Apron Ties

Packed away in the box of doll clothes from childhood, a wad of taffeta, unwrapped to reveal a child-size apron, poinsettias and holly printed on a white background. It was a companion to the holiday apron my mother wore when it was time to celebrate the holiday season. That special scrap of 1950s rayon was the first of a long line of aprons tied around my waist.

My Grandma Heimel favored the cobbler apron. She told me that when she presented me with her shower gift, complete with tiny hand-stitched buttonholes with their companion shirt buttons that must have come from her button jar. The lime green paisley print was appropriate for a young bride setting up housekeeping in the 1970s. Generously cut, it served me through two pregnancies and still hangs in the pantry, though threadbare and thinned from nearly fifty years of use.

When we moved into this old farmhouse, home to the Metzger/Matteson family for three generations before us, I inherited a stash of the kinds of aprons favored by farm wives. And, of course, the aprons were starched, ironed and carefully folded.

The aprons were all constructed from the same pattern with bias tape binding matching the main fabric.  Those aprons, too, were generously cut to fit the tall woman who wore them. The fabrics were mostly small prints in faded pinks, greens and lavender. One, obviously added to the collection in the 1960s, featured a brown background, sprinkled with larger flowers, piped in vivid orange.

All the old aprons are now threadbare and faded. Just last summer, my mother extended the life of one with some creative patching but it was short-lived as the thinned fabric raveled in a new place.

These days, I slip an apron over my head and loop its softened ties around my waist nearly every day as I move through the kitchen that Grandma Metzger wouldn't recognize in her old house. On laundry day, the load of kitchen towels and dish cloths includes the week's aprons. And when it comes time to pull them from dryer, I hang them back on their hook in the pantry, without a thought of the ironing board.

No One Saw This Coming

Last winter, the news began to offer up snippets of information about a mysterious new viral illness in Wuhan, China, stirring unsettling memories of time I spent in the education classroom at Charles Cole Memorial Hospital as a member of a Pandemic Response Preparedness Team.

Since I have been retired for more than ten years, this must have been during the years George W. Bush was president. Around the table were representatives of most hospital departments - infection control, utilization review, purchasing, ancillary services, housekeeping, maintenance, dietary, nursing, medical staff, practice management, education and me, representing the public relations department. Meetings took place regularly over a couple of months and included the people who worked on Potter County's Emergency Management team. There was guidance and informations from state and national agencies.

The scenarios we rehearsed in our tabletop drill were eerily similar to the pandemic we are staring down today. It was one person coming into the country carrying a new infection - one that had never before been observed - one that had no vaccine - one that behaved in ways different than other varieties of influenza.

At the end of the exercise there was a plan. There was a plan to address how the local response would be mounted, detailing roles of the Center For Disease Control and the State Health Department and everyone would implement the phases of the plan

Those hours, all those years ago, spent imagining what might happen should a pandemic strike brought me a measure of comfort in early days as Coronavirus and Covid-19 became household words.  As a country, we know how to do this, I thought.

"It's going to just magically go away," the President of the United States said. "It's a hoax," he said.

We were in Washington, spending a couple of months with our grandchildren. It was late February when a "person of interest" who had ties to the local school was being tested for suspected coronavirus. The school was closed for three days while it was deep cleaned and while awaiting test results that later came back negative.

This is real, I thought.

The death count across the world began to rise. The number of confirmed cases began to rise.  It's "an unforeseen problem" that "came out of nowhere" the President of the United States said. "We're having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem," he said. "It's something that nobody expected," he said. 

But lots of somebodies saw this coming.

There was another person at the pandemic planning table  - a funeral director. And visions of refrigerated trucks outside my hospital office, much like those lined up today outside New York City hospitals, troubled my dreams.

If you choose to learn more about our nation's pandemic preparedness, here is a well-researched link. The work of Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 30 years of experience also offers facts about global threat from emerging infectious disease.

