Serendipity – Just My Luck

Card Quest 2022-2023!

The other day I was thrilled to read an article about the resurgence of vinyl records, postcards and print books in the Millenial generation. After all the “OK Boomer” memes, it was nice to think that we had some territory in common… an appreciation of the technologies available to us now, but also a conscious decision to spend less time in the technological world in order to find a way to remain a bit more…well, human. Investing in experiences, enjoying meals together that last more than 15 minutes, spending some time together without an agenda…and writing.

I love perusing the letters my great-grandmother wrote to my mother, and sifting through my grandmother’s memorabilia – Hospital Auxiliary programs, used ration books from WW2, clipped articles and recipes from the newspaper. Holding cards that my relatives wrote creates a tangibility I don’t find anywhere else, a connection to the person I loved but probably barely knew due to the differences in our ages.

I have fretted that with our mobile society, with email and text messages, we are losing that ability to connect on a personal level as well as losing that permanent record of a life well lived. How many of us have thousands and thousands of digital photographs “somewhere”, but very few that are in print or in an album or book. Who is going to be able to locate and identify these digital records and put dates to them? Who does the new baby look like? AI can only do so much – and if the records aren’t available on the internet and the names aren’t provided, the AI can’t find them. And although I am sure people enjoy getting happy birthday greetings via Facebook, I remember people telling me they turned off their Facebook page around their birthdays. Too many birthday greetings were ‘blowing up’ their phone…but how many of them are from REAL friends?

I enjoyed the anticipation when I went to check the mailbox, especially around my birthday. My grandfather was a great correspondent and I had a few pen pals. Was the stamp an unusual one I should save? Were there questions in there that I needed to answer? It was 5 minutes of hope and excitement that someone had taken the time to write to me, that I was special to them – and especially nice as we were a military family, and often in a new locale with new neighbors and classmates.

This year I have been on a quest to send birthday and anniversary cards to everyone I have stored in my calendar. The cards themselves are not unique; I have around 300 events to honor so I decided I would find some bulk cards, but write an actual letter in the card as my grandfather had done. It’s been a lot of fun for me, and I have been very surprised to get numerous thank you notes for the cards…something I did not anticipate. It IS fun to go to the mailbox and find something other than a political flyer, bill or catalog. Brighten someone’s day and send them a card, and share a little about your day. Honestly, I literally write about nothing. I saw a robin pulling a worm out of the ground. Did you know today was National Pig Day. My garden is covered with cicadas. It’s not WHAT you write. It’s that you DO write that counts, that you are sharing a little time with them.

I started the quest in November, so I have four more months to go to complete the year’s quest. I suspect I will keep doing it. Cards have very little space to fill in so the letter is of necessity short (although I do tend to fill in all blank spaces)…and its a very inexpensive way to brighten someone else’s day. Pick the cards up at the Dollar Store, or the thrift store or look for bulk cards like corporations use online. Granted, postage is not free…but still, if you work at it, you can do it for about $1 a person. It’s totally worth it.

Caverns, Celebrations and Character

I found a working time machine in the Shenandoah Valley, only a mile off the I-81 exit to Quicksburg, Virginia!

We took the grandchildren to Shenandoah Caverns to get them out of the cabin and out of the heat. As we walked up to the main building, our tour guides were waiting for us – but not the guides we expected. Chatting out front were the manager (Joe Proctor) and the owner (Kathy Kelly) of a shrine to hard work, can-do attitude and natural beauty. We expected a small, short tour through a small town cave system and maybe some “gem sluicing”. We received a history lesson we will never forget.

Kathy Kelly is not always at the caverns her father purchased in 1966 but its clear she feels very close to him when she is there (he passed away in 2015). The American Celebration on Parade (“Parade Float Paradise” in my mind) is not usually open at the time of year that we visited, but she offered to take the four of us down to see it after our cave tour because “the children will never forget it”… and neither will I. As we walked around the room, Kathy shared her stories about the floats and what it meant to her to be involved with so many celebratory events – presidential inaugurations, Mardi Gras, Apple Blossom (and other) Festivals over many decades. She described the painstaking work that went into building the different components, the deadlines, the things that went well, and the things that did not. Stories about celebrities, politicians, the Secret Service, runaway animals – and always about her family: her father, her son who was so much like her father, and the team effort that created family within the group of people who worked on the floats. It felt as if they were all there with us as we walked. Afterwards she and Joe took us down to see the Yellow Barn, so that we could see the O-scale railroad trains running on the beams of the barn and around a tree in the foyer (my husband is a model railroader). It was an incredible day, far more than we expected and never to be forgotten.

At Shenandoah Caverns I saw again what I believe America to be, but have not witnessed in a while. Friendly people, hard working, kind, ingenious, willing to share, to look out for each other and work towards a common goal. Everyone who worked there seemed happy to be there, and genuinely interested and invested in making the experience a good one for the visitor. Highly recommend you put this on your list of places to visit.

The natural beauty of the setting of the storefront, which contains a soda fountain and diner, an excellent gift shop and the “smallest Post Office in America” is relaxing and inviting. The grandkids (ages 5 and 7) were excited to see that they could “mine for gems” at the sluice, and the Main Street exhibit upstairs, with its ginormous bears and the incredible animated storefront window displays of Cinderella, the circus, and Santa Claus kept them entertained while we waited for the cavern tour to start.

The guided cavern tour evokes the excitement of the two young boys who discovered the cave in 1884. The walk is more horizontal than Luray Caverns (which is a more vertical cave), and the formations are lit but the general feel is that you are experiencing the cave pretty much as Mother Nature built it. There is a “wishing pond”, so bring a coin or two if you have something to wish for (the coins are donated to a local charity). At times the tour guide turns off the lights so that you can see just how much the two young boys could see by the light they were able to bring into the cave – the answer is not very much! There is an elevator down (and up!) that is a blessing for those who don’t want to walk the 74 steps into the cave.

