Carlisle, a Visit in the Apple Country

Cumberland Valley apple orchard
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2018

Driving through the winding roads of the Cumberland Valley, Pennsylvania felt like riding a roller-coaster sixty miles an hour, with exciting and breathtaking drops. It was a warm February day yet I could only imagine how treacherous it must be when ice and snow cover these roads.

I admired the picturesque apple orchards dotting the landscape and stopped to smell the fresh air, the soil, and to hear birds singing. Even in its dormant state, the sunny day, the stillness, the beauty of the fertile trees as far as the eyes could see, was captivating.

We were bound for Carlisle, Pa, the seat of Cumberland County. Carlisle has a population of 19,162 (2016) excluding the students who attend Dickinson College, a liberal arts college focusing on international education and global education.

Carlisle Barracks is one of the oldest U.S. Army installations and the most senior military educational institutions in the United States Army. The U. S. Army War College is also located on the grounds of Carlisle Barracks.

Cumberland County was crossed by major roads and had an important role in the westward migration. It is interesting to note that the historic district is constantly crossed and clogged by eighteen-wheeler trucks.

Carlisle Square in Historic District

Photo: Ileana Johnson

The settlement of Carlisle was planned in 1751 by John Armstrong Sr. Immigrants from Scotland and Ireland settled in Carlisle and farmed the Cumberland Valley.  They named it after Carlisle, Cumberland, England, and even built the former jail house in the shape of The Citadel in the English city. This jail is now used as general government offices.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 

Carlisle was a munition depot during the American Revolutionary War which was later developed into the U.S. Army War College. The munitions were kept in a barrack built by Hessians in 1777 which is now a museum located on the Carlisle Barracks grounds next to other historical buildings which have been transformed and modernized through time.

Entrance to Hessian Powder Magazine

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2018

 

A Revolutionary War legend, Molly Pitcher, who died in Carlisle in 1832, is buried in the Old Public Graveyard. There are signs all over Carlisle, reminding visitors of its tumultuous history. For such a small borough, it has found itself often at the crossroads of American history in the 18^th century.

When a march was planned in favor of the United States Constitution in 1787, Anti-Federalists initiated a riot in Carlisle. During the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops assembled in Carlisle under the leadership of President George Washington. The Presbyterian Church in the historic district was the place where President Washington worshipped while in Carlisle.

A local lawyer, Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, founded Carlisle Grammar School in 1773 and established its charter as Dickinson College, “the first new college founded in the newly recognized United States.” One famous alumnus, who graduated in 1809, was the 15^th U.S. president, James Buchanan.

Another prominent lawyer and scholar, James Hamilton (1793-1873), left a $2,000 gift and a 60’ X 60’ lot in his will that would be used to construct in 1881 a two-story brick building that became the Hamilton Library Association, dedicated to housing its collection and eventually a research library about Cumberland County.

According to the Historical Society, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, George Ross (1730-1779), was a prosecutor for the British Crown in Carlisle in the 1750s and 1760s. He had been loyal to King Gorge III, but switched over to the Revolutionary movement. He was the last of the Pennsylvania delegation to sign the Declaration of Independence and the uncle of Betsy Ross.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2018

 

The Dickinson Law School founded in 1834 is the fifth-oldest law school in the U.S. and the oldest law school in Pennsylvania. The locals were quite upset when the law school ended its affiliation with Dickinson College in 1914 and reorganized as an independent institution, later merging into the Pennsylvania State University in 1997 as Penn State Dickinson School of Law.

Carlisle was a stop for the Underground Railroad, leading up to the American Civil War. As part of the Gettysburg campaign, General Fitzhugh Lee, attacked and shelled the town on July 1, 1863. There is a cannonball dent still visible on one of the columns of the historic county courthouse.

Many of the early settlers of Pennsylvania were Scots-Irish who brought with them their Presbyterian faith. By 1730, they were settling in Cumberland Valley, in the fertile land near the Conodoguinet Creek.

The First Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, the oldest public building in Carlisle, was constructed in 1757. Colonists met there in 1774 to declare their independence from England and President Washington worshipped there in 1794.

