent a beautiful spring day this past May crying for joy that my dear daughter and her sweetheart were married. Then I cried sad tears when they moved to England the day after they returned from their honeymoon. A few days later,  I cried as I watched my precious mother-in-law's tiny body weaken and finally succumb to death. I cried this summer when Bruce and Blake and I visited some of the homes and places I knew as a child in Maine, places I hadn't seen in forty-five years.

These days I have something new to cry about that has about broken my heart. My son and his wife have split up.

So, now I cry for my son's pain and loss and heartache, and for my own. I cry because I'm losing my beloved daughter-in-law. I'm crying now. I cry for the death of a marriage and the broken, aching place it leaves in people I love more than my own life. And I still cry for my daughter, so far away, and for my almost-grown son who finishes high school in a few months. And I cry for my dad, and for my mother-in-law. I cry when I look at pictures and when I hear songs.

I look forward to the place where there will be no more crying. In the meantime, please pass the Kleenex.

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This picture is for Michel. A sampling of my efforts at canning, this year and last.

In case you were wondering, it's true. Canning green beans takes forever. Bruce brought home two bushels of 'em the other day and I immediately became overwhelmed. That same day, he brought home two bushels of red bell peppers, a bushel of flat Italian green beans, half a bushel of onions, a flat of raspberries, and a bushel of mixed hot peppers -- and it all needed to be put up as soon as possible.

Bruce and I spent the better part of Saturday chopping red bell peppers until my fingernails were split and tinted orange and my right hand was aching. Eighty-four bell peppers yields 20 very full quart-size freezer bags of chopped peppers. On Sunday I made an old-fashioned, heavy Sunday dinner (chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, zucchini) which we ate when they got home from church at noon, then we popped a Midsomer Murders into the DVD player and settled in to prep green beans.

After the beans have had their ends smipped off and are cut in pieces, you fill the jars and pour boiling water over them. Wipe the rims, apply the lid and ring, and pressure can for 25 minutes. If it sounds to you like the pressure canning part of this operation should take aproximately twenty-five minutes, clearly you have never operated a pressure canner.

First, you bring three quarts of water to a boil in your pressure canner. Then you lower your jars into the water.

Once your jars are in the canner, you screw the lid on the pot and allow steam to vent out of this little pipe doohickey for ten minutes. Then you place the weighted thingamabob on top of the little pipe thingy and watch until the dial gauge says you have reached the desired pressure (15 minutes or more). Upon reaching your desired pressure, you begin timing your twenty-five minutes for safely canning green beans.

Of course, you can not leave the pressure canner unattended for a split second, so you pull up a chair and stare at your stove for the required time. Then you turn off the burner and move the pot over to a cool part of the stove. Now comes the most annoying part of the process, the most endless part, the part where you sit and wait for the pressure to drop sufficiently so you can remove the lid without blowing yourself to Kingdom Come and pull the jars out of the canner. This takes awhile. Maybe up to an hour.

Start to finish, this "twenty-five minutes" actually takes a good ninety. My canner holds seven quart jars at a time, so with 28 jars filled that equals four cannerloads. By my calculations, this means over six hours (allowing for the time it takes the water to boil initially) of canning time after a full day of cutting beans. I would've been up until at least one o'clock in the morning at that rate, so upon the advice of a friend and fellow canner (Maggie M.) I decided to can 14 quarts and blanche and freeze the other 14.

I turned off the kitchen light around 10:00 pm. You can trust me when I say the only Green Bean I'm interested in seeing right now is my Jeep, so named by our friends Sue and Lorry. Green Bean will be taking Blake and me far away, to a distant land where there are no pressure canners. It's homeschool co-op day! 

Julie Baby's Fab Food Preserving Tally 2009

Frozen:
Blueberries 19 quarts
Raspberries 4 quarts plus 10 pints
Rhubarb 2 quarts
Bell peppers 20 quarts
Green beans  14 quarts

Canned:
Zucchini relish  8 jars
Dill pickles   17 jars
Green beans  14 jars

Yesterday was a pretty big day for the Painter Clan. We bought a new car. Not brand new, but new to us. It's another Jeep Cherokee, of course, but this one has four doors, an automatic transmission (which I feel somewhat conflicted about), and most importantly two front-seat cupholders. It's a pretty, dark green with black interior. And it's a 2000, which is six years newer than other Cherokee.

