Time Travel

Miss Becky Home Ecky has lived a lot of days. Today, I get to be reminded of just how many days I've lived since high school ended when my husband and I attend my 25th high school reunion.

I try to understand time and cannot. Sometimes minutes stretch to seem impossibly long. Othertimes it feels like you catapult over entire stretches of days in the blink of an eye.

Madeleine L'Engle writes in her nonfiction book, Walking on Water, about the true story of American astronauts from one of our early space ships who heard a program of nostalgic music over their sound system, and radioed NASA to thank whoever it was who had sent them the program. NASA was baffled: they had sent no such program. After much research, it was finally revealed that this particular radio program had been broadcast in the 1930s.

There is so much we still don't understand about time.

Waste Couture

Miss Becky Home Ecky has discovered that she might be inadvertently eco-friendly.

Uncovered today: The average American purchases approximately 70 pounds of fabric each year, with 85 percent winding up in a landfill. This, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. (Miss Becky Home Ecky would like to put a sign up on her humble library door to that effect). Sewing machine companies are looking to market themselves, now with a "green" angle. The article I saw from Brother sewing machines was encouraging people to turn old t-shirts into tote bags. That might be a bit much. I mean, we must have style. At the very least, though, couldn't we make sure that our old t-shirts get transferred to someone who needs them, instead of languishing in a drawer?

We are on to something here at Miss Becky Home Ecky. Even though I shopped at the dreaded home of giant mass-produced items imported from China (sorry, Costco) yesterday, I feel reform in the air. A new president is coming. A new day is dawning. And next on my project list is taking my son to Wall-e. Yes, Pixar and Home Economics do mix. More tomorrow ...

When Treasures Find You

Since I launched this misguided, silly, potential time wasting effort (all negative thoughts that my internal self-critic has thrown around in my head on every possible occasion), several interesting items have found their way to my library.

My new roommates include:
1960s sewing machine. Sears Roebuck catalog, winter 1931-1932. Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking. Coats and Clark's Sewing Book. A hat box circa the 1950s or 1940s from The French Room at Marshall Field's.

As a child, my mom made it very clear that inanimate objects have a life. I pass this along to my boys whenever I can, pretending that their Hot Wheels cars, sweet peas on the plate, pillows on their bed, anything, have a life and feelings of their own. So it's not surprising that I feel that the 1960s sewing machine now taking up residence in my library came here for a reason. In fact, it was offered to me out of the blue by an 80-year-old friend of my husband named Marge. And why is it that, while having my first writing session with my new writer friend, she revealed that she was a home ec minor?

You can call it sheer random chance, or serendipity, but I know better. Every one of these little coincidences, to me, points the way down a path. This is how novels are born. People, don't break the spell for me: The creative idea is very fragile at birth.

Lost in Translation

Duncan Hines yellow cake, Jell-O vanilla pudding, crushed pineapple, Cool Whip - sounds good, right? For some reason, my grandma's recipe for pineapple - a friend tells me some call this hummingbird - cake (labeled in her hand, "delicious," and she only did that on a few recipes, so my hopes were high) did not translate well into 2008. I mean, it sounds good on paper, but like the previously mentioned "yummy dip" (including braunsweiger AND potted meat AND mayo), the result was way too dated. This was basically a cake in a pan smothered in vanilla pudding flecked with pineapple (which my kids hated - I admit the texture is weird), and slathered in Cool Whip.

Then it hit me. This recipe was circa 1976. Flashbacks to endless dishes of Jell-O pudding, Jell-O parfaits, Jell-O molds, even Danish junket desserts in little glass dishes caused me to break out in a sweat. What was the obsession with gelatin in the 1970s? Why is it that some recipes endure, while others get lost in translation?

The Magic is In You

This summer, my family visited the small lake town in Wisconsin where my grandparents are from (sorry for ending a sentence in a preposition, but this is the Midwest). On my way out of town, I drove on a narrow, winding road down to the far side of the small lake, where my grandparents lived. My grandfather and his father built a 2-bedroom house and several cottages here in the 1940s. The place looms large in my memory. They sold it when I was 12, and the best memories of my childhood took place here. Maybe because I was 12 it seems even more poignant, as that age signals the end of an era in so many ways. Driving by, I have to say, the magic is gone from the place. The house has been remodeled in cheap siding and is not attractive in the least. My grandfather's old wood garage with swinging doors and its own gas pump are made into some pre-fab garage. One cottage is still intact. I think of how many times my grandmother had to clean that cottage between renters and how much she hated it.

If I could have walked down the sloping hill to the lake, and dangled my feet in its waters, perhaps I could have felt the magic again. But I couldn't. I had an unfriendly feeling. Now I see: The magic is gone from the place, but not from the child. Every sled run down that hill, every visit from the adorable family of ducks that would tap on my grandmother's patio door to ask for corn, ever daffodil cake that was lit with candles for my birthday, still live. The magic lives inside me.

Arts and Crafts

Taken from the Michael Fitzsimmons Arts and Crafts Furnishings Store Web site:

Believe in goodness
Trust in life
Embrace beauty
Practice kindness

Frank Lloyd Wright's fireplace in his Oak Park home has "Life is Truth" stenciled above it. Stencil one of those over your fireplace.

Is this pretentious? I want to think of a name for our new house. You know, like "Ragdale" in Lake Forest. Somehow it's a lot harder to come up with a name for a 1958 colonial on the curve of a cul de sac than it is for an Arts and Crafts mansion. Hmmm. Also I wouldn't mind carving the four sets of initials of my family members into the legs of our kitchen table/island, as architect Howard Van Doren Shaw did at Ragdale. I can hear my husband now: "detrimental to resale value."

It's so challenging to be artsy-craftsy these days.