In an attempt to force Indians to reject tribal culture and adapt to western society, U.S. Army Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt established Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, a federally-supported school for American Indians off a reservation. The school was closed in 1918 and the property transferred back to the War Department to be used as a military hospital for soldiers wounded during WWI.

The Indian School memorabilia was packed up and employees helped students return home or transfer to other schools. The school’s 39-year history came to a sad end on September 1, 1918. There was no formal job placement in place and society at large did not rush to hire their graduates.

Additionally, those students who chose to go back to their traditional lives were not accepted back with open arms, they were considered having gone “back to the blanket.” According to the Carlisle Archives, “other Native Americans considered them ‘apple Indians,’ red on the outside and white on the inside.” Some graduates became the reservation’s translators and interpreters.  The trades they had learned in the western school were often useless on the reservation.

The museum archives describe how Asa Daklugie, an Apache, remembers the ‘civilizing’ process which stripped children of all outward signs of traditional life. “We’d lost our hair and we’d lost our clothes: with the two we’d lost our identities as Indians. Greater punishment could hardly have been devised.”

The archives recall, “One by one, the boys’ long hair was cut, a traumatic experience that caused resistance and deep resentment. Their clothing was replaced with military uniforms for the boys and Victorian dresses for the girls. For many students, who had arrived dressed in their finest garments made by family members, losing their familiar regalia was painful.”

The most famous student was Jim Thorpe (1887-1953), a halfback football hero who led its team to upset victories against the powerhouses Harvard, Army, and University of Pennsylvania in 1911-1912. Thorpe was also an Olympic gold medalist and coach, considered and named in 1950 “the greatest athlete in the world” of the first half of the 20^th century.

Old Courthouse with Liberty Tree

 

Ten Cumberland County residents received the Medal of Honor. A Liberty Tree stands in the yard of the Old Courthouse (erected in 1766), honoring the Iranian hostages of October 17, 1980.

On the site that had been chosen for Carlisle, there were five major Indian paths that converged, paths of culture, trade, and war. Cumberland valley was settled by Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands, Susquehannock, Iroquis Confederacy, Lenape, and Shawnee peoples. The Cumberland valley connected Iroquois lands to the Cherokee and Catawba in the Carolinas.

In the 19^th century, the Cumberland Valley Railroad opened new ways for goods and people to travel and the speed of life changed. Scientific agriculture was introduced and allowed habitation of legal immigrants who settled in the area. Eventually the railroad system would give way to automobiles, trucking, and to the development of our modern but aging highway system.

Many areas and buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places such as the Carlisle Historic District, Carlisle Indian School, Hessian Powder Magazine, Carlisle Armory, and Old West, Dickinson College.

Location of the former Green Tree Inn

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 

The Green Tree Inn had many distinguished guests, among them Benjamin Franklin in 1753, Hamilton and Knox, members of Washington’s cabinet in 1794.

James Wilson (1742-1798), born in Scotland, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General of the Pennsylvania State Militia, cast the deciding vote for independence for Pennsylvania, was one of the six original justices on the Supreme Court, and a founding father of Dickinson College. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and was twice elected to the Continental Congress.

James Smith (1719-1806) was another signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was born in Ireland and studied law at his brother’s office in Pennsylvania.

Daniel Drawbaugh

Historical Society Museum Archives

 

Another fascinating local was Daniel Drawbaugh, expert mechanic and inventor. He held seventy patents, thirty-five related to the telephone. He invented stone pneumatic drills that were used in the building of the Library of Congress, a coin sorting machine, and a charcoal stamping machine. His Great Cumberland County Clock was an interesting electrical invention that could not keep accurate time because of variations in ground current. 

Carlisle made national news when the McClintock Riot took place in 1847. Pennsylvania was a free state but three fugitive slaves were captured and brought to Carlisle on their way south - a girl named Ann, a man named Lloyd Brown, and a woman named Hester Norman, married to a free man, George Norman of Carlisle.

At the time, 300 freed men and women lived in Carlisle. The owners of the three fugitive slaves, Kennedy and Hollingsworth, were seeking certificates from a local justice to transport the fugitive slaves south, and permission to keep them in the county jail while they conducted other business.

