Summer Lovin'

For ten years, summer has been a source of dread for me. Memorial Day, a holiday of unhappiness. While people in other parts of the country were having cookouts, celebrating the beginning of the season of summer and cookouts and outdoor living and winter being very far away, I was hiding out, trying to pretend that I wasn't about to commence the Season of Hell. 115+ temperatures. (It's a dry heat, my foot. After 105 degrees, it doesn't make a difference. And at least when you get humidity, you get storms.)  Days of relentless sunshine. 

 No more. 

This first Memorial Day back home, I got a pleasant reminder of how summer could be. I strolled down the block of an Indianapolis suburb with friends and their two toddling boys.  I watched them blow bubbles; I watched the sun illuminate brilliant blossoms that would already be struggling to survive in the desert. 

I did a totally traditional thing and went to a friend's house for a delicious cookout. (Mmmmm, cheesy brats...)

And I did something totally different, but that I think can and does happen quite a lot here in the Heartland...I went out on a pontoon boat and spent an afternoon bobbing about on Heritage Lake, swimming and drinking beers and watching kids frolic and being hauled around in a tube...

And watching thunderheads gather, and dissipate...

It was a good day, and it actually left me somewhat happily anticipating the months ahead. 

So, no more summers in hell. Lazy evenings spent watching fireflies; blowing bubbles; bobbing about on lakes; cookouts with all the meat; road trips down country roads; Icees and lemonade and margaritas and adventures. I'm ready to leave hell and love summer. 

Indiana @ 200

There are many, many things that please me about being home again--first, that I am home now, just about 10 years after I left; what a nice, round number!--but second and most of all, that I've returned home at the Bicentennial time, a celebration of my state being a state for 200 years.

There are a lot of BFD events going on this year--we have a license plate commemorating the bicentennial, and we are doing a torch relay through every county and ending on the State House lawn; but there are a lot of modest events and projects, reflecting the equally modest towns and cities and townships and hamlets from which they originate. All of them, though, share the common thread of fierce pride in our home, and the history of it.

I've always been a bit of a history nut. I would beg my grandparents to tell me about "The Olden Days" growing up on their Indiana farms. I majored in history in college. I devour historical fiction and have a freakish recall for dates and love poring over old photographs. And I love learning about the history and the quirks and the houses and the everything around Indiana, for here's the thing: my grandparents grew up in Tipton County, one of those seemingly insignificant counties, and hundreds of thousands of folks' grandparents grew up in 91 other counties of insignificance in this state, and perhaps millions of grandchildren and great grandchildren and so on will never know everything about their families. The composition of Indiana is more than just its people; it is a million stories, untold, never known, forgotten, modified, buried, preserved, pondered.

And celebrating the Bicentennial is, in a way, celebrating each of the long-passed, long-forgotten, anonymous folks that have populated our state and its history. The weathered farmers, the steel workers, the housewives who were never just housewives, the politicians who steered us to where we are now (for better or for worse), the earnest civil servants, the freemen who fled the South, the Klansmen who persecuted them and brought shame to our doorstep, the hundreds and thousands who have lived and died in this state without making the Hoosier Hall of Fame. We are all part of the history of this plucky, overlooked, defensive state, and we are celebrating our own anonymous spot in the ongoing history. Maybe, just maybe, acknowledging that is my own Bicentennial Project.

Oh Hell, She's Cookin' Now!

Cookery. 

I love the sound of that word--the rhythm of the consonants, the way the word just kind of rolls along. It's one of the words that sounds like what it conveys; it not only sounds edible but actually rather delicious.

So many of my memories of my grandmother--my Mawga--involve her in the kitchen. I suppose it's not such a remarkable thing; she was a product of Midcentury America, after all. By the I was a little girl in the 1980s attending elementary school, being told I could be a President or an astronaut by female teachers who were probably once told that was all they could hope to become, my grandmother was still at home, cooking.

The sizzle of smelly salmon patties. The warning hiss of the pressure cooker. The clatter and rattle of the cast iron skillet against the stove as she popped popcorn in preparation for our Saturday night tradition of popcorn and The Golden Girls. My hands, squelching through the raw meat and bread crumbs as we rolled meatballs. Her hands, as she rolled and cut egg noodles, as she spread pink icing over my birthday cake. Her voice, reflecting that she might make Sue's chicken that night. (Who the hell was Sue, anyway?) My grandfather,  making cameo appearances as he mashed the potatoes vigorously every Thanksgiving (to this day, mashed potatoes, no matter how fancy or locally-sourced or foodie-ish, don't taste the same; they lack the quiet, stubborn strength and loyalty that came through my grandfather's potato masher) and grilled hamburgers and hotdogs every Memorial Day, every Fourth of July, every Labor Day.

Yet for all the cooking she did, she didn't do much to teach me how to cook. The one cooking lesson my Mawga gave me was pretty terse: "If you can read, you can cook." I can't say that I ever sought out her tutelage, as Eldest Sister did--I remember, as both Mawga and Eldest progressed in age, Mawga ceded more and more culinary power and responsibility to Eldest. Over the years, I've made a few pretty half-hearted efforts at cookery, and in recent years, less and less. Scoots Magoo was usually condescending at best, slightly mocking at worst, when I attempted to cook, and as our home life disintegrated in other ways, it was less and less of a pleasure to cook.

Well, f**k that noise. I'm home. And I can read. So I can cook.