Update, December 23, 2020: From Heather Cox Richardson, "The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that is investigating the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic today released documents showing that Trump appointees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tried to “alter or block” at least 13 of the reports written by CDC scientists. Appointees messed around with the CDC’s traditional “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports” and edited reports on the use of masks, the dangers of Covid-19 in children, and the spread of the disease. They also tried to delete emails revealing political interference in scientific assessments. Some of the emails from science adviser Paul Alexander calling for the administration to speed the spread of coronavirus in order to achieve herd immunity have sparked outrage."

Currant Jelly

I learned to make jelly in my Grandma's kitchen with its tall painted cupboards reaching to the ceiling, the Kelvinator refrigerator and the ironing board that came down on hinges from the wall.
I wanted to go swimming with Vicki and Debbie at the town pool on that summer afternoon but Grandma had other ideas.
The currants had been gathered in our backyard where they grew on bushes close to the river. I learned early on that the fruits of the currant bush were too tart to eat. They were easy to pick but if you waited too long, the birds would swoop in and devour them in one afternoon.
A hair net and a starched apron reaching below my knees replaced my bathing suit and towel. I needed a chair to reach into the colander in grandma's deep kitchen sink. We plucked each ruby berry from its stem and into the large enameled pot they went. Then to the stove, the heat rising before the steam. "A rolling boil," she told me.
The pot was moved to the table and she let me use her long-handled potato masher to crush the fruit. The colander had been lined with layers of cheesecloth and placed over a pot. She poured the crushed fruit into cheesecloth, steaming her silver-framed glasses. Her cobbler-style apron protected her everyday dress from splatters.
When the mixture was cooled enough to handle, she brought the corners of the cheesecloth together and tied it with kitchen twine from the drawer next to the sink. Grandma let me squeeze the candy apple red juice from the bundle.
Then it was back to the stove, adding sugar, turning up the heat to achieve the rolling boil. There was some kind of alchemy employed to know when it was time to take the mixture from the stove and she made me step back as she moved back to the table with the heavy pot. She used the pot holders I had made her for Christmas with chunky cotton loops.
The sound from the doorbell ringer on the wall in the kitchen came just as she laded the shimmering liquid through the canning funnel into the waiting jars. She sent me down the long hall to answer the door.
There stood Debbie and Vicki, their blouses buttoned over swimsuits, bare feet slid into their Keds. Grandma bustled up behind me. "Janie's busy now, girls." I was ready to close the door immediately, so very embarrassed that my friends had seen the hairnet and the apron.  "Why don't you come in while we finish what we're doing?"
That's how I learned how to make jelly though today, we don't use melted paraffin to seal the jars. But we do enjoy that little bit of jelly that doesn't quite fill the last jar just as Debbie, Vicki and I did, spreading it thick on slices of Holsum bread before setting off to spend the rest of the afternoon at the town pool.

Faded Photographs

This story starts before I was born. It's going to be a long one but stick with me.

Packed away in the attic of this old farmhouse on Crandall Hill are boxes and boxes of Kodachrome slides. Like many of us are doing in these days of isolation, I decided that it was time to unpack those memories. It was a joy to see faded images of Heimel family gatherings in the late 1970s and 80s projected on the wall. We moved to the tray marked "Dad's Old Slides." Faded images of Golly's Folly (the family camp on the Nine Mile) came into view, along with images of what I recognized as Montana. And then the photo of this gentleman appeared.

I called up my mother seeking information about "Dad's Old Slides." My maternal grandfather, W.D. "Golly" Fish was something of a celebrity in these parts. His "Golly" column in the newspaper he published was the first thing many readers turned to when the paper came out each week. My mother remembered some details from a cross-country trek he'd made one summer but came up blank on the gentleman in the photo.