Historic Old Courthouse

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 

A crowd gathered at the courthouse and a riot ensued. The judge had reluctantly decided that the escapees could not be jailed but that the certificates of ownership were valid. Kennedy was trampled and broke his knee in the melee; he died of his injuries three weeks later. Thirty-four black and white people and Professor McClintock were charged with inciting a riot. Thirteen people were convicted and eventually imprisoned for this riot.

The faces of immigrants who built Carlisle post office

Museum Archives

Iron furnaces existed in Cumberland County as self-sufficient plantation communities: farms, mills, workers’ homes, school, offices, church, cemetery, and a company store. The labor was composed of free laborers, indentured servants, some of whom were white, slaves, and apprentices. Women mended clothes, farmed, supplied wood, and finished iron casting. A 1800s ironworker made anywhere from 51 to 86 cents a day for 12 hours of work. Most people in this time period worked on farms or in farm-related fields such as milling, blacksmithing, and tanning.

According to the museum archives, due in part to the tanning and iron industries, slavery lingered in Cumberland County even though it was abolished in Pennsylvania on March 1, 1780, one of the first states to do so. “In 1810, half of all the slaves held in Pennsylvania were in Cumberland County… Twenty-four Africans were still in bondage in 1840; 1847 was the first year that the county no longer held slaves.”

The museum archives explain that “Cumberland County was not a stronghold for abolitionists. Many residents had family and friends in slaveholding Maryland, southern born soldiers were in training at the Cavalry School at Carlisle Barracks, and nearly half of Dickinson’s students were from the south. Newspapers in the area were anti-abolitionist and slave catcher gangs roamed the county. After 1945, local churches forbade abolitionist meetings in their establishments.”

New Courthouse

Photo: Ileana Johnson

 

The new courthouse is located on the grounds of the former Market House Square. The Penn family, in their 1751 plan for Carlisle, had designated a portion of the square to be used as a market. Consequently, a market was held continuously on that spot from 1751 until 1952 when it was demolished to make way for the new courthouse, to the protests of many local conservationists.

Twice a week markets were held here and overseen by the Clerk of the Market who used scales to validate the weight of the goods and produce sold. Three different buildings were erected to hold these markets, two open-air ones and one elaborate Victorian building.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2018

 

On a quaint side street in the historical district, dotted with whimsically bright and colorful mom and pop stores, one particular shop displays in a large bay window numerous “progressive” signs of PEACE and COEXIST just in case you missed one. 

Et tu, Flamingo!

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2018

 

 

Throughout downtown businesses posted flyers announcing its 15^th annual food dinner on March 31 sponsored by the Dickinson College, celebrating local agriculture, with a keynote speaker, a fourth generation grocer with a conscience and a political message. She runs “an all-local grocery, deli, and craft beer bar that exists specifically to make climate change progress through responsible sourcing practices, resource-conscious equipment, power and packaging decisions, and the realization of a no-food-waste mandate. This market empowers shoppers to make incremental progress at a time when large-scale legislative change seems unlikely.”

The food will be delicious and expensive ($30) but the dinner sounds like a political drive in support of the debunked man-made climate change scheme rather than just an opportunity to sample locally grown and prepared food and to meet other like-minded progressive neighbors.

 

Smart, Switch, Sweat, and Shiver

The federal government in Canada has moved to pass coal phase-out legislation into law with its Just Transition Task Force in favor of “clean energy.”

“The end of coal power will help usher in a new era for renewable energy,” said David Suzuki Foundation director of science and policy Ian Bruce. “With conventional coal-fired power officially headed for the history books, people across the country can literally breathe easier about the future of energy production.”

“This is yet another signal that dirty, outdated energy sources are on their way out,” said the Foundation’s lead climate campaigner and senior policy analyst Gideon Forman. “Canada will now join a handful of leading industrialized countries such as the U.K., the Netherlands and France in accelerating the end of coal power worldwide – and the onset of clean, renewable energy.” France uses mostly nuclear power to generate their electricity.

Clean energy sounds great, especially nuclear and gas, but wind and solar electricity production, at the current rate of production and cost, cannot possibly replace all the energy needs of the planet for the industrial and public energy sectors.

