Icing on the Cake

Baked a cake tonight after supper and while frosting it once cooled, I remembered that my grandma (Martha) used to make her frosting from scratch.  She would invariably have extra when she was done and would frost up some graham cracker cookies for me to avoid wasting it.  My grandparents (and consequently my parents, too) came from thriftier generations where everything was kept or stretched so that it would go as far as possible.

We've lost something, I think, in not teaching our children to value every morsel, appreciate every little thing in our lives.  We take so much for granted now and simply expect that what we want, we'll get plus we'll have more than we need.  I'm not typically a person who lives in the world of "what ifs?" but I do wonder where we're headed when the majority of us couldn't even feed ourselves for a season...or wouldn't even know how to function if the power went out.  We have made ourselves extremely vulnerable in our quest to make life easy.  In our effort to prolong our lives with "safe environments" we've inadvertently put ourselves in danger.

But I digress.  I miss sitting in my grandma's kitchen on my favorite yellow, metal stool (with the pull-out steps) and watching her as she mixed her ingredients and stirred her batters in a ceramic mixing bowl with a wooden spoon - all in her "house dresses" that she wore during the week.  Martha was always busy - if she wasn't cooking or cleaning dishes, she was picking up pieces of lint by hand from the carpet or sprinkling water on my grandpa's dress shirts before ironing them.  (She used an old Pepsi bottle - glass - with a special "sprinkling" adapter that plugged into the top like a cork.)

I miss that pioneering spirit, that gritty work ethic, wrapped in a hunched-over body.  She kept going and going...but took time to rest and play with her grandchildren, too.  She was my druid-like, chicken-loving, nylon-stocking-wearing, yoo-hooing great lady and I miss her.  Her birthday was November 30 - though I'm not sure what year she was born any more.  I anticipate these memories have flooded back because of that date.  Wherever you are, Grandma, sweet dreams.  I love you muchly.