The American Celebration on Parade building is full of incredibly large parade floats (I felt like a little mouse creeping around them), beautiful even up close, creatively designed and built by hand with the materials at hand (one includes grass seed!). The display was designed with families in mind, even to the extent of placing actual boulders in a display rather than plaster ones because “kids will want to climb them”. The children could sit in the driver’s seats, look up into the inside of the floats to see how they were made and hunt for items on a scavenger hunt checklist. Each float has its own informational sign, and most have a QR code that brings up a short video (if you have your cellphone with you) with an interesting tidbit about the float. These are all floats made by Earl Hargrove, his company and family over many decades, many used in presidential inaugural parades. The ingenuity involved in creating the floats is amazing, and all to please the crowd and often to surprise the newly elected President! It’s well worth the entrance fee, which is discounted if you also go on the cave tour.

The Yellow Barn building once held gift shops but is now used as an event hall that opens to a beautiful mountain view on one end. There is a gorgeous mirrored wooden bar (brass foot rail and all!) on one end, and the other end has a stage, and of course there is a kitchen. Each year they create a haunted house at the facility, but the rest of the year the hall can be rented for private events.

All in all, an amazing day full of amazing people in an amazing place. Just My Luck!

Sharing, Savoring, Simplifying

I am a packrat.

There is no denying it. I have wooden painting projects that have moved with me from country to country for decades. I have leftover embroidery thread from completed projects, scraps from quilts long since completed, stickers from when my children were small (also decades ago)…toilet paper and paper towel and wrapping paper tubes that might be needed for a craft project…old keys to things that are probably long gone…and a gazillion recipes gathered over a lifetime of roaming as a military dependent, officer and wife.

The recipes I treasure. I have the newspaper recipes that my grandmother cut out and put in a box, same from my mother, a whole newspaper section of Bohemian/Slovakian recipes my father preserved, and the ones I myself cut out. Recipes shared during our military travels (military wives are the BEST cooks!) and recipes born out of living in areas where certain foods weren’t available. And then there are the recipes that I created in a JML moment when I didn’t have the exact recipe or exact ingredients I needed to make whatever I had a taste for.

Before my children went off to college I drafted them to help me type our most used recipes into a cookbook entitled ‘Things You Can Eat And Some Things You Can’t’ (yes, named by my brilliant children). There are a few typos (scratch that, a lot of typos) in the book, and it is printed, not digital, so…

Many requests later, I am going to attempt to make the cookbook digital. I will give attribution where I have it, and since apparently you cannot copyright a recipe, I ask only that you also provide attribution if you find the recipe worthy of using. Good food shared creates community and caring and nourishment of the body and soul.

Links to the recipe posts can be found in the sidebar of this website and on the Recipes From Life page. I hope you find at least one recipe that you really love — or perhaps lost — over the span of your own lifetime.

Kathleen

Mrs. Slithering

A three foot long black snake undulates towards me from the flower beds towards my house. She stops and raises her head, tasting the air, when she sees me. “You don’t want to live here”I tell her “we have dogs.” She shrugs shoulderlessly and continues towards the back stairs, disappearing into the gloom underneath.

The next day, she is watching me work on my raised garden (it is on four foot high supports) as I adjust the anti-squirrel fencing. “Could you move please?” I ask her, as she is directly in my path, and she obligingly and calmly angles to the right, under the gardens and out of my way. Do snakes understand English?

She seems like a considerate gal, and we don’t seem to have any mice problems these days. If we are lucky, she will also keep our cicada population down. She wasn’t out today but it is raining; maybe she doesn’t have an umbrella or is enjoying a good nap. She is the same color as my garden hose; it would be JML to have not noticed her. Hopefully I won’t try to pick her up next time I water the flowers!

On the Radio

“Living on a Prayer” was playing on the radio as I drove to get the second of my vaccination shots, which I thought was quite appropriate for the past year (“we’re halfway there” rang true as I had only 1 of 2 shots at that point) and as I turned the key in the ignition to go home, “Low Rider” came on, at “take a little trip”. Call it what you will; I am looking forward to whatever trip is in my future!

A Hopeful Sign…

The Sunday comics were up to their usual shenanigans today. Life must be getting back to normal, at least a little bit at a time. Thank you, cartoonists, comic strip creators and other illustrators of the quandaries of daily life, for helping me navigate this past year . A little smile goes a long way…even if its only a smirk.

Good Energy Translations

Many years ago, my husband was stationed in Europe. When you are living far from your birth family, the other Americans around you become your second family. My European second family has stepped forward to help with the translations of Why(r)us the Virus and I can now provide the book in German (Why(r)us das Virus), French (Why(r)us le Virus) and Spanish (Why(r)us El Virus). The women who did the translations (Angie, Sophie and Andrea) were military spouses like myself, and we worked together in Europe to look after the American families stationed with us. Angie is a German national, Sophie is a French National, and Andrea is the daughter of a Mexican national, and all of them donated their time and energy to provide excellent translations so that the book can be of use world-wide. I am so grateful to them for their continuing contributions to increase the Good Energy in the world. Hopefully we can visit again soon, once the vaccine has made a difference in the pandemic’s spread. Just so lucky to have their friendship and support…

Amanda Gorman

It wasn’t just that her reading of her poem at the inauguration was sincere and polished, or that she was beautiful, or that she was well dressed and well spoken and composed. It was the Spirit that glowed through her, that incredible optimism and belief in humanity – to see that in a woman that young, from a segment of the population that has every reason to not feel optimistic on any given day made me feel for a moment just as optimistic and positive about my country’s future as she did. Just My Luck to be so blessed.