Rationing electricity via smart meters which turns off power during peak electricity use and now Smart Cooling Rewards are ways in which the global warming advocates are forcing people to do without electricity in order to save the planet from a manufactured global warming catastrophe renamed climate change which we used to call seasons.

It is hard to convince people to give up their civilization, air conditioning, refrigeration, cars, central heat, and other amenities that make life more comfortable. They were bribed or forced to install smart meters on their homes. But people fought back and many states now have opt-out programs.

They tried to force people out of their cars by narrowing roads, bulldozing parking lots, building high-rise, mixed use tiny apartments, limiting suburbia with regulations and fines, and charging ungodly tolls of $46.50 to go 10 miles on I-66 to Washington, D.C. But Americans find ways around this global warming piracy because they love their cars and the freedom which the open-wide roads given them.

Private-public partnerships now scalp the public, working against the public interest and for the globalist investors’ interest. Governments, whether local, state, or federal, despite their claims, do not know what works best for their citizens.

Virginia citizens fought back and won the right to keep their standard meters, protecting their privacy, lower electricity cost, and their health. Dominion Energy recently came up with another scheme to control electricity consumption, Smart Cooling Rewards. The rewards are $40 at the end of each year that a household volunteers to participate in the program.

What is the program about? Dominion Energy installs “a switch on or near the outside of your air conditioner or heat pump system.” How convenient and generous, $40 for the privilege to sweat to death in summer time or freeze to death in winter time when the mother ship decides to cut off your power in order to save them the headache of having to buy more expensive electricity during peak seasons or perhaps build excess capacity storage.

“The switch enables us to automatically ‘cycle’ your central air conditioner for a few hours when electricity demand is highest, helping to reduce demand when it counts most,” says Dominion Power.

Utilities buy electricity annually during low season when the weather is mild and electricity is cheaper; they buy it in a lump sum by estimating their future electricity needs. If the load on the power grid is higher, then they have to buy more electricity at the market price when prices are higher. Some utilities may go as far as helping their customers weather-proof homes during free inspections, and giving them rebates if they comply.

“During periods of high electrical use, Dominion Energy Virginia may call an ‘event’, which means we will cycle your air conditioner or heat pump compressor on and off for defined intervals. The fan will stay on circulating already cooled air. The switch is programmed to cycle your AC unit half of the time it ran preceding an event. If your AC runs non-stop the hour before an event, then it will run 30 minutes for each hour of the event duration. This is accomplished by running 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off. At the end of the event your AC returns to normal operation.” 

It is entirely up to you how much you are willing to sweat or shiver in order to save your power company money and save the planet from a non-existent Armageddon that the global warming alarmists world-wide have been promoting.

This “switch” installed by Dominion Energy will be nothing but another smart meter that will control your energy use since the air conditioning puts the biggest load on electricity use. Why don’t utilities pass costs onto consumers? Is this bribe only about saving costs to them? Could it be possible that it is a way to control the non-cooperating first world people who love their A/C and other modern conveniences that environmentally conscious globalist elites condemn?

According to electricians, the electric grid is not in really good shape, it is a patched job that sometimes results in brown outs and black outs, especially in metropolitan areas that have grown extensively. The grid has not kept up with this expansion and the electricity loads are more than the grid can handle. It is a lot cheaper for utilities to turn power off than to redo the grid.

Will building the smart power grid be safer and will it handle electricity loads better than the existing conventional power grid? According to experts, changing everything to a smart grid will not be any better in terms of load other than the fact that those in charge will be able to turn your power off as they see fit. Additionally, hackers will be able to interrupt service maliciously. There is always the potential of a solar flare or the explosion of an EMP in the atmosphere that would fry everything.

Smart grids, smart meters, and smart switches will also allow utilities to spy on its customers without a warrant in terms of energy consumption, types of appliances they have, when owners are and aren’t home, and then sell other data about your home to an interested third party. Thieves can also easily find out when you are and aren’t home.