Earlier I had come across a box of old "Golly" columns and other memorabilia from my grandfather. Digging down deeper I came across this:

In his words ... "To begin at the beginning my daughter Marian, and her husband, Walter Brown of Billings, Montana, conceived the idea of getting dad away from the every week routine of editing and publishing a weekly newspaper for a real vacation... soon the old satchel was packed - and how, since the better half did the packing - and dad was on his way."

Husband Arthur and I have made several cross-country drives in recent years, first to Oregon and most recently to eastern Washington. I delved into the sixteen page tale, interested to read how he found words to describe places I had experienced - some just weeks ago.

It was on page 13 that I found this:

"It was at the hotel at Coulee Dam that I met "Dad" Redding. We visited at the hotel and when we boarded the bus I took pains to sit with Dad. He had just about the most luxurious hirsute decorations of any man I have ever met. After we had visited for a time and he had told me of some of his experiences prospecting way up in the Rockies, I asked him if he would answer some very personal questions. There was a merry twinkle in almost hidden eyes when he allowed I could fire questions to my heart's content.
"The answers revealed that "Dad" Arch Redding is 71 years of age. His address is R.D. 1, Ellensburg, Washington, but he was born in Missouri. He is single and has been prospecting since 1899.
"On the mountains where Dad spends months at a time he hunts moss agates, gold and silver... Dad's wants are simple and he has no desire for riches. He loves the life he leads and he is happy - what more can any man ask than happiness.
"Dad's hair and whiskers are long and I mean long. He told me he had had neither a haircut nor shave in 21 years."

I was content to close the door on 1948 after solving the mystery but the next day, my 2020 technology beckoned and I set out to see what else I could discover about Arch Redding.

Looking at notes scrawled on scraps of paper next to my computer today, I cannot recreate just how these pieces came together but the search led me to the newspaper archive maintained by the University of Oregon and specifically to the Heppner (Oregon) Gazette Times where this mention of Arch Redding from May 12, 1949 was highlighted.

"Arch Redding and Carl Klindsmith of Ellensburg, Washington were overnight guests of Mr. Redding's niece, Mrs. Alena Anderson. The gentlemen are prospectors and were touring about looking over the country."

Mrs. Alena Anderson (daughter of Arch's brother Lawrence) proved to be the key to unlocking more information about Mr. Redding including the newspaper report of his death in 1971 in Ellensburg. He was 94 - the same age W.D. "Golly" Fish was when he died in 1969.

I shared this new information with my mother this morning and in her delight she recalled "The Celestine Prophecy" and its first insight: becoming conscious of the mysterious coincidences in life.

"These coincidences are happening more and more frequently and that, when they do, they strike us as beyond what would be expected by pure chance. They feel destined, as though our lives had been guided by some unexplained force. The experience induces a feeling of mystery and excitement and, as a result, we feel more alive." -from the novel "Celestine Prophecy" by  James Redfield, 1993

For my mother could immediately see the coincidences in this tale - not just our retracing of Granddaddy's steps through the great northwest in recent weeks.

The real coincidence was the little town of Heppner, Oregon, the town where daughter Kate's children were born. That's the little town we visited on many occasions, with one long visit of six weeks,

I'm working on gathering information about Mrs. Anderson's descendants from Kate's former neighbor who volunteers at the Historical Society in Heppner. Perhaps they would have an interest in learning of the lasting impression their prospector great-great uncle made on a gentleman from Pennsylvania so many years ago.

"Dad told me that a small moss agate is worth perhaps as little as fifty cents. I asked Dad to mail a small stone to me and I tried to get him to take a dollar but he would not. Eventually we compromised and he accepted fifty cents to pay postage. But what do you think? When I arrived home I found a box that required 78 cents postage. In that box were nine stones from Dad Redding, some of them as big as your fist!
"Dad Redding was the most interesting stranger I met on my journey ... I liked Dad and his honest eyes."   (from a long drawn-out letter by Bill Fish after a trip of five weeks through the Great Northwest in 1948)