Because I turned right

When I started writing this blog I really had no agenda - which was probably painfully obvious.  I swing from promoting preparedness for everything from a short power outage to some unidentified apocalyptic event and then flip over to one written because someone hurt my feelings.  Most of the things I write about just pop into my head - a memory, a scent, a song - anything can kick off a subject.

I have a nephew, Peter Greene, who is arguably a famous educational blogger and his daughter, Barbara Alfeo, on a hell bent mission to save the planet and with her ambition and smarts she just might make it.  Remember the "straw" rant?  But I am nowhere near as organized or focused.

Take today for instance.  I needed some stuff from the drug store so I girded up my metaphorical loins and headed out.  And turned right at the end of my road instead of left as I normally do thinking that perhaps that direction had less utility construction (no) and would be easier to navigate.

And then the memories kicked in:

The route took me past a pond where we used to ice skate as kids.  Back then the platform and sluice for cutting and moving ice blocks for summer storage was still there.  I vividly remember tripping on one of those uprights that was sticking up out of the ice when skating there -  painful to say the least.  It's all cabled off now - complete with No Trespassing signs - probably in fear of an accident and a lawsuit.

Up the road a bit is the little pond - more like a puddle - where I used to catch polliwogs (tadpoles) in the spring. If I was really lucky and it was early enough in the year I could find the actual frog eggs.  Take them home in a jar and watch them morph from eggs to polliwogs and eventually into frogs...it was really cool and I can still smell the funky odor of the marsh around the pond.  It's still there but I don't know if anyone even knows what a polliwog is any more.

Around the next corner on the left is the farmhouse that my parents rented while they were building their house back in the 1930s.  It's still there and still in the same family - although a couple generations down.  On the right is the farm that was owned by the brother - I believe it also is still in the same family.  I can remember going down there to watch Aunt Marion (not really my aunt - it was more of a respectful title) skim the cream off the great big flat settling pans of milk produced by their cows.

She would run the skimmer across the top of the pan just barely under the surface - any milk that got caught drained off through the holes but the cream was so darn thick it would sit there until she scraped it off into another container.

She would do this out in the "shed" between the house and the barn because it was cooler - and if it was winter or fall we would go back into the kitchen and stand around the wood burning cook stove and the warmth would just enfold you.  There would always be cookies or a snack and a feeling of belonging.

And if we were lucky we got to spend some time in the barn jumping from the haymow into the piles of extra hay.

Another farm on the left was where we would go to watch "Unkie" milk the cows by hand.  There would be a ring of barn cats sitting around him.  They knew he would squirt some milk on them if they waited long enough and we knew he'd do the same to us if we didn't duck fast enough!  We thought it great fun and so did the cats.

I suspect that children today might think that watching someone skim cream was boring and that hanging around in a barn a few times a week on the off chance we could outwit the milker would be smelly and not the fun we thought it was.

Yeah, it was smelly - it smelled like cows for crying out loud...we were in their house!  It smelled of cow poop and urine and hay and there were little bits of hay that would stick to your socks (if you had shoes on) and wiggle through and stab you later.

I'm fortunate, I suppose, to be able to see that at least some of the places I remember as a child are relatively unchanged - even if crowded in between these giant houses that everyone seems to build today.  But the changes that have come over the last 70 years or so are sometimes overwhelming and depressing.  They tend to make me feel as if the world I grew up in is so long gone no one will even remember it.  That it slipped by when I turned my head and somehow disappeared in the rear view.

That no one will remember putting frogs eggs in a jar of water and waiting for the miracle of polliwogs and frogs to appear!