The Marxist Paradise of Millennials

Tide pod  Photo: Wikipedia

I watched countless videos of Millennials interviewed on various campuses around the nation by people with knowledge of history or survivors of communism who were lucky enough to escape to this country or other western nations whose economies are based on the capitalist free market model and not the socialist one.

In every video, the well-fed and cared for Millennials, in their indoctrinated and delusional rage, shout the praises of socialism and communism without having any idea what socialism and communism are, how deprived and mistreated citizens are under such regimes, and how many millions of innocents were killed in the name of this failed Marxist philosophy they proudly advocate.

If communism failed to deliver on whatever utopia, they say, it is because it was not implemented correctly. If given the chance, they would create communism the right way. And what would this right way be? They have no idea but they are sure they would succeed because their progressive professors told them so in revisionist history, social justice, racial justice, and gender studies classes.

In reality, communism would still be achieved at the barrel of a gun when only the government would own guns and the citizens would give up theirs in a kumbaya society where people adore each other, the government knows best, and takes care of the needs of its subjects they oppress.

Millennials should look in the eyes of Venezuelan mothers who are giving up their children to orphanages and abandonment centers because they can’t feed them thanks to the mismanagement of Maduro’s socialist economy even though Venezuela used to be a rich country with the largest oil reserves. The public system is overwhelmed and the private help is inadequate.

Like food and most necessities for daily life which American Millennials take for granted, contraceptives are in short supply in communist Venezuela.

Children placed in these orphanages are no longer coming from homes where they were abused and neglected, they are now mostly children from families who lost their jobs and can no longer feed them. They watched their children get thinner and thinner and made the agonizing decision to give them up. Many are turned down as there are waiting lists for placement. Foster families are adopting some older children and fewer infants because baby formulas and diapers are expensive due to escalating inflation and ever more difficult to find.

Even abandonment centers are closing in Venezuela for lack of funding and resources. Maduro’s communist handling of the economy is even worse than Hugo Chavez’s who at least pretended to be caring for the downtrodden by giving them free medical clinics staffed by communist Cuban doctors. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuelas-economy-is-so-bad-parents-are-leaving-their-children-at-orphanages/2018/02/12/8021d180-0545-11e8-aa61-f3391373867e_story.html?utm_term=.4a9a5fd74b2b

It has never crossed the minds of these moronic American Millennial students that socialism and communism starve their citizens either on purpose to keep them under strict control or through their disastrous economic policies, very similar to Venezuela’s collapsing economy. Communist elites are never very good at planning and running a centralized economy, they can’t even deliver basic food, services, and toilet paper.

Millennials should read about the orphans who survived the harsh orphanages of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Marxist regime. If they survived, they are scarred for life after having been abandoned in cribs where workers seldom touched them or picked them up. These children learned to soothe themselves by rocking themselves incessantly.

Revisionist history classes in the U.S. do not teach Americans about Operation Peter Pan, a mass exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children to the United States during 1960-1962. Desperate parents sent their children alone to the U.S. in order to escape Castro’s communism. The program created by Father Bryan O. Walsh provided air transportation. If communism was so great, why would so many thousands of families send their children away from communism?

How brainwashed are our American students that they believe the communist indoctrination dished out by their Marxist professors daily and not the reality of millions of naturalized Americans who had risked life and limb, left everything behind they knew and loved, in order to escape from an oppressive dictatorship and a communist regime?

Since liberal minds are already made up and cannot be confused with facts, Adam J. MacLeod, Associate Professor of Law at Faulkner Law, has decided to undo the indoctrination and mis-education of his Millennial students who come to class with a heavy baggage of Marxist views of the world around them fashioned by the “elite culture.”

During his legal reasoning class, Professor MacLeod told his students the following:

“Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various ‘isms’ which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.

Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as ‘diversity’ and ‘equality.’

Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful.” http://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/

It would serve American Millennials well if they could intern in Cuba or North Korea for a few months and witness firsthand the communist paradise of their choice.

The unfortunate young man who was tortured and beaten to death in North Korea for a foolish prank was returned to his parents a few short days before he passed away. The details of his horrible life in custody and how he died are just now coming to the surface.

On the other hand, who expects rational thought from Millennials who ingest toxic Tide detergent pods and then post the videos on social media?