We got a great deal on it locally through Craigslist, but we've found a thing or two that the previous owners were not especially forthcoming about, like the little piece of black tape that covers up the CHECK ENGINE light, which is on, coincidentally. Bruce said he doesn't know what happened to his brain when we got to the people's house to look at the car. So the fact is we may have been somewhat snookered, but it's still a good deal. We knew before we bought it that we wanted to get a couple of things fixed on it, so we're happy and thankful and trusting the Lord. In the meantime we have a nicer vehicle that still looks like our style. If we have a style.

Currently Grey Gardens - Criterion Collection By Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale, Edith Bouvier Beale, Jack Helmuth, Brooks Hires, Albert Maysles see related

Bruce picked me up after work last night, because we're still having problems with my Jeep. Blake was waiting on the porch for us when we got home and said, "The farm market called. They're not going to have your peaches for tomorrow. You should call back next week."

I let out a huge sigh of relief. Earlier in the week, I had placed an order for a bushel of peaches. Then I checked back in my Xanga archives and discovered that the last time I canned peaches, not only did I have five helpers, but we only canned a half bushel. That doesn't sound quite right, now that I think of it. Maybe someone went out for more or something, because we got 25 quarts and that's an awful lot of jars for half a bushel of peaches. Either way, it was plenty of work for all of us and a big mess to boot. I was not looking forward to doing a full bushel alone.

When my husband saw how relieved I was that Hoover's couldn't fill my order, he was scratching his head. He still can't figure out why I was going to can peaches if I was dreading it so. "Why didn't you just cancel the order, if you didn't want to do them?"

What was it the man said when asked why he climbed Mount Everest? "Because it's there"? In my own silly little way, I think I understand how he felt.

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Last night we started watching Grey Gardens, a 1976 documentary about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie. I had been trying for months to get my hands on the DVD, but because our library doesn't own it and it was a new item in the owning library's collection, I couldn't request it and have it sent to our library. Two pleading phone calls paid off and they sent the discs to Lititz this week.

What a quirky pair Edie and her mom were! If you're middle-aged, you may remember reading about them in the 1970s. They lived in an oceanfront mansion in East Hampton, one of the most exclusive enclaves in America, and their home was falling down around them. The house, named Grey Gardens, had great, huge holes in the walls, dozens of cats (why do these people always have cats?), no running water, and very bizarre decor. The get-ups the two parade around in are amazing. At the time of the filming, LittleEdie was 56. She clearly had problems that went way beyond mere quirkiness. And her mom was not especially stable, either, and was given to sitting outdoors au naturel. What made the Beale ladies so fascinating, beyond their offbeat lifestyle and their fancy-schmancy address, was the fact that they were the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, beautiful style icon and former First Lady of the United States.

The HBO film of the same name is coming soon to a library near you.

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Speaking of the Kennedys, I am rereading a book I first read in 1977 when I was working at a library in New Jersey. (Please note: If you are a die-hard Kennedy fan, you should probably stop reading this right now.) The book is called Death at Chappaquiddick, and if you don't recognize that name, then you either weren't born or weren't paying attention in the last months of the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

The events that transpired on a tiny bridge on July 18 and 19, 1969, left a young, single  woman, Mary Jane Kopechne, dead and probably prevented Ted Kennedy from ever becoming the President of the United States. The cover-up that followed the married Mr. Kennedy's abandonment of Miss Kopechne -- who was very much alive when he exited the vehicle -- in a car submerged in a pond, was evidently forgiven and forgotten by the people of Massachusetts, who elected and reelected him to represent them in Washington for the next several decades. The rest of the country was evidently less forgiving and, due in large part to the scandal that followed Chappaquiddick, the nation was spared an Edward M. Kennedy presidency.

The evening began with a hush-hush cocktail party. The guest list included six young, twenty-something single women who were staunch supporters of Robert Kennedy, and six middle-aged politicos, five of whom were married. Somehow, Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne ended up in a car together late that evening. Miss Kopechne had somehow gotten grass stains on the back of her blouse, but had none on her skirt. When the evidently inebriated Kennedy drove the car off the bridge and into the water, he was able to climb out the car window, swim a fair distance to the shore, and find his way back to his hotel, where he rested for what was it, ten hours? before he finally reported the accident to the authorities.

