Can she bake a cherry pie.......

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......Billy boy, Billy boy......
Can she bake a cherry pie, darling Billy?

I started this last night when I was eating a fine bit of cherry pie.
Tonight I'm snacking on a double chocolate cake the wife made this morning. It sort of fell apart as she was spreading the chocolate icing.........so she dumped it in the cake plate cover and called it a "Dump Cake".
I don't care what you call it..........it's chocolate ......and all good to me. A little whole cow milk to help slide it down and I'm working on a gooooooddd evening.

The cherry pie got me to thinking of my maternal Grandmother last night.

Born right after the turn of the last century to a rural farming family, she was a faithful help meet to my Grandfather for the better part of 60 years.
To say that she was a good cook doesn't give her enough credit to my mind...... as I look back.
I well remember the mid-day meals (we call that dinner where I come from, it being big enough and hearty enough to sustain a farmer through the rest of the day) that she would cook.......as well as on Sundays when we grandchildren would go visit. I've written before about the Holy day meals that would be consumed at their house.

There was an old wood fired cook stove that sat in the corner of their kitchen even though she had a modern electric range and oven. That stove was huge in my memory........it had to be easily 6 feet long and 5 feet high in the back. I can only imagine the meals that were cooked there........and the labor to keep the fire temp just right. Probably burned pine because of it's hot burning temps and ease of starting. The oak and hickory were burned in the parlor wood stove. It would last all night if damped down just right.......ready to flame up in the early morning as Paw would go out to milk the cows.

I don't have enough information about her early life........I need to take a tape recorder to my Aunt Margret's before she gets any older herself........she's over 80 now......the spitting image of Grandma.

One picture I do have is one of her in the Lawrenceville Canning club.......sometime in the late 19 teens I'd guess........



She is 3rd from left second row. Maybe not a raving beauty by todays standards.... ..but beauty my friends is more than skin deep.

It seems strange to think of a canning club........but young women back then were trained in practical arts........useful things....to prepare them for the real world.........not to get them to think of themselves as only how large their bust size is, or how many paparazzi are chasing after them. They would no more think of showing their shaven genitals as they exited a car than we would think the world is flat.

And she could make a cherry pie.......or an apple pie...or pickled peaches......
.......and most especially a home and family.......and be the heart and soul of it.

I miss my Grandmother.