Childhood Years with Mamaia and Tataia

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

The simplest things in life can trigger a wave of memories long forgotten or buried deeply in the recesses of my mind – the scent of food, fresh baked bread, an exotic perfume, a melody, the crisp snowy air, the smell of smoke in autumn and a sudden thunderstorm.

The steady rain for the past two days could have easily turned into feet of snow had the temperature not been above the forties. Hard rain drenched the woods into deeper shades of winter browns and greens and turned the trails into soggy miniature swamps so close to the river. It was a long overdue rain as both summer and winter have been quite dry.

Even in its dormant state, nature smelled alive and dense trees looked majestically strong. Without its coat of leaves, the woods allowed the river to peek and shine through its thick boughs. In the full moonlight, each tree appeared like a phantasmagorical giant with human features, casting long shadows in the drenched soil.

As a child, I’ve loved rain and its soothing thumping on the metal roof. Sheltered under Tataia’s shop awning, I was mesmerized by the rivers of fast water running in the muddy yard; everything in nature came alive. Tataia would answer any questions about the earth bursting with life, how clouds formed, why it rained, and how water nourished life.

I learned how to garden, how to water plants with carefully dug ditches that pulled the rain water away from direct contact with the fragile roots. He taught me first how to grow wheat and bean sprouts in a moist glass dish on the window sill in winter. He was truly my first biology and science teacher.

Lightning did not frighten me; the zig-zags of light were God’s hand drawing on the sky’s canvas. Rainbows were God’s palette, the colors that tinted nature and life. And thunder was God snapping his whip to make unseen heavenly horses run faster through the clouds.

When it rained, Mamaia had a reprieve from the farm chores. But she did not rest; she washed clothes by hand in a wooden tub carved from a tree. It was the same tub she used to bathe me in as a toddler. Her hands would turn red from scrubbing one item at a time in hot water and harsh, unpleasant smelling soap which was made with lye. And there was no lotion to soothe the redness of her small hands. Layers of skin would peel off painfully. Finding unscented lanolin to treat the cracked and burning skin was difficult.

On my wash day, the modern “chore” is to sort the laundry, pour a pre-measured cup of detergent into the washing machine, adjust the water setting and temperature, and let it do the scrubbing and washing for me. And the dryer replaces hours of hanging clothes on the line, bringing in off the line dry clothes stiff as a board in winter and smelling like wet dog. We never stop to think how much easier our lives are today and how many varieties of cheap lotions we have to soften our hands. I don’t think most people appreciate what a wonderful and easy existence they live.

Mamaia’s hands were magical. They raised six children, fed them, bathed them, and cloth-diapered them. Mamaia cooked and washed everything for six children, milked the cows, slopped the pig, and fed numerous chicken, ducks, and rabbits that Tataia bought from other farmers.

In her spare time, Mamaia was the village seamstress who made beautiful wedding dresses, church dresses, and practical every day clothes for her own children. She mended their clothes and pressed them with a heavy iron which could be filled with hot coals or placed on the stove to get hot. Sometimes there were slight brown lines left from the iron burning a favorite shirt but children still wore it.

Mamaia’s chores included putting away the vegetables from the garden that Tataia planted, weeded, and watered. She would stir a huge cast iron pot outside on a fire stoked with wood, turning pounds of tomatoes into a sauce preserved in jars for winter time. She pickled cucumbers, cauliflower, green peppers, red peppers, green tomatoes and preserved green beans in jars sealed with wax or corks covered in tar. Everything was stored in the cellar for winter.

Her prune marmalade and tart cherry preserves were delicious. Using sugar made from beets, she made sweet preserves from green plum tomatoes stuffed with walnuts. Regrettably, her recipes were never recorded before she passed away. We were too busy trying to survive or escape the communist harsh life to think about writing these recipes down for posterity.

To this day, when I want to cook something that my mom used to cook for us, it is impossible to replicate the recipe because she did everything from memory, just like Mamaia, a pinch of this, a pinch of that, no measuring cups in mom’s kitchen. Now that her memory is scrambled, I regret not having written her ingredients down and the number of pinches.