By the time rescue personnel arrived on the scene, Miss Kopechne was dead. The autopsy showed no water in her lungs, which indicated she was able to stay alive for some time in an air bubble in the car. No doubt she was waiting for Ted Kennedy to return with help.

When Mr. Kennedy appeared on television to address the nation some time later, he was wearing a neck brace. As a friend of mine pointed out, his neck seemed just fine when he swam ashore that July night.

I haven't finished the book, so forgive me if I've gotten any of the details wrong. I'll fix that when I've finished rereading the book, but these are the facts as I remember them.

The Kopechne family accepted a financial settlement from the Kennedy family and part of the agreement was that they not speak about Chappaquiddick until after Senator Kennedy's death. I, for one, would like to hear what they have to say now that the Senator has passed away.

Hallelujah, it's September first! After a very eventful spring, we have enjoyed a happy and peaceful summer. And I did notice the cooler-than-usual temps, too, Lord. Thanks mucho for that. What a blessing!

Our family of autumn lovers usually has a little celebration on the first day of September. That usually means I will make a little dessert or cake or something like that. Today I'm canning, so I'm not sure I'll bake today, but if I do it will probably be a rhubarb crisp or rhubarb muffins. Our rhubarb patch did not have a great year. In all the busyness of Chelsea's wedding, and then MomMom's death, I didn't get out there and pull it, so we only ended up with two quarts to freeze.

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My Jeep is having problems, so this morning Bruce drove me over to Hoover's Farm Market to pick up the half-bushel of cucumbers I ordered yesterday. Brought 'em home, washed 'em and stuck 'em in ice water to soak for a couple of hours. Lord willing, this afternoon we will have ten or so quarts of dill pickles lined up on the counter, lids happily pinging that rewarding ping. I haven't canned much this summer -- really only a batch of zucchini relish -- so I feel like I'm behind even though I've just begun. Don't you hate that? 

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We have a pair of well-worn children's Lee jeans, size four slim, that all my children wore when they were little. For several years, the jeans were displayed in the bathroom in all their faded glory inside one of those cheapo plastic box frames I found at a yard sale. That frame finally bit the dust and I vowed that someday I would have the little britches framed good and proper.

When I got my weekly email from ACMoore last week, and found that they had all their custom framing on sale for 50% off. I headed over there pronto, jeans in hand. I figured it'd cost me maybe $60 with the coupon. Boy, was I wrong. The girl at the counter quoted me a price of $250. Meaning the regular price would be $500! Who on earth would/could pay that? Not me, baby! After I caught my breath, I asked the helpful clerk what options I might have and she directed me to a ready-made shadow box frame that will work just fine. Total price: twenty bucks. Now, that's more like it.

So that's what I'm going to do today. Can pickles and frame tiny blue jeans*. I will also take an inventory of my canned goods from last year and see how many more jars of tomatoes I need. There's wash on the line that'll need folding, too.  Heck, I might even go for a walk since the weather is so spectacular.

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So, what are you reading these days? Here's what's on my nightstand:

• The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar - One of my favorite, new-to-me authors.
  
• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks - This is the 2009 One Book, One Community selection. Since I work in a library, I read these books every year, in the interest of being well-informed. Just started it yesterday. So far, it's okay. Last year's choice was The Grace That Keeps This World, which was also okay once I got into it, which did take awhile. I think the year before that it was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which is a fascinating book and very eye-opening.

I am counting the days until January 5, 2010 when Anne Tyler's newest offering, Noah's Compass, is released. That's on a Tuesday, people, so mark your calendars and please, for Heaven's sake, do not call me or stop by on that day.

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Here's a question for you local, homeschooling types: Anybody have kids participating in the CLCHM concert choir this year? I just signed Blake up for it and am interested in connecting with some carpool buddies. Call me if you want to talk about it. (Just not on January 5, 2010.)

Love to all. Have a swell day!

* Attention all copy-catters: Get your own idea! I don't want every home in Lititz suddenly sporting tiny jeans on the walls.