My mom smiles in her moments of clarity and tells me how hard she and her five siblings had to work to help their parents on the farm, how they had to give up too much education, and how they practically raised each other. Aunt Nicuta was Mamaia’s first child; Nicuta helped raise her brother, and then each child helped raise the next. They learned to grow up fast this way. Few of the girls actually extended their education past eighth grade or high school but the two boys went much further.

Rain is still coming down hard, drumming on the shingles; my eyes are taking in the soaked nature and bubbling mud but my mind is still wandering through my childhood years, flashing memories and images of my past, times when we, as children didn’t understand the vicissitudes of life, we were happy and felt loved no matter how poor our families were. It was another life, another world, long time ago.

 

Life's Hard Lessons

"Love is laughing while being stupid together."

Canal Fulton, Ohio Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017

Ray is eighty-two years young and a natural story teller, always with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile on his face. Tall and energetic, he has worked hard his entire life and is not about to quit. He could move mountains once. He has slowed down but his energy level and drive would put many younger men to shame.

Born and raised in West Virginia, he became an Ohio resident after he met his future bride with whom he fell in love head over heels. If you ask him, he does not mind telling you that she begged him to marry him and has the picture to prove it. She was eighteen when he took her to the prom and he was a handsome lad of twenty-one.

When Ray was ten years old, his beloved mother had a nervous breakdown. Back in those days, they committed patients and treated nervous breakdowns in insane asylums. Of the five children, three of the minor boys were put into foster homes. His childhood ended then as daily chores took over his diurnal existence for the next five years. Ray had a paper route when he was nine years old but he had never made a whole lot of money as a delivery boy.

But now, placed with an older farming couple, the boys had to feed the animals, “slop the hogs,” the chicken, and milk the cows before they went to school. They learned how to work hard for their keep. They ate beans and potatoes, not so much meat, but never went hungry. There was no heat in the old farm house, the boys hated to get out of bed and step on the stone cold floor. There was a pot-bellied stove for cooking, an outhouse flushing over the creek, a Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, plenty of chores, and many life-long lessons in work ethic and responsibility.

Every Sunday they went to an old Methodist country church. If there was a revival, they went to revival with their foster parents. There were pie socials, ice cream socials, and other family-oriented activities. They were part of a family but were missing their mother’s love, a mother who was too sick to treat them with kindness and affection.

Ray went to school every day smelling like cow manure because they had to do chores first thing in the morning. In his inimitable language, Ray laughs that it did not matter a hell of beans because everybody else smelled the same.

When Ray left the foster family’s West Virginia farm, he moved to Ohio to work in a steel mill. One brother went into the Navy and one into the Air Force. Ray worked in a grocery store, on the docks, in a steel mill, and pretty much any job to make a buck.

On a blind date, a blindness from which he had never recovered, he met the love of his life, Joan. His best friend asked him to go on a double date with a woman he’d never met. As Ray tells it, his buddy was looking for a “sucker” in order to appease his girlfriend whose friend was single. He could have said no, but he was smitten the moment he saw her. A very defiant young woman with bright blue eyes, Joan was in a hurry to get married so she could get away from her controlling mother Aida.

Ray and Joan got married on Saturday and Ray got fired on Monday. But the in-laws were nice enough to set them up in a trailer, rent free. Young and immature love can cause temporary blindness but true love conquers any adversity.

Ray learned how to build trailers from scratch, to weld, to wire, to do carpentry, to brick, and to cement foundations, skills that saved him a lot of money and helped him build two homes. He is in great demand to this day because he can fix anything. Additionally, in his spare time, he served in the U.S. National Guard. Out of the tragedy of his mom going into the asylum, Ray fashioned himself into a life-long Renaissance man and weekend soldier who could fix anything with string, a paper clip, dirt, and spit.

From Ray’s blind date came love, marriage, and three beautiful children. And one day, decades later, fate brought Ray’s youngest son, a captain, across my moonlit path in Mississippi and he became my husband.

After 59 years of marriage, Ray lost the love of his life to a lengthy and painful illness. Joan is buried close to a thicket of blue spruce in the cemetery where he bought a plot fifty years ago.